Another Rant about American Pronunciation

I don’t care about accents as such, I have one, you have one, we all have one, and none are ‘correct’.

A typical American uses, in pronunciation at least, the diphthong ‘ae’ (pronounced something like ‘eh’) whereas a typical Brit would use ‘a’ (pronounced something like ‘ah’) when saying, for example, ‘hand’. That’s not a problem, all are understood.

But it becomes a problem when the USA thinks it can teach the rest of the world how to spell English in other alphabets, using its pronunciation. The letter ‘a’ is generally pronounced ‘ah’ in every major language in the world, including English, everywhere except North America – it is never ‘eh’ (ae). More annoyingly, when they use it correctly, as in ‘aesthetic’, they change the spelling to ‘esthetic’!

The Koreans have a letter that is pronounced ‘ae’ (eh) it’s ㅐ in Hangeul (there’s a picture above if you can’t see this (you need Korean language on your computer). So now we have Americans telling Koreans how to spell place names, in Korean, using American phonetics. For example Amsterdam phonetically ‘spelled’ in Korean is akin to “Ehm-ster-dehm”! New Zealand, spelled in Korean, is 뉴질랜드 (Nyu-jeel-LEHND-uh). So we’ve got Americans telling the rest of the world how to pronounce and spell the names of cities and countries that are, in some cases, ten times older that their own country. They really have no right to do this. It begs the cliched question. Who do they think they are?

And while we’re on the subject of place names, Moscow does not rhyme with ‘cow’, Iraq and Iran are not Eye-raq, and Eye-ran, Nottingham is not pronounced Nodding Ham, and Yorkshire is not pronounced York Shire. Accents are one thing, they are forgiven, but don’t tell us how to say the names of the places we come from! We don’t pronounce the ‘s’ on the end of Arkansas, despite there being a Kansas with an audible final ‘s’, so return the favour and say our, and the rest of the world’s, place names correctly. And unless it’s North American like Canada (캐나다) Keh-na-da don’t have the downright arrogance to instruct other countries to use your phonetics.