I was at my cousin's place last week and we somehow got into the topic of pronuncations, or specifically, mis-pronunciations. So my cousin, who was 16, told me that his English teacher should be fired. He said that his teacher taught him that "wagon" should be pronounced as
/weIg@n/.
SAY WHAT?!?!As a budding linguist, I've always repeatedly told myself that I should not judge someone by the way s/he pronounces words (pasir ris low not included). But when I heard about how his teacher pronounced wagon I felt like slapping her, and slapping myself too. (I guess I was
that upset)
I can't offer an explanation as to the teacher's (warped) pronunciation, except that she might have been high on something that day :s
And the online dictionaries I checked also confirmed that there was only one pronunciation of wagon, which wasn't the one that she said.
Perhaps she thought the "wa" in "wagon" was supposed to be pronounced the same way as the Singaporeans' way of saying the "we" in "wedges"?
I guess this is similar to when Prof encountered the guy who said "dah-ta", though I still cannot in the life of me figure out how in the world she could have pronounced it as
/weIg@n/.
They let anybody in these days.