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Hello stemians. Much love from Kenya. It is 20:17 hours on Saturday. I love you all.
Our English teacher, Mr. Bakore enters the classroom. Before he enters, the whole class had their spelling book on the table and the day's date already written.
"Number 1," he says.
All pens are at on your marks and the ears were prickly for the first word in the dictation lesson. If you did not know, Bakore meant the walking stick which often was used to beat stupidity from our heads. So we were ready to write correct spellings.
"Pronounce," he said.
That was easy. We scribbled it as fast as possible. Then....
"Number 2-Pronunciation."
Now this was the catch. After writing pronounce you were likely to follow with pronounciation or pronouncation.
To pronounce
is to make the sound of a word or part of a word in the cotrect or particular way.
The sounds that make the said words must be said in the exact way as they were meant to be. We had mother-tongue interferance but we tried.
Now to make the noun for pronounce was the tricky one. The 'ou' was replaced by 'u' and the 'e' at the end dropped and then you add 'iation'. You will end up with pronunciation
Other words included
Enounce-enunciation
Renounce-renunciation
Denounce-denunciation
Mispronounce-mispronunciation.
However
Announce-announcement
We had other words that used a similar rule too. One needed to be so keen to learn them.
Proclaim-proclamation
Declare-declaration
And many others.
It is in this manner that we memorized the spelling of words. We also put to memory the meanings of words. Often we looked at synonyms of words so that we learn the key to open the spellings of the words. Nobody wanted the bakora of Mr. Bakora. We wanted to be in good books with him.
The above examples show that English is a complicated language. It pauses problems to those taking it as a second language. The language also is not a smooth walkover to those the language is their first language. Dialects also do not make English an easy language too.
I love the short term for mother
Mam
Mom
Mum
Such normally vomplicate matters. Yet we learnt the language and we enjoy it. That does not mean we are free from mistakes. We still make them. Do you?
All images above courtesy of pixabay
Thanks to @iwrite @antonette @purpledaisy