I do not know why but It drives me mad that everytime I see an American on a talk show they say "AXE" instead of "ASK".
The combination SK a the end of a word is much more difficult to pronounce than KS. Measure your effort and the number of milliseconds for saying "task" instead of "tax," "desk" instead of "decks," "whisk" instead of "wicks," etc.
Some of these mispronunciations were introduced by African slaves in the 19th century. The majority of them came from linguistic regions in which words only ended in vowels. So it was difficult enough for them to learn a word ending in
one consonant. A word ending in two consonants was a Herculean challenge. Try pronouncing the Czech word
vstup (entrance): your vocal apparatus has never been trained to produce those consonant clusters, and once you're past your tenth or fifteenth birthday, your muscles probably will never be able to bend that way. It was the same for these folks, but with the additional handicap that no one ever tried to teach them English, they just had to pick it up.
We still hear many vestiges of that in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English, sometimes referred to as Ebonics). For example I hear people with university degrees say "bofe" for "both" and "toe" for "told," and not even realizing it's wrong. Many generations later, their ears are still not tuned to perceive the difference. To be sure, this is dying out, but slowly.
English is a very difficult language by several measures. Phonetics probably tops the list. Our language has more phonemes (individual sound components such as B, SH, W) than most; many of them sound identical to speakers of other languages. Furthermore, the way we combine phonemes is a challenge. In Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Vietnamese, and may others, a word cannot end with either SK or KS.
It seems so commonplace that AXE should mean Ask in an American dictionary.
Don't give them any ideas. Snuck for sneaked and dove for dived are already in there as alternatives, and they gave up on buffalo for bison decades ago.
The Irish language doesn't have a 'th' sound. So things like wif and Keef are quite common. As are expressions like half past tree (as opposed to three thirty). These pronunciations were passed down to their Liverpudlian descendants...
The voiceless TH of "bath" and the voiced TH of "bathe" are very rare phonemes. Icelandic, Greek and Spanish are the only other European languages I know of that have it. Some languages of India do and a few in Africa.
We all have our pet hates. My own bête noire is pronouncing "nuclear" as "nookular". Even the last US President did this!
This is an example of
metathesis, the rearrangement of sounds within a word, like
comfterble for "comfortable." We have many words like "particular" and "spectacular," even "ocular" and "avcuncular," but how many words can you think of that end in -klee-ar?
Not real sure about the last one (Bush) although he certainly did have a problem with enunciation.
Take it from an amateur linguist, he did indeed consistently mispronounce "nuclear."
However, I know Jimmy Carter did - and what's particularly funny about that is the fact he had been a navy reactor specialist!
Carter was born in 1924 and grew up before the word "nuclear" was part of the average citizen's vocabulary, and as I said, that -klee-ar ending is difficult to pronounce. But Bush was born in 1946; he's a few years younger than me. When he grew up the phrase "nuclear weapons" was in the news constantly. But yes, he does have a speech problem. It's part of the pre-senile dementia that makes it difficult for him to speak in complete sentences, remember how the "Fool me once..." aphorism goes, or figure out which country to bomb after we're attacked by terrorists primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Actually, it's not uncommon for individuals to be somewhat tongue-tied when trying to say certain words - but that's not the problem with "AXE" for "ask", that's just plain *lazy* speech and I don't like it either. Sort of sets my teeth on edge when I hear it.
As I noted, the problem is much more complex than that. Cut the folks some slack.
Compared to Chinese, Russian and many other languages, English is rather easy to learn to speak
wrong and still be understood. But it's devilishly hard to learn to speak
right.
Actually, it's not uncommon for individuals to be somewhat tongue-tied when trying to say certain words - but that's not the problem with "AXE" for "ask", that's just plain *lazy* speech and I don't like it either. Sort of sets my teeth on edge when I hear it.
