My pettiest post ever

For someone whose professional career was based on her persnickety checking and correction of putatively minor details of punctuation and whatnot, Mary Norris demonstrates a surprising willingness to be fast and loose with her descriptions in Greek To Me. Here, for instance, is something she says about the letter chi, χ, as it appears, transliterated, in English words:

Speakers of English often have trouble pronouncing words with ch in them—melancholy, chalcedony, chiropodist, chimera—because ch also represents the sound in such common English words as church, chicken, and cheese. (You could say our alphabet is imperfect.)

Speakers of English have trouble pronouncing such words as those in "rødgrød med fløde", in at least a double sense: first, when confronted with the written words, speakers of English are unlikely to even know how to begin; they will find it difficult to go from a written representation to an audible performance. Second, even after hearing a Dane speak out the phrase or one of its components, a speaker of English will find it difficult to repeat the performance back, producing the same sounds again.

Speakers of English certainly do not have trouble pronouncing the sounds /k/ or /tʃ/, which is completely unsurprising, since both of those are common sounds in English. Speakers of English may occasionally be wrong in how they pronounce a word containing "ch", as I was, for a long time, with "chalcedony", but that, surely, does not mean that such speakers have trouble pronouncing them. They pronounce them with ease and confidence, just wrong. I would never have characterized myself, in the period in which I was incorrect about "chalcedony", as having trouble with its pronunciation, and I doubt that anyone else would have, either, even someone who knew its correct pronunciation. Perhaps speakers of English are often mistaken about "chiropodist" (though Norris gives us no real reason to believe that, either), but do they often have trouble?

Comments

[Mr. F]

Beyond the pale,

[Francesca Berger]

I got here by pure internet rabbit-holing, and just want to say that I think you're entirely in the right on this petty point. Hear hear.