Pronunciation

Pranav Mistry was one of the speakers at IIT Bombay’s Techfest this year. He rose to fame in 2010 for his TED Talk on Sixth Sense, a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with it (Description sourced from his website). Since then, he has been in and out of limelight, and has generally been on the receiving end of a lot of (well deserved) love and admiration from Indians, especially because he comes off as a ‘son of the soil’.

When you combine an awesome Harry Potter reference with Spanish phonology, you get a winner. This has got to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the recent past: Since this is Linguistrix, let me add a few lines about the points of linguistic interest in this gag. Spanish pronunciation is delightfully easy and predictable with a very regular spelling system. Words usually have only one stressed syllable, and it is the last syllable, except when the word ends in N or S or a vowel, in which case it's the penultimate syllable (Michel Thomas calls this rule the Nose Rule).

[Edit: A few days after this post was written, the powers-that-be decided to retain the name JEE for the new entrance test that would replace JEE+AIEEE combo from next year] The JEE and AIEEE, two flagship examinations that used to be conducted for students aspiring to secure an admission into the IITs/NITs are going to be replaced by an exam called ISEET (Indian Science Engineering Eligibility Test). There are of course loads of issues surrounding this decision that the government took, but none that come under the purview of Linguistrix.

Christmas is around the corner, and it seems to be that time of the year when you discover you had been pronouncing a word wrongly all this time. The word is awry, which I had always thought of as awe-ry, instead of its actual pronunciation a-wry (əˈraɪ). The funny part is that I learnt of the correct pronunciation while reading someone else’s account of how he had been making the same mistake (for a much longer period than mine).