Words are hard!

[Morrus]

Absolutely - when I was learning Spanish it was the same way. And I suspect many languages are like that. But English has a serious legacy issue here. Many words are spelled the way they are because of how someone decided they "should" be spelled centuries ago. But even if said spelling was accurate back then, pronunciation has changed and we've failed to update the spelling. I believe "knight" made some sense phonetically, when that spelling was settled upon. No longer.

Ki-nig-it.
/Python

 

[Fifth Element]

Ki-nig-it.
/Python

Yeah, the irony is that although it sounds like they're doing a purposefullly silly pronunciation of the word, it's actually not far from the correct pronunciation for the time period.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I always read and pronounced justiciar as "JUST-ih-car" until I learned it's "ju-STIH-she-er". Who knew! (Probably lots of people.)

I did the same. Then when I saw the right pronunciation it made sense.

Justice - iar - someone who does justice.

 

[prosfilaes]

I don't think english got the memo!

Hou tu pranownse Inglish offers a set of 56 rules that are correct 59%, and almost correct another 26% of the time. For what it's worth, it pronounces Sigil with a dʒ, that is the sound we've been writing j.

 

[Starman]

One of my favorites from a game I was in a couple of years ago was 'forecastle.' We were having a little naval adventure and one of the players said he was going to go stand on the forecastle and pronounced it exactly as it looks. Another of the players happened to be ex-Navy and gave him tons of grief for it. "It's fohk-suhl!" Another brilliant English word that you could never figure out the pronunciation for if you didn't know it somehow.

 

[Lwaxy]

Oy vey, nautical terms. That's not much better in German where sailor jargon tends to be a mix of English and German and a bunch of words which are neither here nor there.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Well crap. At what point is it acceptable to just decide I'm going to continue pronouncing something wrong.

As a teenager I stumbled across these cool fantasy books about a dark elf who wielded swords called "SKIM-it-ars". For a while I bullheadedly kept pronouncing it that way because I thought it sounded better than "SIM-it-ar".

 

[Thotas]

How many 3e players pronounce blaggard as "Blackguard" just because it was spelled that way? I did, originally.

 

[Lwaxy]

Scimitar was pronounced skirmishtar by my son for the longest time

 

[theredrobedwizard]

Well, how do you pronounce Garage?

In english we have hard g's and soft g's - the latter providing the 'j' sound as in Garaje.

I didn't say my logic was sound, just that it was.