Words that Brits pronounce...

Place names and nationalities. Tunisia.

Chew Nizz Ee A.

Add an Nfor the nationality. I had no idea you pronounced it differently until I saw an episode of American Dad.

I think we've covered place names ending Borough.

We pronounce most words differently, the words that usually catch American actors out are Amazon Python and Pentagon.

We don't pronounce the o, there is a glottal stop instead.

Even John Oliver pronounces it the American way now so no wonder it trips so many up.

When I was a kid I thought lieutenant and leftenant were different army ranks not different pronunciations. I can't remember which one ranked higher, I think it depended on what I was watching.

And when you say Brits I suspect you mean English, the Scots have their own pronunciations as do the Welsh.

Privacy

A fiver, a tenner, quid

Knicker, five knicker, ten knicker. Same as fiver and tenner.

And this is what they call cats.

Ordin-ary--American

Ordin-ry--English. (that's the way it sounds to me.)

"Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home."

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english

Different dialects are a delight to the eardrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English#United_States



minutiae

A few yearsbackthe BBC updated some old sitcoms, Dad's Army had some lost episodes recast and Porridge was about Norman Stanley Fletcher's grandson. Both received excellent reviews, they also did Are You Being Served.

That did not go down so well, primarily Jason Watkins' limp wristed portrayal of Mr Humphries was dated and homophobic and people are no longer interested in a middle aged woman talking about her vagina all day long.

There is a reason why this awful sitcom was consigned to the trash bin and never shown again. It is a real embarrassment.

The slang term for a cat that most people use is moggy.

I wish I could remember the the name of the lady that posted about her moggy. She also had a hedgehog in her garden.

We had hedgehogs at our last house.

Words that end in "ile" used to be pronounced "ul" in America, such as reptile--rep-tul or missile--miss-ul.
Now more and more they pronounce it like the English do: rep-tile or miss-ile.

The differences that hit you are the ones you're unaware of, like Tunisia. When I first heard the American punctuation I had to do a double take, I wasn't sure what it was at first.

Oh, how do you pronounce Tunisia?

We usually pronounce it Tu-ne'-zha, but I've heard Tu-ne'-zia.

Look at my first post on this thread.

That was really funny! It made me laugh!

Exclamation Mark.

Here's one. On Sunday they showed the most recent episode of The Simpsons. It's the one where Brandine is found to be secretly smart.

That's how far behind we are on The Simpsons, the Christmas one usually arrives mid summer.

That's another point.

What I noticed was a simple Brandine used, when she said something was harder than a month old biscuit.

Now I know that a biscuit in America is more like a scone and nothing like a biscuit over here, which is why it doesn't work.

There was a famous legal case.

Over here cakes and biscuits are treated differently when it comes to paying VAT. Biscuits are charged VAT, but cakes are exempt because they are seen as freshly baked.

There is a chocolate orange confection known as a Jaffa Cake. They are in the same aisle as the biscuits and, because they're cakes are cheaper.

The government wasn't happy about this saying that Jaffa cakes were biscuits in all but name and should be subject to VAT.

It went to court and eventually found in favour of the manufacturers. The definition between cake and biscuit hinged on what happened when they went stale.

When cakes go stale they become hard, but when biscuits go stale they become soft, and Jaffa cakes go hard, so they are cakes.

So a month old biscuit is as soft as it gets.