I realise that might read as a rant, so wanted to clarify it was not intended in a hostile manner, and my frame of mind was simply bewildered. I didn't understand why I said something (something very straightforward and easy to google) and people seemed to simply assume I was probably mistaken. I guess I must express myself in a way that makes me seem like I'm not very logical or thorough. So, I looked in the OED, and give you a quote from there instead.
In addition to North American use, mom is also found in English regional (West Midlands) use (cf. quot. 1996; quots. 1904 and 1911 show early use in British sources) and in South African English.
Heh, I'm surprised people are disbelieving me! You could google rather than imagine. But it's worth pointing out that when I state something, especially something linguistic, I have generally been very thorough checking it, and if there is a doubt, I express that doubt. If I had simply heard people say what sounded like Mom in their accent, I would not have assumed they were spelling it Mom. And if I had just seen it now and then spelt 'Mom' and never talked to anyone about it, I wouldn't assume that was specifically a Midlands spelling. I am someone who needs to have had multiple conversations and read articles and such before I will accept something isn't simply an individual's quirk or an error. (In fact, at uni, whenever my linguistics teachers stated something about a certain pronunciation being Scottish or American, I would go onto my LiveJournal and ask all my Scottish and American friends if this were true, and get them to make voice recordings to prove it! )
Yes. I know you are. That is exactly why I covet you to come to the U.S. and be our proofreader and fact-checker, so we'd never make embarrassing mistakes again (such as the totally wrong phone number I caught on a brochure yesterday).
I only hear "mommy" and "mom" when people are mocking it. Mom said this way is like the word awe with M the front and back. But Mom is the more common spelling, but said as "mum". A mum is also a flower (chrysanthemum) and to keep mum is to not talk.
My parents were usually Ma (said with a short U sound) and pappa (said like pawp-paw) and frequently pops after he got over the authoritarian idea he should be called "sir". My grandparents were 3 dead before I was born. The one I knew until age 6 was gramma. My wife's parents were gramma and grampa to my children. My parents absented themselves from our lives so never really got names. After I repatriated my doddering father, he's back to being pappa for everyone, except me who calls him "mein Vater" (mine f'awe-tuh) about half the time in a vain attempt to be closer to him.
Do children call adults by their first names where you live? In my lifetime, it is common for children to do so once they're school age. Teachers not, doctors probably 50% of the time when younger than about 40, university professors with undergrad not usually, but has been first names with grad students for at least 45 years because it was when I went through. I think we're quite informal here comparatively.
Reminds me of Eustace Clarence Scrubb who did not call his parents Father and Mother but 'Harold' and 'Alberta'. (CSL clearly thought this a bad thing).
I remember being quite taken aback when a colleague in Northern Ireland (who'd have then been in her 50s) always referring to her mother-in-law as "Mrs. X". It seemed very formal to me; D. and I had never called each other's parents by anything other than their Christian names.* I was introduced to D's parents as L. and N. (quite a while before D. and I were an item), and it would never have occurred to me to call them anything else.
* well, I suppose D. would have initially called my dad Mr. Bain, as when he came to Orkney Dad was his boss ...
As my parents are ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ it worked well for me to call my in-laws, as my wife did, ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. She, by contrast, called my parents by their a Christian names. Everyone seemed happy with those arrangements.
I was married for 26 (miserable) years and never called my in-laws anything. I guess I was waiting for them to tell me what they preferred. I don't remember my ex calling my parents anything either. We had no children, so grandparent names weren't an issue.
My Leicestershire-born husband used to call his Mum ‘Mam’, the first time I’d heard this pronunciation.
My Mum used to call my Nana (her mother in law), ‘Mother’, while Nana herself would sign cards and letters ‘Ma’.
I find children go through a period of calling their parents by their first names, just to try it out, then they go back to Mum and Dad or whatever.
My parents were Mom and Dad, except when I was very young when they were Mommy and Daddy. Of my grandparents, my maternal grandparents were Grandma (last name) and Grandpa (first name). My paternal grandmother was just Grandma, unless it was to distinguish her from my other grandmother, in which case it was Grandma (last name). My paternal grandfather died before I was born, if referred to in passing, he was Grandpa (last name). When my daughter was young, I was Mommy, and her father was Daddy. Now I'm Mom, and her father, who has left her life, is either Dad, or "my father" depending on her mood. She called my parents Grandma and Grandpa, and my husband's mother also just Grandma.
I've never heard longitude with a soft 'g'. Thinking about it, though, for reasons of euphony, I think quite a lot of people insert an extra letter after the 'g' either a 't' or a 'd' 'long-di-tewd.
Quite an interesting one - or two actually - recently. The BBC likes to adopt pronunciations of foreign words that it thinks we ought to use, but are actually rather pretentious. For several days they were ostentatiously talking about a storm that they mysteriously called 'Storm Haw-Hay'. It was only after several days of this that I discovered that it was really 'Storm Jorge', so named because it was first identified by Spanish meteorologists.
Now, however, that's pronounced in Spanish, I'm sure that it isn't pronounced 'Haw-Hay'. I'm fairly sure that at least one of those consonants (probably both) is some sort of guttural. To be intelligible at all in English, I'd say it has to be pronounced something like 'Jaw-jay' possibly with a slightly softer 'j' than in English so as to denote that one recognises it's not an English word.
Presumably some edict had gone out from somewhere in Portland Place that that was how everybody had to say the word.
Meanwhile, though, with all the reports on the floods in Shrewsbury, 'everybody' knows there are two ways of pronouncing the first syllable, 'Shroo' like the little animal, and 'Shrow' to rhyme with 'throw'. And 'everybody' also thinks the way they pronounce it is the right way, and the other way is wrong. So when one added up the reports on the floods there, it came out about evens which version of the town's name one heard.
Quite an interesting one - or two actually - recently. The BBC likes to adopt pronunciations of foreign words that it thinks we ought to use, but are actually rather pretentious. For several days they were ostentatiously talking about a storm that they mysteriously called 'Storm Haw-Hay'. It was only after several days of this that I discovered that it was really 'Storm Jorge', so named because it was first identified by Spanish meteorologists.
Now, however, that's pronounced in Spanish, I'm sure that it isn't pronounced 'Haw-Hay'.
I have a colleague named Jorge. Haw-hay is a pretty good approximation of a non-rhotic English-speaking person doing their best to say his name. I'd not call it pretentious to try and actually pronounce something correctly.
I'd think he'd have every right to be offended if we started calling him George, or Zhor-zhay, or something, because we were afraid it was pretentious to try and say his name right.
He might actually be OK with George as a straight anglicization of his name, but putting some random slightly foreign-sounding consonant in his name that isn't close to the one that's actually there, but "recognizes that we know it's foreign?"
Reminds me of Eustace Clarence Scrubb who did not call his parents Father and Mother but 'Harold' and 'Alberta'. (CSL clearly thought this a bad thing).
He also disapproved of them being non smoking, teetotal vegetarians! How times have changed....
Reminds me of Eustace Clarence Scrubb who did not call his parents Father and Mother but 'Harold' and 'Alberta'. (CSL clearly thought this a bad thing).
He also disapproved of them being non smoking, teetotal vegetarians! How times have changed....
And they wore a special kind of underwear. Mormons?
When we argue about what babies say when they begin to identify their maternal parent, I am reminded of the different sounds animals make when to the Spanish. A list, here:
Same animals, same sounds, but for some reason, we hear it differently. Could that been happening with the first sounds a baby makes? The English expect the sound to be mum and it is; but the American expect the sound to be mom, and it is.
There is the old song
You say tomayto, I say tomahto,
Tomayto, Tomahto
Tomahto, Tomayto
Let's call the whole thing off.
I've never heard longitude with a soft g, but equally it's not a word I hear often. The OED has both pronunciations.
I didn't see the attempt of the BBC to pronounce Jorge in the Spanish way as pretentious. More respectful, as it was Spain who named that storm. I googled the name at the time, and discovered the sounds in Spanish are not phonemes in English, at least not RP English, so the /h/ sound is the nearest approximation.
It's interesting, though - I do find that in the UK, it has often been seen as pretentious to attempt to pronounce something from another language in its original pronunciation, and we have a bit of a history of wanting people from other countries to change their names to something familiar to us. Dismissing a 'foreign' name as impossible to pronounce has been quite common in the UK. (I put foreign in quotation marks because of course plenty of our English names are from other countries too, so I mean a new and unfamiliar foreign name.)
I became particularly aware of this when I was in Canada, and it was very much the norm to attempt to pronounce someone's name with its original pronunciation, rather than default to English phonemes. So, for instance, if someone was called Maria, and from a Spanish speaking country, people would attempt to pronounce the 'r' in her name in the Spanish way, which doesn't seem to happen in the UK in my experience. I asked people in Canada about this, why they do it, and they all said it was respectful to try to pronounce a person's name the way they pronounce it.
Of course storms are less personal, though I suspect the Spanish might attempt to pronounce our storms with our pronunciations, rather than completely change them. I think in general an attempt to be aware of other languages is respectful. I always thought the idea about pretentiousness was more about words for food that more privileged people are likely to have eaten in the food's country of origin, and so learnt the name of the food in its original pronunciation. So a bit of a class divide can happen, where people who come across the word for the first time in the UK are of course more likely to default to an anglicised pronunciation, and maybe feel resentful of the the people who airily use a foreign sound they're unfamiliar with - it can maybe seem a bit snobby and cliquey.
During the 2018 World Cup there was some controversy here about a commentator pronouncing foreign player's names in a foreign fashion, accusing her of being pretentious.
There was certainly a considerable amount of misogyny involved. This was the first time that a woman had taken the lead hosting role. Her predecessor was both male and had an 'accent' anyway as he was a refugee from Hungary.
But as far as she and her colleagues were concerned, pronouncing a name the way the person themselves would pronounce it was a basic matter of respect.
The IPA symbol for what is being pronounced by English speakers as /h/ in Jorge is /x/. Voiceless velar fricative, further forward in the mouth than /h/, which is a voiceless glottal fricative. It's the sound at the end of the Scottish word 'loch.'
When some English people say 'huge' in an exaggerated way to emphasise hugeness, saying the h and the y simultaneously, and slightly prolonged, with the middle of their tongue up at the top of their mouth - it's like that. In reality, it's easy for English speakers to say in contexts they're familiar with, like 'huge', but hard for many to realise what they're doing in their mouth and consciously apply to a different sort of word.
The Spanish 'r' is probably harder for us to get right.
A lot of embarassment by English people over foreign sounds. I remember learning French and those shameful u sounds, much nicer to say a lax English u.
Footballers' names are a mine of comedy, Mesut Özil sometimes pronounced to rhyme with nozzle. But the player Gabriel Jesus is the reverse, everyone careful to pronounce it a la Portuguese: [ʒeˈzus]. We don't want those old jokes, Jesus saves and de Bruyne scores on the rebound. (De Bruyne is easy peasy to pronounce).
Our local university has a huge number of students from all over the world. A friend of mine has the job each year of announcing the names at graduation. He takes very seriously the responsibility of learning the correct pronunciation of each name, as it would be pronounced in their country of origin.
Our local university has a huge number of students from all over the world. A friend of mine has the job each year of announcing the names at graduation. He takes very seriously the responsibility of learning the correct pronunciation of each name, as it would be pronounced in their country of origin.
Does your friend interrogate each student to find out how they pronounce their name, or does he research the "standard" pronunciation of each name?
(I know a few sets of people with names that are spelled the same way, but who pronounce them differently - usually different vowel sounds or different emphasis.)
Our local university has a huge number of students from all over the world. A friend of mine has the job each year of announcing the names at graduation. He takes very seriously the responsibility of learning the correct pronunciation of each name, as it would be pronounced in their country of origin.
Does your friend interrogate each student to find out how they pronounce their name, or does he research the "standard" pronunciation of each name?
The former is what was done for high school graduation at the school my kids attended. Practice was held a few days before the ceremony, and practice included calling out the names of all 400+ graduates, among whom were a large number of Hispanic, African and other international students, as they walked up on the stage. That was the opportunity for any student to correct the way their name was pronounced; the assistant principal responsible for calling the names would make appropriate notes to help them pronounce it correctly.
There's the old story of the American being told by a Parisian 'Vous parlez Francais comme un Belge' (You speak French like a Belgian) and taking it for a compliment. To even the score, remember Chaucer's Nun's Prioress,, who spoke French 'after the fashion of Stratford-atte-Bow'.
Longitude sounds quite like lawn-di-tude here. The d isn't quite a d but it is close to d than to g.
Jorge - as haw-hay. I think haw must be said differently in some places it has the same sound as awe here. We'd say Jorge as hor rhyming with "or". The hay is not quite accurate as the y of hay is clipped short in the name.
Recently I visited the van Gogh display in London. There I was interested to hear that Dutch members of his family pronounced the name in a way that was half way between the English (Goff) and American (Go) ways. So we're both wrong!
To all: Do "often" and "soften" rhyme in your dialect/idiolect?
Yes. The 't' is silent in both for me. But plenty of the people in the UK pronounce the 't' in 'often'. I did myself as a young child, but at ten years old, I had a teacher who told us it was a silent 't,' like in the word 'listen,' and she made quite a big deal about it, acting like it was terribly important, and so I believed her and stopped pronouncing it!
Recently I visited the van Gogh display in London. There I was interested to hear that Dutch members of his family pronounced the name in a way that was half way between the English (Goff) and American (Go) ways. So we're both wrong!
I could see describing the Dutch vowel in van Gogh as half-way between the one that Brits use and Americans use, but I don't think there's any sense that the guttural consonant sound in Dutch is half-way between the UK and US attempts.
Gogh apparently ends with the same sound that English speakers were pronouncing as 'h' in Jorge. The /x/ sound in loch. And it begins with the voiced version of that. Wikipedia has the phonetic transcription and an audio recording.
When Josephine and I were in Amsterdam this past summer, we were lost in the museum district looking for the Van Gogh museum, and a friendly but English-challenged gentleman asked if we were looking for the fahn khokh museum ("hibbeda hebbeda Van Gogh moo-zay-oom?"). Where the "kh" was a barely gutteralized, or perhaps better described as roughly-breathed, version of "h".
I wouldn't consider /x/ a guttural sound. It's produced at the soft palate part of the mouth, same as g, k and ng. My understanding of guttural is it's produced further back, in the throat, though I'm never sure exactly what sounds people mean by it, as it's not a term I've come across in linguistics/phonetics books - I just see it used in chats like these, to say a language or word sounds guttural.
I can't remember if this thread has covered the pronunciation of the word 'nuclear'. In the US, is it normally 'nookle-ar' (as used by a well-known former President), or 'newc-lee-ar', as in British English?
Comments
In addition to North American use, mom is also found in English regional (West Midlands) use (cf. quot. 1996; quots. 1904 and 1911 show early use in British sources) and in South African English.
Yes. I know you are. That is exactly why I covet you to come to the U.S. and be our proofreader and fact-checker, so we'd never make embarrassing mistakes again (such as the totally wrong phone number I caught on a brochure yesterday).
My parents were usually Ma (said with a short U sound) and pappa (said like pawp-paw) and frequently pops after he got over the authoritarian idea he should be called "sir". My grandparents were 3 dead before I was born. The one I knew until age 6 was gramma. My wife's parents were gramma and grampa to my children. My parents absented themselves from our lives so never really got names. After I repatriated my doddering father, he's back to being pappa for everyone, except me who calls him "mein Vater" (mine f'awe-tuh) about half the time in a vain attempt to be closer to him.
Do children call adults by their first names where you live? In my lifetime, it is common for children to do so once they're school age. Teachers not, doctors probably 50% of the time when younger than about 40, university professors with undergrad not usually, but has been first names with grad students for at least 45 years because it was when I went through. I think we're quite informal here comparatively.
* well, I suppose D. would have initially called my dad Mr. Bain, as when he came to Orkney Dad was his boss ...
My Mum used to call my Nana (her mother in law), ‘Mother’, while Nana herself would sign cards and letters ‘Ma’.
I find children go through a period of calling their parents by their first names, just to try it out, then they go back to Mum and Dad or whatever.
Thank you - right latitude, wrong longitude.
Which brings a new query - do people pronounce longitude with a hard or soft g?
Quite an interesting one - or two actually - recently. The BBC likes to adopt pronunciations of foreign words that it thinks we ought to use, but are actually rather pretentious. For several days they were ostentatiously talking about a storm that they mysteriously called 'Storm Haw-Hay'. It was only after several days of this that I discovered that it was really 'Storm Jorge', so named because it was first identified by Spanish meteorologists.
Now, however, that's pronounced in Spanish, I'm sure that it isn't pronounced 'Haw-Hay'. I'm fairly sure that at least one of those consonants (probably both) is some sort of guttural. To be intelligible at all in English, I'd say it has to be pronounced something like 'Jaw-jay' possibly with a slightly softer 'j' than in English so as to denote that one recognises it's not an English word.
Presumably some edict had gone out from somewhere in Portland Place that that was how everybody had to say the word.
Meanwhile, though, with all the reports on the floods in Shrewsbury, 'everybody' knows there are two ways of pronouncing the first syllable, 'Shroo' like the little animal, and 'Shrow' to rhyme with 'throw'. And 'everybody' also thinks the way they pronounce it is the right way, and the other way is wrong. So when one added up the reports on the floods there, it came out about evens which version of the town's name one heard.
I have a colleague named Jorge. Haw-hay is a pretty good approximation of a non-rhotic English-speaking person doing their best to say his name. I'd not call it pretentious to try and actually pronounce something correctly.
I'd think he'd have every right to be offended if we started calling him George, or Zhor-zhay, or something, because we were afraid it was pretentious to try and say his name right.
He might actually be OK with George as a straight anglicization of his name, but putting some random slightly foreign-sounding consonant in his name that isn't close to the one that's actually there, but "recognizes that we know it's foreign?"
He also disapproved of them being non smoking, teetotal vegetarians! How times have changed....
That's an interesting variation I can't remember hearing. Most of the time, I hear a hard g, which is what I'd use, but sometimes a soft one.
That's the only way I've ever heard it as well.
Soft.
And they wore a special kind of underwear. Mormons?
Here is a differential history of mom and mum, Fascinating reading.
When we argue about what babies say when they begin to identify their maternal parent, I am reminded of the different sounds animals make when to the Spanish. A list, here:
Same animals, same sounds, but for some reason, we hear it differently. Could that been happening with the first sounds a baby makes? The English expect the sound to be mum and it is; but the American expect the sound to be mom, and it is.
There is the old song
You say tomayto, I say tomahto,
Tomayto, Tomahto
Tomahto, Tomayto
Let's call the whole thing off.
I didn't see the attempt of the BBC to pronounce Jorge in the Spanish way as pretentious. More respectful, as it was Spain who named that storm. I googled the name at the time, and discovered the sounds in Spanish are not phonemes in English, at least not RP English, so the /h/ sound is the nearest approximation.
It's interesting, though - I do find that in the UK, it has often been seen as pretentious to attempt to pronounce something from another language in its original pronunciation, and we have a bit of a history of wanting people from other countries to change their names to something familiar to us. Dismissing a 'foreign' name as impossible to pronounce has been quite common in the UK. (I put foreign in quotation marks because of course plenty of our English names are from other countries too, so I mean a new and unfamiliar foreign name.)
I became particularly aware of this when I was in Canada, and it was very much the norm to attempt to pronounce someone's name with its original pronunciation, rather than default to English phonemes. So, for instance, if someone was called Maria, and from a Spanish speaking country, people would attempt to pronounce the 'r' in her name in the Spanish way, which doesn't seem to happen in the UK in my experience. I asked people in Canada about this, why they do it, and they all said it was respectful to try to pronounce a person's name the way they pronounce it.
Of course storms are less personal, though I suspect the Spanish might attempt to pronounce our storms with our pronunciations, rather than completely change them. I think in general an attempt to be aware of other languages is respectful. I always thought the idea about pretentiousness was more about words for food that more privileged people are likely to have eaten in the food's country of origin, and so learnt the name of the food in its original pronunciation. So a bit of a class divide can happen, where people who come across the word for the first time in the UK are of course more likely to default to an anglicised pronunciation, and maybe feel resentful of the the people who airily use a foreign sound they're unfamiliar with - it can maybe seem a bit snobby and cliquey.
There was certainly a considerable amount of misogyny involved. This was the first time that a woman had taken the lead hosting role. Her predecessor was both male and had an 'accent' anyway as he was a refugee from Hungary.
But as far as she and her colleagues were concerned, pronouncing a name the way the person themselves would pronounce it was a basic matter of respect.
The on-air response to what happened can be viewed here
The IPA symbol for what is being pronounced by English speakers as /h/ in Jorge is /x/. Voiceless velar fricative, further forward in the mouth than /h/, which is a voiceless glottal fricative. It's the sound at the end of the Scottish word 'loch.'
When some English people say 'huge' in an exaggerated way to emphasise hugeness, saying the h and the y simultaneously, and slightly prolonged, with the middle of their tongue up at the top of their mouth - it's like that. In reality, it's easy for English speakers to say in contexts they're familiar with, like 'huge', but hard for many to realise what they're doing in their mouth and consciously apply to a different sort of word.
The Spanish 'r' is probably harder for us to get right.
Footballers' names are a mine of comedy, Mesut Özil sometimes pronounced to rhyme with nozzle. But the player Gabriel Jesus is the reverse, everyone careful to pronounce it a la Portuguese: [ʒeˈzus]. We don't want those old jokes, Jesus saves and de Bruyne scores on the rebound. (De Bruyne is easy peasy to pronounce).
Does your friend interrogate each student to find out how they pronounce their name, or does he research the "standard" pronunciation of each name?
(I know a few sets of people with names that are spelled the same way, but who pronounce them differently - usually different vowel sounds or different emphasis.)
Jorge - as haw-hay. I think haw must be said differently in some places it has the same sound as awe here. We'd say Jorge as hor rhyming with "or". The hay is not quite accurate as the y of hay is clipped short in the name.
Yes. The 't' is silent in both for me. But plenty of the people in the UK pronounce the 't' in 'often'. I did myself as a young child, but at ten years old, I had a teacher who told us it was a silent 't,' like in the word 'listen,' and she made quite a big deal about it, acting like it was terribly important, and so I believed her and stopped pronouncing it!
@mousethief do they for you?
Yes.
I could see describing the Dutch vowel in van Gogh as half-way between the one that Brits use and Americans use, but I don't think there's any sense that the guttural consonant sound in Dutch is half-way between the UK and US attempts.
(Here's the BBC on the subject.)