Bayer is pronounced like buyer

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Sure, but both Houston, Texas (pronounced hoo-ston) and Houston Street in NYC (pronounced how-ston) are named after Samuel Houston, who I've heard pronounced his name "he-U-ston".

And don't get me started on Bokeh, which is a bastardization of a Japanese word and didn't exist as an optics/photography term until the 1990s.

If the native Italians call it "Roma" but my language seems to insist on calling it "Rome" then I don't think there are many relevant rules to the pronunciation of a type of color filter array.
 
Ha! You guys have been mispronouncing words for over a hundred years, often to our amusement. Bayer is Germanic, so it conforms to their pronunciation rules. They have Beyer too, as in microphones. These are words that just cannot work out, just learn. Leicester, Gloucester and the shires they are in are all mangled. Shire, is of course pronounced sheer, so it's lestersheer. Lie-Chester-shire makes us roll about. We get used to how you invent new English words, that's OK. The past tense of dive, for example. We don't even have dive on use at all. We have a bird, but he dived into the water. And those weird things like one sheep and lots of sheep, you do it to words that are the same. We have lots of waterways, and we have lots of craft on them. Rivercraft are everywhere, and Christopher Cockrill invented Hovercraft, just a few miles from here where he developed them on the Norfolk Broads. He started with one hovercraft, but soon had quite a few hovercraft running up and down. Not one use of the word hovercrafts it just sounds very wrong to us Brits. We still get a bit stuck with aluminium/aluminum though. However, I mispronuncied some of your words for years till I got laughed at. Ches-ap-e-ack bay.
 
"two countries separated by a common language"

Personally, I think the idea of correct pronunciation (or even spelling) is a bit useless seeing as they evolve. An interesting case is "Caesar," which - although we can't say with absolute certainty how the Romans pronounced it - was probably pronounced like the German word "kaiser." So, the English got the spelling right and the pronunciation wrong. The Germans got it the other way round. And the Russians mutated the whole thing ("czar").
 
You say toe-may-toe I say ta-mar-toe. Frankly, I like the little differences in accent/pronounciation. And as a cockney, I love the use of slang. Making up words to sound intelligent while telling lies is where I draw the line, particularly when said by a person in authority standing at a lectern in front of the media.
 
ahalpert said:
Whatever. This is one of those annoying things like ISO/I S O
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It is supposed to be I S O. Just like ASA before it. It was A S A, I never heard anyone say this film is “ā-suh” 100.



ahalpert said:
Personally, I think the idea of correct pronunciation (or even spelling) is a bit useless seeing as they evolve.
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That’s a very millennial thing to say/philosophy. Actually, it’s a very ‘society today in general’ thing to say. Don’t correct me. I’ll pronounce it however I want to(or use this saying incorrectly and then think you’re stupid, because you don’t understand what I mean, etc.).
 
combatentropy said:
I have been saying Bayer filter wrong. It's pronounced like buyer, because that's how Bryce Bayer's name was pronounced.

In the Wikipedia article for Bryce Bayer, you can see, "/ˈbaɪər/; pronounced BYE-er".

Also in this video explanation of the filter, the speaker pronounces it so. At first I thought it was just his British accent or something. Then I looked it up.
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Kind of like GIF. Most people have been coaxed into saying GIF with a hard G, like gift minus the T. But the inventor has been on the record as saying it is pronounced “JIF”, like the peanut butter.
 
The one that always gets me is "buoy" which I pronounce as boy but keep hearing boo-ee , so a friend asked how they would pronounce buoyant? :)
 
Run&Gun said:
It is supposed to be I S O. Just like ASA before it. It was A S A, I never heard anyone say this film is “ā-suh” 100.
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There are so many blogs and videos that disagree with you. But I couldn't really care less what the "correct" way is. I say I S O as well, as I learned it.

That’s a very millennial thing to say/philosophy. Actually, it’s a very ‘society today in general’ thing to say. Don’t correct me. I’ll pronounce it however I want to(or use this saying incorrectly and then think you’re stupid, because you don’t understand what I mean, etc.).
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Haha you're dead wrong. I'm a stickler for the "right" way to say things, much to my wife's chagrin.

But if you study etymology and language a bit then you realize that language is a living thing. I GUARANTEE you that you're saying/using a thousand words wrong...according to 19th century dictionaries...

And this is just another example. Are you going to go around saying Buyer filter instead of Bayer filter? I'm not. It's wrong. But that's the general use.

And historically, codifying the "proper" way of saying/writing things is typically just a tool of the elite to distinguish themselves from the less educated. Whoop di doo

And let's be fair to ourselves: English is a maniacal language with zero standardization of pronunciation or spelling
 
Mitch Gross said:
And don't get me started on Bokeh, which is a bastardization of a Japanese word and didn't exist as an optics/photography term until the 1990s.
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Oh, man, the incorrect pronunciation of ボケ gets under my skin every time.

You should pronounce it bokay - like okay with a b in front of it. That's the closest in english you're going to get. Say Pokemon with a B, minus the mon. You're there.

Anytime I hear someone pronounce it as bo-kuh, I die a little inside. The word bokeh and sake have the exact same syllable at the end (ケ). Does anyone really think the correct pronunciation of sake is saw-kuh?

Here is the exact vowel sound - the mid front unrounded vowel, which is closest to our close-mid front unrounded vowel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_front_unrounded_vowel
 
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Run&Gun said:
It is supposed to be I S O. Just like ASA before it. It was A S A, I never heard anyone say this film is “ā-suh” 100.
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I have only ever heard it as "ISO" though I have done lot of standards work over the decades and that is always "ISO"
 
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Joshua Cadmium said:
You should pronounce it bokay - like okay with a b in front of it.
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Okay, I'll pronounce it bokay :)

As for Bayer, and responding to some of the other comments, it's named after a guy from Maine, who died just 8 years ago. It isn't a loanword, imported centuries ago.

I took linguistics, and I agree with ahalpert that language is like a glacier, slowly flowing. So you have to pick your battles. I have no desire to correct Austinites who pronounce Guadalupe Street as Guadaloop. I don't even think it's "incorrect" because that is how the street is uniformly pronounced there. They will also tell you that Burnet Road isn't pronounced like Burnette but instead, "It's Burnit, learn it, dern it!" So in Austin, those are the correct pronunciations.

So I certainly didn't mean to scold anyone who pronounces Bayer like --- well, like how it is spelled. Also, if you're a child of the 80s, the commercials for Bayer pain relief drilled that pronunciation into your head. But since the Bayer Filter was named after a person, someone quite recent, I thought it was still legitimate to give it the old college try.
 
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ahalpert said:
There are so many blogs and videos that disagree with you. But I couldn't really care less what the "correct" way is. I say I S O as well, as I learned it.



Haha you're dead wrong. I'm a stickler for the "right" way to say things, much to my wife's chagrin.

But if you study etymology and language a bit then you realize that language is a living thing. I GUARANTEE you that you're saying/using a thousand words wrong...according to 19th century dictionaries...

And this is just another example. Are you going to go around saying Buyer filter instead of Bayer filter? I'm not. It's wrong. But that's the general use.

And historically, codifying the "proper" way of saying/writing things is typically just a tool of the elite to distinguish themselves from the less educated. Whoop di doo

And let's be fair to ourselves: English is a maniacal language with zero standardization of pronunciation or spelling
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Yes, the English language is crazy.

I'll avoid politics and not say my thoughts on the emphasized comment.

It's one thing for a language to evolve through the years, it's another to willfully be lazy and ignorant(not a shot at you).
 
Run&Gun said:
Yes, the English language is crazy.

I'll avoid politics and not say my thoughts on the emphasized comment.

It's one thing for a language to evolve through the years, it's another to willfully be lazy and ignorant(not a shot at you).
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There is a long history of people in positions of dominance choosing to pronounce things the way that they want, even when it's easy to pronounce things the right way. That makes it a loaded topic and not a simple one. If the words is being pronounced wrong more less in a contained way, within the language where it more or less originated, then it's usually ignorance combined with momentum, and as you said a healthy does of laziness.

...and sometimes, it is actually difficult to pronounce a word the "right" way because of your native tongue. You can't go around telling a native Cantonese speaking person that they better learn how to pronounce the word "rarified" the way that a native English speaker would pronounce it. It's just not realistic or fair.

However, when you have a British scholar of the life and work of Gandhi pronouncing his name like "Candy" instead of like Gone Dee, what is that? Laziness, disrespect, or totally within their right because language "is a living thing?"

Language is a living thing. The question is what is our contribution toward it? There is no one answer. Just trying to point out that there are situations where what we do might be "wrong" and in distaste (think colonialism) and situations where it's fairly benign and part of the living evolution.
 
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combatentropy said:
Okay, I'll pronounce it bokay :).
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To go off on a huge tangent, it is understandable why bokeh is hard to pronounce if you are trying to get it close to the Japanese pronunciation.

The Japanese vowel え (like an "e") is a mid front unrounded vowel. In American English, we don't have that sound. We do have two vowels right on either end of that sound, though.

One is the open-mid front unrounded vowel, which is the short "eh" sound, like in the word bed.
The other is the close-mid front unrounded vowel, which is the long "ay" sound, like in word may.

So, the correct sound is somewhere in between "eh" and "ay". To me, it is an "ay" sound pronounced very shortly: https://youtu.be/VPJIwff3w0I?t=140 .
In Japanese, you can double up all the vowels. When you double up the え sound, I think it's really easy to hear what the single sound should be: https://youtu.be/1Otil8Oxx-w?t=119 .

So, where does bo-kuh come from? In American English, the closest (only?) mid vowel sound we have is the mid central vowel (AKA the schwa), which is the short "uh" sound, like in word bus. So, if you're trying to say the vowel with the same type of mid sound, you're naturally going to gravitate to that "uh" sound. Schwa is definitely the wrong vowel, though. え is a front unrounded vowel, which means the tongue is in the very front of the mouth. Schwa is a central vowel - the tongue would be at the center of the mouth. (And close, mid, and open refer to the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth - close meaning the closest to the roof.)

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Word stress also plays a role, because English stresses words completely differently. In Japanese, every syllable gets the same stress. Not so in English: https://englishwithkim.com/word-stress-american-english-rhythm/

So we have two options in English: BO-keh or bo-KEH

BO-keh would mean we would end the word with a short non-stressed "eh" sound. We have no words in the English language that I am aware of that end in a "eh" sound without a consonant after it. We do have a lot of words that end in that "uh" schwa sound, like cola and pizza. Pizza is a good example because it really should end in an "ah" like it would in italian, but the "uh" sound is more natural.

Also, nouns generally have their first syllable stressed in English: https://pronuncian.com/2syllable-word-stress . On top of that, English unstressed syllables are usually a schwa, because it aids in conversation flow: https://pronuncian.com/intro-to-schwa

So, BO-kuh, with a schwa at the end is just more natural sounding than BO-keh in American English. It even flows very smoothly in conversation. The vowel is still all wrong though.

On the other hand, if we stressed the last syllable - bo-KEH - we would end the word with a stressed "eh" sound. A stressed sound is not only raised in pitch but is also voiced for a longer amount of time. If you listen to that double え (ee) sound in the video above, it is very similar to stressing in English, because that vowel sound is held longer. So the Japanese え sound when stressed in bo-KEH would be lengthened and sound like "ay". And of course we have a bunch of words in English that end in "ay", like they or bouquet.

Bouquet is interesting because it is the closest English word to bokeh (and you would generally pronounce it the same way in American English). Because it is a French loan word, though, the stress is on the last syllable even though it is a noun (in French, generally the last syllable is stressed).

So, that's why bo-KAY should be the correct pronunciation with an American English accent. It's the closest vowel sound we have to the Japanese vowel and we already say a very closely pronounced word with the same stress pattern.
 
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Run&Gun said:
Yes, the English language is crazy.

I'll avoid politics and not say my thoughts on the emphasized comment.

It's one thing for a language to evolve through the years, it's another to willfully be lazy and ignorant(not a shot at you).
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And who should be the arbiter of correct language? The president? The richest man? should we put it to a vote?

Why do Americans spell color without a u? And furthermore, who cares?

At the end of the day, we're all just trying to communicate. I'm a compulsive person and I never used the letter u instead of the word you in text messages until recently. It still bothers me. But just as in film scripts, what you say is more important than how you type it.

Here's an interesting article on Prestige in sociolinguistics that explores the relationships between dialect and class: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics)#cite_note-Gumperz-31

Standardizing language can facilitate communication. But I wouldn't say that makes "bad" English "wrong." Just deviant. At any rate, today's misspellings are tomorrow's dictionary entries
 
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PS Run&Gun - apparently ISO differs from ASA because ASA is an acronym. The International organization of Standardization decided to adopt ISO because their acronym would be different in different languages.

The wiki page lists the official pronunciation as 'eye-so': https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ISO#Pronunciation

Will you be correcting your pronunciation now? Personally, I couldn't care less.

But one thing that really bothers me is when people say, "I could care less." Because that's obviously the opposite meaning of what they intend to convey
 
combatentropy said:
Okay, I'll pronounce it bokay :)

As for Bayer, and responding to some of the other comments, it's named after a guy from Maine, who died just 8 years ago. It isn't a loanword, imported centuries ago.

I took linguistics, and I agree with ahalpert that language is like a glacier, slowly flowing. So you have to pick your battles. I have no desire to correct Austinites who pronounce Guadalupe Street as Guadaloop. I don't even think it's "incorrect" because that is how the street is uniformly pronounced there. They will also tell you that Burnet Road isn't pronounced like Burnette but instead, "It's Burnit, learn it, dern it!" So in Austin, those are the correct pronunciations.

So I certainly didn't mean to scold anyone who pronounces Bayer like --- well, like how it is spelled. Also, if you're a child of the 80s, the commercials for Bayer pain relief drilled that pronunciation into your head. But since the Bayer Filter was named after a person, someone quite recent, I thought it was still legitimate to give it the old college try.
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Bayer’s name was being mispronounced in his lifetime, but he was a relatively obscure individual. How about someone famous, a rich guy who used some of his money for philanthropy, such as to endow a university and to establish a world class concert hall? Surely people would pronounce his name correctly when it was a part of the title to these fine institutions. Well just ask the family of Andrew Carnegie, pronounced “kar-NEG-ee”. Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Hall use the pronunciation “KAR-neh-gee” even though Andrew Carnegie himself funded them into being.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice saying his name wrong.
 
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