Author: Kirk

Why do people say “Shavez” for Venezuela’s president?

Devolution toward Simpler, Foreign Languages, Mispronunciations

The notorious Hugo Chávez has been president of Venezuela, a Spanish-speaking country, since 1999.

I believe that many Americans ten years later still pronounce the “H” in his first name, even though the letter “h” in Spanish is silent, because of their ignorance about this aspect of the Spanish language.

Aggravating that ignorance, perhaps, is the fact that the name “Hugo” in American speech is often pronounced with a hard “H” — as when meteorologists repeatedly referred in 1989 to Hurricane Hugo.

What puzzles me more is the pronunciation of the C-H in his surname as if it were spelled S-H instead.

Many Americans know that they should pronounce the C-H in the Spanish words “chico” and “chihuahua” just as they pronounce the C-H in “church” and “chapel” and other English words.

But somehow they get thrown by the C-H in Chávez and end up pronouncing the name as if it were Shávez — with an S-H — instead.

Maybe the confusion comes from the S-H pronunciation of the beginnings of the surnames of such French personalities as Marc Chagall and Maurice Chevalier.

Given the strong influence of French on the English language, this could explain the mispronunciation of Chávez as Shávez.

Another explanation is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis: It is simpler to pronounce the “soft” S-H found in words such as “shoot” and “shout” than it is to pronounce the “hard” C-H found in words such as “chore” and “chow”.

What do you think? Let me know!

“Signitures”

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this last week on an order form.

Problem:
This word is misspelled.

Explanation:
The order form had an area at the bottom where the customer was supposed to sign his or her name.

The order-form creator misspelled “Signatures” as “Signitures” — with an “i” in the middle — perhaps because of confusion from words such as “signify” — spelled S-I-G-N-I-F-Y — or perhaps because of mispronunciation of the letter “a” in the word “signatures”.

“Signify” dates back to the early 1200s and comes from the Latin word “significare”, which means to make a sign.

In contrast, “signature” dates back to around 1530 and comes from the Latin word “signare”, which means to mark.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “signature” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 185,000,000 matches
  • “signatures” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 34,700,000 matches
  • “signiture” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 384,000 matches
  • “signitures” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 57,700 matches

Combining the singular and plural results, this tells me that Web authors have used the correct letter “a” over the incorrect letter “i” by a ratio of 497-to-1, which is excellent. However, over 400 thousand misspellings is a bit troubling.

Solution:
“Signatures”

“12 mbps”

Abbreviations

I saw this yesterday in a document about the maximum download speed made available by an Internet service provider.

Problem:
The provider misstated the download speed by one billion times!

Explanation:
The Internet service provider (ISP) was bragging about the maximum download speed that any of its customers could obtain.

The ISP was trying to say that the maximum speed was twelve megabits per second.

The ISP correctly wrote the final three letters correctly because lowercase-B-P-S stands for “bits per second”.

The problem is with the initial, lowercase “m”.

Lowercase “m” stands for milli, the prefix that means 1/1000 and is found in words such as “millimeter”.

The ISP should have used uppercase “M”, which stands for mega, the prefix that means one million and is found in words such as “megapixel”.

So “1 mbps” (with a lowercase “m”) is one billionth as fast as “1 Mbps” (with an uppercase “M”).

Solution:
“12 Mbps”