Mispronunciations

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”

“quaint essential picnic”

Mispronunciations

My wife saw this a week ago in an email message.

Problem:
The modifier of “picnic” is incorrect.

Explanation:
My wife got what appeared to be an often-forwarded email message about being safe with mayonnaise, which has a reputation for spoiling quickly when not refrigerated.

The message referred to the popularity of mayonnaise in meal items that are commonly found on picnics.

The message included the phrase “quaint essential picnic”.

A spelling checker would not have caught the problem in this phrase.

Except perhaps to suggest a comma between the word “quaint” and the word “essential”, a grammar checker would not have caught the real problem, either.

The solution comes from saying “quaint essential” to oneself quickly and appreciating that the email message writer probably was attempting to convert an unrecognized word into two words that he or she already knew.

Solution:
“quintessential picnic”