This is because it is produced further back in the oral cavity than the following “t”, and so its release can be masked. It is possible that the first “c” might not be heard in rapid speech, even if a speaker is articulating it. The last word I’ll draw out for examination is “Arctic”, pronounced “Artick”. I’m not entirely sure what is going on here, but it could be by analogy with the word “repair”, or with “comparable”, which seems to be shifting from “COM-pra-ble” to “com-PAR-a-ble”.

For example, “irreparable” seems to be changing from four syllables with a main stress on the second (“ir-REP-ra-ble”) to five syllables with the main stress on the third (“ir-re-PAR-a-ble”), with the stressed syllable sounding like “pear”. I have, however, noticed a recent change in the way some words which have historically had weak syllable elision are pronounced. He gives the examples “memory” (pronounced “MEM-ry”) and “library” (pronounced “LI-bry”), which did not make the list. As George Bailey, a sociolinguist at the University of York, notes, it is interesting that “probably” and “especially” are singled out when we do this with many words. In rapid adult speech, it is very likely that these weaker syllables will be deleted. That’s why young children acquiring language say “tatoes” for “potatoes”, or “jamas” for “pyjamas”. In English, the most important syllables for listener comprehension are stressed.

A similar phenomenon happens in “especially”, pronounced “specially” – the first syllable is weak and is deleted.

The weak second syllable in “probably” is often deleted in speech. The pronunciation of “probably” as “probly” likely arises from a process called weak syllable elision or deletion. Incidentally, I’m reliably informed that the French word for “espresso” is “expresso”. We don’t have a similar issue with the pronunciation of “cappuccino” or “macchiato” because we simply don’t have anything similar to those words in English. Importantly, you are unlikely to misunderstand what the speaker has asked for. If you hear someone ask for an espresso, it’s easy to see how you might mishear this to be nearer to a word you already know, and therefore adopt that pronunciation. The two are actually cognate words with similar origins, both meaning “press out” or “obtain by squeezing”. This pronunciation probably arose by analogy with the word “express”. “Espresso” is pronounced “expresso” by many people, even though there is no “x” in the spelling. Let’s have a look at some of the pronunciations people objected to in that survey. Certainly, language change is inevitable, which is handy because it keeps us linguists in business and generates a lot of copy for newspapers and the like. These changes could be the result of social interaction (“other people say it like this”), mishearings, spelling pronunciations, phonetic processes or the influence of other languages, among other things. How did we get to those pronunciations? Through a process of gradual, historical language change.

The most extreme cases are probably family and place names: the surname Featherstonehaugh can be pronounced to sound like “Fanshaw”, for example, while Torpenhow in Cumbria is pronounced “Trepenna”. In fact, English is known for having some very irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences, so that argument does not always hold up. One criticism of speakers who pronounce nuclear (“NU-cle-ar”) as “nucular” is that it does not match the spelling.

Funny pronunciation words