what is correct way of saying it...rout-er or rowt-er??
choc lover Mon 21/04/08 22:42
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rout-er in English, rowt-er in American . Take you pick
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I think Bimbim's answer above would be better if he/she had written 'root-er' rather than 'rout-er'. The problem is that 'rout' in British English is actually pronounced 'rowt'! It means a total defeat and sounds exactly the same as the Americans pronounce 'route'.
So, British rooter and American rowter.
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The Americans are masters of mispronounciation. Many are unfamiliar with common words, and will pronounce them according to their own experience of how even more common words are spelled.
'Our' (belonging to us), and 'hour' (time) are pronounced in English with the 'ow' sound. So based on this experience, many Americans carry over this pronounciation to less familiar words like 'route' and 'tour'.
Working offshore, it took me some time to realise that workers 'on tower' were actually referring to their 'tour of duty'.
But note that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. When Nat King Cole sings 'Get your kicks on Route 66', he correctly pronounces it 'root'.
'Route', as in a road from A to B, is pronounced 'root'. So your wireless router, which is similarly establishing a roadway for signals from A to B, would be a 'rooter'.
(To add to the confusion, the name for a 'router', a power tool for shaping wood, is based on the verb 'to root', meaning to dig, to hollow, to scoop out. Yet these days this word is pronounced 'rowter'!). So it goes! ;-)
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The 'rowter 'pronunciation is not universal in the US - it's more regional than that. Whereas it's never 'pronounciation' or 'mispronounciation' anywhere...
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The earliest recorded use of the word 'hour' - then spelt 'ure' from Old French - dates back to 1250 and the earliest use of 'route' - then spelt 'rute' and also from Old French - dates back to 1220. So, both have been around in English for over three quarters of a millennium and for some 400 years before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail. Presumably, therefore, the earliest Americans were equally familiar with both rather than mispronouncing one! The pronunciation of lots of British English words has changed over four centuries, too.
Sorry, H...couldn't resist responding to the concept that Americans constantly get words 'wrong'. For example, Brits are always on about 'aluminum' versus 'aluminium'. The plain fact is that its discoverer, Sir Humphry Davy, initially called it 'alumium' and then 'aluminum'. Only the editor of a British scientific magazine decided to call it 'aluminium'. The Americans use the version Davy himself finally decided on. 'We'changed it...not them!
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some US pronunciations are regional - just like ours. Alaskans call a buoy a 'booey' (helps me remember how to spell it, in fact). Some say root, some say rowt. Pronunciations are seldom 'right' or 'wrong'. But in Britain everyone seems to say root and rooter.
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Hmm...QM...I would argue that a change in a word pronounciation has to start with someone initially mispronouncing the word. Should this change be taken up by others, they too are mispronouncing it. Only when a suffucient number of people use the changed form, and it has become common usage, can we say that it is an acceptable variant and no longer a mispronounciation.
And an extra letter 'i' was inserted into 'aluminum' to bring the name into line with other elements which are distinguished as metals by the suffix 'ium'. That editor provided an aide-mémoire for generations to come!
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Yes, H. But standard English English has a word 'house' pronounced with an 'ow' sound in the middle and standard Scotish English has the same word spelt 'hoose' and pronounced 'oo'. Are the Scots 'wrong' or just 'different'? When Geeordies say 'walking' it sounds more like 'wakkin' (to me). There's no need to go on, surely.
It wasn't until Webster produced his American dictionary that those particular speakers of our 'common' language settled on 'harbor', words ending in 'ize' rather than 'ise' , a letter called 'zee', not 'zed' and so forth. These aren't mis-spellings or mis-pronunciations.
Re 'aluminium. the fact remains that Davy did not choose it. I'd be piddled off if I discovered and named something and some journalist decided to change it!
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