| re: Title pronunciations | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:17 pm EDT 09/08/24 | |
| In reply to: Title pronunciations - Chromolume 08:00 am EDT 09/05/24 | |
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| I've always put pretty much equal stress on all four words in the title Merrily We Roll Along. And pretty much equal emphasis on all three words in West Side Story. But I remember when the Laurents-directed WSS was playing, the announcer on at least one commercial for it put a strong emphasis on West, which I think I had never heard anyone do. There was a Cariou-narrated commercial for that production, but I think this was a different one. John McWhorter recently had a piece about how it's become common for the emphases in the pronunciations of multi-syllabic words to gradually shift to the first syllable, at least for many people. This brings up how often I hear people on television — not usually actors, but commentators on MSNBC and CNN and some of the TCM hosts — use nonstandard pronunciations of words, pronunciations that no one or virtually no one would have used in the not-too-distant past. These are always well-educated people, sometimes exceptionally well-educated people, and it's surprising to me how many people don't seem to know the standard pronunciations of certain words. But pronunciations do shift over time (which is why so many rhymes and puns in Shakespeare don't work any more), and I guess I've just got to get used to hearing pronunciations that to my ears sound terribly wrong, some of them nonstandard till recently and some of them still nonstandard. At this point, I think more people may be saying comPArable than COMparable, and I guess I've just got to live with it, especially since some dictionaries are now listing both, even if the older standard pronunciation is listed first. |
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