Wednesday 13 August 2014

bullet

credit: Ed Schipul; licence: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

"He wore a vest which was bulletproof" was one of the 20 sentences students of my English phonetics courses had to read aloud. The adjective is pronounced /bʊlɪtpruːf/. Quite a few of my young professionals pronounced it as /bʌlətpruːf/. They never seem to have watched a whodunit.

credit: aussiegal; licence: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

5 comments:

  1. It's universal. It's also possible they spent too much time watching whodunits and too little time listening to you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The second picture shows a rather extreme way of getting your students to pronounce English correctly, Petr, if you don't mind me saying so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've tried that. But they tend to stammer, for some reason.

      Delete
    2. John, I sometimes have that strong urge to ...

      Delete