I've never been sure of this one: Controversy: Is it Con-trow-ver-see or Con-traw-ver-see ?
It's strictly a matter of how precisely you're speaking. If you're standing in front of a PTA meeting shaking your fist and yelling, "Sex education is too con-trow-ver-shəl for little children," then you're going to drag that second syllable out, even though it's unaccented. But in casual speech you'll replace the unaccented long O with a schwa. Not an aw, but an ə.
Well remember, in American English we flap our intervocalic T and D. An intermediate N doesn't interfere with the process, so that's how "goin' to" and "want to" became "gonna" and "wanna" on this side of the Atlantic. We flap that first D in candidate, which puts it on the path to elision.
bate for beat, as in he bate me, rather than, he beat me.
That's a new one for me.
I have a suspicion that that metathesis is caused by literacy. We never spell out
et cetera. (Which by the way is two words, not one, which you don't know because you've probably never seen it spelled out, which proves my point. It's Latin for "and the rest.") We always abbreviate it as etc. Since it usually falls at the end of a sentence, that period looks like normal punctuation, making etc look suspiciously like a word. But it can't be spelled ETC because that would be impossible to pronounce, so our brains helpfully resequence the letters into something sensible: ECT. This is all going on unconsciously, but the result is that people think ect is the abbreviation and therefore the phrase must be ect cetera. That T between the two C's is a tongue-twister so it becomes silent, and presto, the word eccetera was born.
Scalectrix for Scalextric?
Not being a gamer I had to look that up. Three times, because Googling "Scalectrix" took me directly to the hits for "Scalextric." Apparently it's so common that Google adjusts for it.
The reason of course is that we have lots of words--especially product names--in English that end in the truncated suffix -lectric, and many of them can be made plural -lectrics. There are almost none that end in -lextric. And for good reason: it's very difficult to pronounce. Your mouth just naturally resorts the letters so it rhymes with "electric."
Adver tis muhnt. The second "e" isn't "used" in British English (actually it wasn't but is rapidly becoming common). The "i" is pronounced as in thIck - short, not as "eye", and a soft "s".
That's just one of a whole book full of words that have different standard pronunciations in British and American dialect. No big deal.
Brits put the accent on the second syllable, so having a long I in the third syllable would be awkward. Since British English is spoken faster than American English, they reduce a lot more vowels to a schwa (IPA ə) than we do, and they even elide many of them completely. We both pronounce "laboratory" in four syllables instead of five, but they put the accent on the second syllable instead of the first, so they elide the second A instead of the first O. We say LAB-rə-taw-ry; they say lə-BAW-rə-tree.
My favorite British pronuciation is "extraordinary." We actually pronounce all six syllables. They elide four of the vowels and one of the consonants, and create the unique consonant cluster DNR, in order to condense it into two: STRAWD-nry.
The third "e" is "uh" - schwa(?).
Yes.
Shwa is a Hebrew vowel, three dots running in a downward pointing diagonal. (The Hebrew "alphabet" is really an
abjad, with only consonants, but they put diacritical marks under the letters for vowel sounds for students and in the liturgy.) So linguists borrowed the Hebrew word as the name for that sound. The IPA symbol is an upside-down lower-case E,
ə. It's a lax, neutral vowel. In most languages it occurs in unaccented syllables, the result of an unstressed vowel collapsing. But there are exceptions such as Korean, in which all morphemes are monosyllables as in Chinese, and the schwa can be stressed. It's transliterated as EU when Romanizing Korean.
Schwa is merely the German spelling but of course they pronounce the W as a V. So do the Israelis, actually; Modern Israeli Hebrew has lost the W sound.
Lately though, as I said above - adver TIZE ment.
You're assimilating our pronunciation of some words. I'm really waiting for you guys to learn to say
tequila right!