Pronouncing it RIGHT (page 3)

respectful_observer

San-hee'drin (when it should be SAN' hi-drin)

Oh, and let's not forget about Jesus' close friend "LazarUTH"!

AGuest

San-hee'drin (when it should be SAN' hi-drin)

Interesting, dear RO (peace to you!). Dictionary.com states it as "San hed rin" or "San hee drin":

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sanhedrin

Per Webster's its "San head rin":

http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?sanhed01.wav=Sanhedrin

I always hear it as "San hehdreen"... with a tongue roll on the "dr"...

Peace!

A slave of Christ,

SA, a bit of a "wordsmith" hobbyist and former English major who not only has had to learn to overlook mispronounciations but mistransliterations, both of which used to grate but now... who cares? If I can hand "ur" and "idk"... well, "nothing really matters"... anymorrrre...

punkofnice

Reminds me of a dub that pronounced Sodom as Sew-dem so as not to say SOD! Same with Shittim = Shy-tim.

coffee_black

We had one brother in our hall that was obsessed with making sure that everyone pronounced Philistines correctly. He was certain that you put the emphasis on the second syllable. He would correct and chastise anyone who did not use the approved pronunciation. Strange. No one wanted to say the word...knowing what his response would be.

Coffee

Christ Alone

When I was reading the WT, I would listen to the audio recording of the article to make sure I got the "right" pronunciation. I didn't need to check a dictionary or even reason it out. What the WT said went!

The WT direct us on how to pronounce names using accent marks and syllable breaks in the NWT. When people didn't understand or follow these marks, I would get livid. Yes, I was pretty anal as a JW about some of this stuff. I would've probably been like the brother that insisted on stressing the second syllable in Philistines.

kurtbethel

I originally came from a parallel Earth that had cities this one doesn't have. There was Peking, Bombay, and Saigon.

Apognophos

Ah, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. It's even worse when you have studied Latin, because you are often taught a set of rules for pronunciation that are quite different from the "modern English Latin" rules. The example usually given is that Cicero is actually more like "Kick-er-oh". But a more common dilemma for me when I was a WT reader was something like "Cestius Gallus", which Americans would say "Sess-chuss Gall-us", but which I naturally tended to pronounce "Kes-tee-oos Gah-loos". I had to mentally prepare myself before the reading to use the "standard" pronunciation, so I didn't distract, confuse or amuse the friends with my reading.

I'm pretty sure that some pronunciations are what I could call "Witness shibboleths", like the insistence on "Phi-LIS-teen". One highly-placed Bethelite probably decreed it so, and then it spread like a mind-virus ("meme" for us pre-Internet fogies) to the various elders over time. None of them checked the dictionary to see if it was really so.

That being said, I believe some peculiar pronunciations have been fixed over time so that Witnesses now sound less silly when talking about the Bible. Hosea used to be "Hoe-zay-uh" where I come from in the U.S., but now it's "Hoe-see-uh". Nahum was "Nay-hyoom" and now it's "Nay-hum". So that's improvement.

Amelia Ashton

All the halls I ever went to we pronounced Isaiah as "I zigh ya" but one brother always pronounced it "I zay ya". No idea why but it was the same brother who always asked for extra portions of holy spirit and called the Watchtower study "our weeky letter from Jehovah."

The brother doing the school always used to talk about the importance of "correct pronounciation" which made me laugh as no-one ever corrected him on his incorrect pronunciation of the word pronunciation!

Apognophos

It seems to me that a very small percentage of school overseers were ever qualified to criticize someone's speech. We actually had one of the qualified ones when I was growing up, so I didn't realize how many were making fools of themselves when giving counsel. Good thing the counsel is done privately now -- good thing for the overseer!

Amelia: That's odd, are you in the U.S.? If everyone at the meeting was saying "I-zigh-ya", I would be looking around like I was in the Twilight Zone!

panhandlegirl

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Pronouncing it RIGHT

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