Adding stress in Singapore

Reading the title, you could be forgiven that this entry is about pain or anxiety. It's actually about pronunciation.

What on earth?  I hear you cry.

Yes, pronunciation.

This little list started to germinate as we were planning for our safari trip in South Africa earlier this year.  Packing our suitcases someone asked about taking binoculars and of course we took them.  But the stress on the BI made me smile.  Normally in the British Isles we would try to say all words as quickly and effortlessly as possible and hence, binoculars is pronounced: b-nok-u-le-s (I won't use the phonetic alphabet as their symbols are far too complicated and I'd end up explaining more about them, than the actual words I'm poking fun at...but the table might be interesting for those phoneticians among you).

The emphasis (in Singapore at least) I suspect stems from the same stressing of the first two letters (bi) comes from the pronunciation of bisexual, where obviously one stresses the bi to separate it from asexual and transsexual etc.

Then I started to listen for more examples and was quite taken aback at some of them.

Not knowing epitome should be audible as ep-it-o-mee with the stress on the final syllable is, I suppose is acceptable and getting some proper names slightly off like Clemenceau avenue being rendered as kle-men-see with the stress on the middle syllable is understandable.

But how did the underground station of Braddell end up as brad-dl and not bra-del stressing the second syllable and not the first?

Equally strange is describing a film as mem-or-able stressing the middle "o" - making it sound very close to mammary.


I will leave you with my favourite you could deploy when something is bearable:  try saying palatable by effectively splitting the word in two giving pala and table and then stress the 3rd syllable.  I heard that on the radio for goodness sake and it surely renders the word less than palatable when said that way.  Oh, the irony of it.