Colonel HotForWords Reporting!

Happy New Year Marina!

In keeping with a military theme, I have always been curious why “lieutenant” is often pronounced “left tenant”. I would be interested in any info you can find on this little language oddity.

Your devoted student,
Major Chaos

“Schedule” in English is most often pronounced as: \?ske-(?)j

Hi honey,
Sorry to be the “French upset guy” here, but let me make an objection:
we don’t pronounce colonel as a “c-o-r-o-n-e-l”, but just like you do in the U.S…. we say it colonel. :twisted:
:arrow: I found the answer to the question Major Chaos asked. Lieutenant means the person who is in charge while the commander is not here.
In french: lieu (place) tenant (the one who holds). In short, the lieutenant is the one who holds the place. For peeps who speak French: tenir lieu de means remplacer. In the French police classification, the lieutenant is the lowest superior officer grade you can hold.

Nice to see that such a cute girl like you is found of words and etimology. :mrgreen:
Zavatta

Always informative! I have enjoyed the cards, when is the next occasion!!? :wink:

John

I’m here from the clean hotforwords’ apartment infantry division. Ten…..hut! :mrgreen:

i love Marina, especially her clothing in this episode. :wink:

This has to be my favorite episode to date

This is by far the hottest and most intelligent outfit that I have seen you in Marina! Quite amazing! Keep up the good stuff

:grin: ‘ten hut! from you just makes me want to smile and have more fun learning from you!!! You are definitely not my boot camp chief! you are a nice replacement for that &!*#^. :grin:

The legal term indictment or to indict, to bring a formal accusation against, I’m wondering if it’s another example.

Marina Your “colonel” video has the ShadowSpear “seal of approval” :-]

http://www.shadowspear.com/vb/showthread.php?t=8843

How great you are, Marina!

Since I started learning English, fairly long ago, I’ve been wondering why “great” is pronounced like that and not like meat or treat, but rather like fate or trade.

Shouldn’t it be spelt “grate”?

Thanks! Keep it up!

zavatta, I was talking about many years ago with the pronunciation. The pronunciation AND the spelling have changed over the years… so you are correct in stating that you no longer pronounce it as

I don’t know… Valentine’s day? I’m thinking about doing report cards. What do you think?

New user to your site, love it!

I would also like to second the questions about “great” as well as “lefttenant”/”lieutenant”. In doing some research on the issue, it seems that the former may be a bastardization stemming from people mis-hearing the word, and assuming that the lieutenant was just the person who stood to the left of the commanding officer (from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenant). Interesting, then that we refer to a second in command frequently as a “right hand man”. Seems like someone’s mixing their positions!

However, the Occam’s Razor explanation is that we simply do not know. See http://www.waywordradio.org/discussion/?forum=1&topic=60&page=1 for a brief discussion of this topic — especially for people who hesitate to cite Wiki articles.

Anyway, great site!

I have a few: knife, knee gnat, if letters are silent why do they need to be there. we don’t say ka-nife, or ka-nee, or ga-nat.

what again is dissimilation ?

In Greek language there is also the work Κόλων (kolon), modern Greek: κολώνα (kolona) and it means exactly the same.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CE%BF%CE%BB%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%AF

I don’t know which is the most ancient..

I’m next to my mailbox as I type.

Question: If we didn’t have homonyms, would we still be talking about how to pronounce fort vs fort-tay?

I think most people have been impacted in some negative way due to hearing one thing when it was supposed to mean another. To prevent mis-heard speech, some people emphasize certain syllables, or in some cases people use affected speech. Here are examples of emphasized or affected speech, not necessarily homonyms. niner (nine), biatch (bitch), dayum (damn)

How about tort vs torte. We don’t say, “Give the children another piece of tor-tay”.

Many dictionaries have a usage note regarding the pronunciation of forte, pointing to the influence of the music term forte.

On a related note, Marina did a video on the word Colonel vs kernel. That video points out some interesting historical things regarding pronunciation.
http://www.hotforwords.com/2008/01/01/colonel-hotforwords-reporting/

Hey, if we didn’t have all these inconsistencies there might not have been a HotForWords site. :grin:

Marina, I messed up :sad: . I meant to post the above on the Forte video page. I’ve already re-posted the above on the Forte page. You can delete this and the above comment. Thanks.

Yes Ma’am you can be my commanding officer in the apocalypse. I love when she wears baseball caps sooo cute. Hotforprofits should wear a baseball hat sometime.

HeaD of CLaSS is MARINAof H.O.T.for.W.O.R.D.S

corn belt and a hit of bunchberry; dogwood

[[[C*A*P*I*T*A*L]]]

:grin: :mrgreen: :razz: ;-) Random[top-class]

I like these kind of videos. The new ones are cool too, but the older ones bring back such good memories. :smile:

My 5th grade teacher told us a story about her parents (who had come from Italy back in the 1970′s) and the words that really threw them off were:

– Throw
– Though
– Thorough

She said that her Mom specifically said “that’s stupid”. HAHA! Never thought about it again until just now. They do kind of violate some phonetic principals.

je suis d’accord