Easy for you, guys
Blegh.
Also – it’s Rowling like rolling, not Rowling like howling. Rowl as in bowl, not as in cowl. English is completely wack and pronounces words randomly, whatever the spelling.
H/t Pliny
Tip Jar
Blegh.
Also – it’s Rowling like rolling, not Rowling like howling. Rowl as in bowl, not as in cowl. English is completely wack and pronounces words randomly, whatever the spelling.
H/t Pliny
Blegh indeed.
I saw in my news feed something about Neil Gaiman and Stephen King striking back forcefully in the face of Rowling’s comments, then I saw Graham Linehan was refusing to work with the studio over then yanking a supposedly transphobic episode of The IT Crowd, and I thought it’s going to be that kind of day.
Today is International Day of the Girl. Feminist outlets are marking it. Everyone else is going on about National Coming Out Day.
I watched the offending scene from The IT Crowd. It was a guy saying some things that some people might find offensive. Like an awful lot of other TV shows do.
Slight correction: English spelling is completely wack and spells things randomly, regardless of the pronunciation.
Sadly that video is not available here.
If Rowling had said that trans people are responsible for all the wars in the world, then the comparison to Mel Gibson would be not totally insane and outrageous. Rowling has never said anything remotely close to that…
If Rowling ever makes a film implying that trans people killed Jesus, then SNL will have been vindicated. There is no universe in which that will happen.
Oh, sorry, Rob. It’s not all that interesting – just a smartass sniping.
It’s disappointing to see Pete Davidson going along with the torches and pitchforks crowd.
All the wars of the world, indeed.
This world has gone insane.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/stephen-king-margaret-atwood-roxane-gay-champion-trans-rights-open-letter-jk-rowling
So fringey, so very fringey, to suggest that people with dicks should not be let into women’s rape crisis centers. What a crazy, wacky, fringey idea. JK almost made that idea seem not fringey, with her super fame. So she had to be smacked down.
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/09/13/protecting-men-at-the-womens-shelter/
Just to confuse the issue, in the usual pronunciation over here it’s Row as in grow, not Rowl as in either bowl or growl. ‘Rolling’ is a surname in its own right, only it’s pronounced Roll as in knoll, or as the ‘coll’ in collie.
Now, about Derby and Berkeley :-))
Cripes, Acolyte, I have never heard Rowling pronounced as “Roeling” but as “Rolling” over here, if by over here, you mean Blighty.
Rob,
That’s (one of the many reasons) why you should use a VPN.
Row as in a rowboat. Row ling. Like bowling. Anyway, the guy is not funny, but he thinks he is, which is all you seem to need nowadays to get a clown gig and be put on TV. I have no tolerance for giggling dipshits. As Donnie would say, “unwatchable.”
AoS @ 7 – what?? I’m completely lost. Over there “grow” is pronounced one way and “bowl” is pronounced another? I mean, the ow part is pronounced differently?
I think he’s saying the surname Rolling is pronounced like Rawlings is here. I think that’s what threw him off.
Huh?
Oh, I see, like the “coll” in collie. No but I’m asking about “in the usual pronunciation over here it’s Row as in grow, not Rowl as in either bowl or growl.”
If you say Rowling is pronounced like rolling, like a wheel, I would agree with that too. But if the surname Rolling is not pronounced rolling like a wheel, but more like falling, like a leaf. Like Rawlings is here, ‘aw’ instead of ‘oh’?
cross post, ok @14, I think that’s a typo. Bowel or Growl maybe?
Only AoS can answer that question.
The definitive answer. JKR on how to pronounce her name:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/video/2012/sep/27/jk-rowling-pronounce-name-video
Good one latsot, that clears it up. She seems to think it’s often mispronounced in America, but other than the clowns above and a few others, I usually hear it pronounced properly here.
Latsot, also thanks for the tip on the vpn/firewall advice a while back (I think it was you?). I thought I would never need one with ios (ipados in my case), but it made a world of difference. My adverts and ad tracking are down to nearly nil. I had no idea. :)
It was already clear! It’s what I said in the first place.
Mind you it’s pleasant to have it in her voice.
She notes that it’s a pretty horrible name, “rolling” – yes, one can imagine a lot of boring childhood teasing.
I said it IN the post – “Also – it’s Rowling like rolling, not Rowling like howling.” Perfectly simple.
Absolutely. I knew you had it right too. While watching that I was hoping I didn’t have it wrong all these years! (not that it would be unusual for me) ;)
I was about 90% sure of the pronounciation, now I’m closer to 100, but I probably should have said ‘confirms it’ rather than ‘clears it up’. I need an editor, posting quickly gets me in trouble, and self editing isn’t one of my best skills. ;)
Ah well I had to look it up to be sure, a few weeks back. I thought it was like-rolling but I wanted to be damn sure before I said anything.
I’ve watched the video that latsot linked to and JK is definitely pronouncing it as ‘Roe-ling’, rhyming Row with grow (or with the bow in rainbow). It’s a small distinction, but the first syllable of rolling (downhill) and bowling (a ball) are pronounced differently from that of rowing (a boat), and JK’s own pronunciation is that of rowing (a boat) with an ‘l’ in the middle.
Regional and class accents vary, of course, as in laff/larf, bath/barth, and it’s likely this that is causing the confusion in this conversation.
Yeah Ophelia, but you know what you’re like, making all these assertions without evidence. Good job I’m here to help you out…
;)
Always grateful latsot!
AoS –
I’m still lost. You’re saying bowling (a ball) is pronounced differently from rowing (a boat) with an ‘l’ in the middle? When it’s the same syllable except for starting with a different letter? Are you sure?
Long O sounds are interesting, no question. They do vary. There’s a recorded announcement on Seattle buses, made by a male doctor telling us about the need to wear a mask “over your nose and mouth” – and he pronounces “nose” very distinctively and regionally. I think the region is western Pennsylvania but I’m not sure.
But still, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any difference between rolling and rowing with an l in the middle.
“Rowing” and “bowling” are pronounced slightly differently in a geordie accent, but I won’t even attempt to describe the difference.
Ophelia, yes, I’m sure. Roll rhymes with hole, row (a boat) rhymes with grow.
What’s that got to do with it? Of course roll rhymes with hole and row (a boat) rhymes with grow, but that doesn’t demonstrate that the o in rolling is pronounced differently from the o in growing. Road rhymes with toad and boat rhymes with goat but that doesn’t demonstrate that the o sounds in each pair are different.
Now I’m confused, and not just because as far as I’m aware road, toad, boat and goat use the same ‘o’ sound. I’ve never heard you speak, Ophelia, so it’s possible that you do pronounce rolling and growing with the same ‘o’ sound whereas for me they are distinctly different.
The way JK pronounced Rowling in the video uses the same ‘o’ sound as growing but different from that of rolling, but I really cannot think of how to demonstrate that difference without actually speaking to you. The best I can do is to say that to my ears, the ‘o’ sounds of growing and rolling are as different as the ‘a’ sounds of can and can’t.
Heh, that’s a good example to use on a Yank because we say can and can’t with pretty much the same “a” sound. Maybe not exactly, but close – we definitely don’t say “cahn’t” unless we’re from Boston.
I guess the sound varies a little depending on what other letters are present, in generic US-speak. I guess I say the o a little differently in bowl and bowling…the ing draws it out a little, maybe. I’m not sure. But it’s not very different, not really noticeably different.
I once asked Jeremy and Julian (my bosses on The Philosophers’ Magazine) when we were at a CFI thingy if they pronounced “father” and “farther” differently. They were both unsure, and remained unsure after they said both a few times. I wasn’t sure I heard any difference. Accents are interesting.
It never made sense to me that ‘can’ in cannot is pronounced differently to that in can’t (especially in the Midlands, where can’t is pronounced ‘car-nt’, or that despite the only difference being an apostrophe, cant and can’t are also said differently.
The more one thinks of the English language the odder it gets. If I trained a female pig to pull a seed drill, and she was very noisy when she was put to work, then I’d use my sow to sow the seed despite her row as she moved up the row. In fact, in order to attach the seed drill to my pig, there was a harness I had to sew so my sow could sow. So there.
In the US of course cant and can’t are pronounced exactly the same…although to be fair I can’t be sure I’ve ever heard cant in Yank; it’s not much in use here. Too bad, it’s an excellent word. But when I say it, I pronounce it to rhyme with scant and ant and pant and grant and rant and slant…but not want.
One of the more interesting aspects of an accent study I read about years ago was that they tracked whether people claimed they pronounced various words differently, and also whether those people could actually distinguish those words in recordings of themselves. There were many cases where the claim was not substantiated by the listening test.
AoS, wonderful! It’s no wonder non-English speakers just look totally bewildered when learning our language. I read your @32 and was nodding my head, but at the same time wondering what O’s accent was like and whether she would ‘hear’ the same thing. Clearly not.
There are some videos of me talking out there, so you can find out pretty easily.
@35 I have used canted, as in leaning at an angle, and canter, as in a horse’s gait, but not cant. I would pronounce it the same as can or can’t also, but wouldn’t it sound more like cont or cahnt in the King’s English? I was thinking if we all got on Zoom for N&C we would need captions, or maybe a translator. :P
twiliter, not that I use it often (or is that ‘offen’?) but I pronounce cant the same as Ophelia, rhyming with scant and pant, etc. Can’t, on the other hand, I pronounce with the same ‘a’ sound as in far and car, so ‘carn’t’.
While we’re on the subject, does anybody here pronounce ‘wh’ words differently from ‘w’ words? Could a listener tell, for example, whether you said ‘whether’ or ‘weather’, ‘where’ or wear ‘, and so-on, without the context of you putting the word in a sentence?
@38, but then we’d have to use Google and that means typing in a search bar and… :-)
@40, for me, can’t = carnt as well. For my accent I suspect the wh vs w sound depends on what follows the w. So, my whether has a shorter e than weather. Still, other cases could be confusing as in “Whether the wether cares where’s the weather” since with my accent the first two will sound almost the same and the flow of the sentence will shorten the last such that it also becomes much the same.
Sackbut, that’s interesting about people not distinguishing between certain words in recordings of themselves despite claiming to pronounce them differently. I think that I pronounce words such as book and look differently from buck and luck* – at least I imagine they sound different when I say them, but the difference is so subtle that I don’t know if I’d tell which was which if the words were played back to me in isolation. It would be fascinating to find out but it could only be done if I were recorded without knowing, because if I did know then I’m sure that I would consciously make sure to pronounce them differently, perhaps even to the point of exaggerating the difference beyond my usual way of saying the words.
* There’s a couple of lines in a Harry Connick Jr. song, The Last Payday, that go ..trouble will find you, no need to look, and luck won’t help when they close the book, and I’m sure that I can hear a difference in his pronunciation of luck from that of look and book, yet nobody I’ve mentioned this to can hear it. I don’t know whether this means that I have a particularly good ear for subtle differences in accents and pronunciations or if I’m imagining them.
Rob, I was thinking more of the aspirated ‘wh’ so that the ‘h’ sound is included with the ‘w’. It’s something I rarely hear nowadays but was used to be far more common, particularly from television and radio presenters (BBC English?).
Incidentally, a place I used to work at once had to take on some agency staff for a rush-job. One of the temps was named Paul, but we already had a Paul on the team so, owing to his accent, the temp quickly became known as ‘Aussie Paul’. After a couple of days I asked him why he didn’t tell them that he was a Kiwi; he said that after 2 years in England he’d given up trying to explain the difference. He also said that in those 2 years I was the only Brit to have recognised that his was an NZ accent.
Hah! ‘..was used to be..’
Typical, just when we’re talking language :-))
This video uses IPA [kæn] and [kænt] for can and can’t. I don’t think I use the same vowel for both words. I use [kan] (same vowel as “hat” and “tack”) and [kænt], I’m pretty sure. Most of the time,
https://youtu.be/Vp7xmbtylqI
This IPA vowel chart could be handy. It has audio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
AoS @43, NZers aren’t much when it comes to an aspirated ‘wh’ in English – we’ve pretty much abandoned Received Pronunciation, with very few exceptions. Interestingly, Maori, in some dialects at least, does have a distinct wh sound that comes across as an F (Ph). in other dialects it’s silent. it’ll be interesting to see if that pronunciation eventually finds it’s way back into NZ English as a result.
Very few Northern Hemisphere people can pick the difference between Aussie and Kiwi accents except at the extremes. it’s one of the few things that I know for sure that ‘Story of English’ documentary from a few years ago got badly wrong. I know my sister went to England (Camden) for an OE and came back taking with a strong Aussie accent. She fell in with a bad crowd.
In another example of things that sound the same, my Irish colleague insists that he can’t hear the difference between me saying pin or pen and bread or bred. Bare, bear and beer are also pretty indistinguishable.
I’m pretty sure I don’t pronounce that ‘h’ at all. Wether, wen, wy…
‘Who’ on the other hand is hoo. Don’t ask me why…or wy.
Huh, this thread went weird fast.
I’ve got a funny one for the “can versus carn’t” file – I used to work with someone who pronounces “can” as “cun” – short vowel, rhymes with fun (the way I say it, anyway). Not that noticeable if she says “cun we try and finish early”, but absolutely bizarre when she says “let’s finish early if we cun”.
Fortunately, she never pronounced the vowel in “can’t” the same way.
Catwhisperer, in a similar vein, I know several people who for some reason really shorten ‘ouldn’t’ words, so ‘shouldn’t’ comes out as ”shunt’, ‘wouldn’t’ as ‘wunt’….need I go on? I mean, I could, but I’m sure you’re ahead of me.