How do you say it?

[pablopepper]

Informative and amusing video about how to pronounce confusing guitar brands.

I was saying Joyo, Vigier and Aristides incorrectly!

[Marcel]

Good to know.... All we now need to do is get Americans to drop the phantom double D and include the letter L in the word "solder"....

[FrankenWashie]

Good to know.... All we now need to do is get Americans to drop the phantom double D and include the letter L in the word "solder"....

and to remember to put the second 'i' in Aluminium

[Marcel]

Cut and pasted both as a comment to Phillip's YouTube post....

[FrankenWashie]

BAHAHAHAHA Nice One Marcel!

[fender3x]

After all these years I finally know how to say Takamine...only to learn that there are a bunch of other word I don't pronounce right.

We threw off the the second "i" in *aluminum" with our colonial shackles. Perhaps that's how we acquired the freedom to walk, talk and solder without the L-sound.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk

[pablopepper]

Apparently, "aluminum" is the original way of saying it. The extra "i" was put in there so it conformed to the "ium" suffix of other elements.

[Sonic Mountain]

My Dad is Canadian so I have a wide variety of pronunciations that upset people aye. Its not as pronounced as it used to be, but things like saying 'Noocastle' instead of 'NeueCastle' and describing things in a combination of metric and imperial were common problems as a kid.

[Marcel]

As the eldest Aussie born to families of Dutch ancestry living in the Melbourne Western suburbs filled with other immigrants from mostly Mediterranean or Slavic origin there were many words that consumed hours of discussion to resolve a single agreed meaning. This was of course helped by our teachers from the 'sub-continent' who all held Harvard doctorates in the English language in our French/Canadian brothers run private Catholic secondary school.

There are so many words you learn as a youth, so many you forget along the way, some you care about, others.. well, you know.... I find it amusing now though that when I hear any voice I can usually pick reasonably accurately where that someone is from. or at least the district they were raised.

People go on about diversity... but I always thought it was just normal...

[Simon Barden]

Apparently, "aluminum" is the original way of saying it. The extra "i" was put in there so it conformed to the "ium" suffix of other elements.

Not quite. It actually got named 3 times by Sir Humphrey Davey, who discovered the element. The first name was alumium in 1807. He quickly decided to then call it aluminum, but by 1812 changed it again to aluminium, which pleased most of the other scientists with a classical background because of so many other elements ending in -ium.

A few people used the 'older' -um ending, but almost all (including American chemists at the time), used the -ium. However it was still a very rare element until 1895 so it wasn't in common usage at all

The US/English split came from the decision by Webster's Dictionary to drop the -ium version in 1913, whereas previously both -um and -ium were listed as alternative spellings. The original Webster's Dictionary of 1828 was the main reason for most of the US/English spelling differences, as Noah Webster simply wrote the words the way he thought best, so dropped the 'u' from many words e.g. colour/color, humour/humor, but strangely left a lot of 'u's in other words that could easily have done without them. The dictionary became a best seller in the US, and so the written language slowly diverged.

The -um ending was made officially recognised by the American Chemical Society in the US in 1925, but the The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry standardised on -ium in 1990.


So, Fender3x, you didn't throw off -ium with your colonial shackles (as aluminium hadn't been discovered at the time).

I have no real idea why ''solder' became 'sodder' in about half the US ('sodder' is not universal in the US), except to speculate that some non-English speaking immigrants found it difficult to pronounce the 'l', so the pronunciation changed in the areas where there were a high proportion of those immigrants. The spelling hasn't changed, (except by people asking questions on the web), so you'd still buy a soldering iron to use solder in the US.

But all language changes over time, it never stands still, as the French have found out recently with various French organisations battling to keep the French language 'pure' and remove outside influences, but failing horribly. It is what it is. And in a few years from now, it will be slightly different again.