When you do a lot of reading in your formative years, you tend to come across many more words than you or your friends use in every day conversation. Hopefully, you are smart enough to figure out these words' meanings from context clues. But pronunciation. . . this could be anybody's guess.
At least this is the way it is for me. I've always been good at spelling, but I apparently have a gift for mispronouncing words. I tend to pronouce words phonetically, especially when they are not supposed to be, apparently. A good example: I came across the word "posthumously". To me, it will forever be pronounced in a very wrong way because the sound that it made in my head when I first came across it was not what I would have heard if I had people around me who made use of the word regularly in their vocabulary. Or maybe even used it once. Either way, posthumously always rings to the sound of "POEST-hume-uss-lee" instead of the proper pronunciation "poss-CHEW-muss-lee".
I suppose I will next hit Mariah Carey, since I have been asked politely.
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1 comment:
It's funny you mention this, because I have the exact same problem, and I too am generally a good speller. For an example though, I had a really hard time with words in the Harry Potter books...I thought Sirius was pronounced like the name Cyrus, and several other words and names gave me trouble as well. There are of course, other literary examples I could have given, but I prefer to keep everything HP related in these final days.
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