How do you pronounce "Buick"?
And if it is pronounced the way I think it is, why would you name a car brand after a sound someone makes when he vomits?
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39 Answers
The true sound of puking is a couple of boys names, “Huey” & “Ralph”
It is not! It’s like, “Huggha…huckka…houga…......gaaaahhhhhukh BLETCH, BLAH spatter.”
Agree with @LuckyGuy and others. I’ve always pronounced it Byew’–ick. Seems to me Bew’-wick adds an unnecessary “w” sound.
Bew-ick. Like few, bew.
Buick doesn’t sound like vomiting to me, nor do I even think about ick being in the word. It’s just a brand name when I hear or see it.
LuckyGuy got the diphthong correct with his Byew…
We have one. We pronounce it “The car.”
@Dutchess_III My mom pronounced it “Riviera”.
@ragingloli It was named after a Scotsman who founded the company; Scottish born David Dunbar Buick.
I called it “Vega.”
Wrong again! Dunbar Danced With Wolves.
I’d suggest that byoo-ik is a fairly clear phonetic representation in terms of other English sounds.
@Dutchess_III She wrote byoo not boo. Byoo and byew are fundamentally the same I think. Think of the words few and boo. They final sound of the words sound the same.
No, beau is like toe. Or, do you mean as in beautiful? This is one of the problems using other words to demonstrate how to pronounce a word. LOL. English is a mess.
When I first saw the word “beau” in print, like to mean a man courting someone, I read it as “beau,” as in beautiful. Then I heard someone actually use it. Still doesn’t change what I hear in my mind when I read that word!
@jeruba. Ok, more tricky than some languages. Look at the words tough and and though. Adding an H as the second letter changes how we pronounce gh? That’s pretty difficult.
Another thing, our language is evolving, the spelling isn’t. Many of the words we still use today were originally written as they were pronounced in the old English or even Gallic or Irish, which is how we end up with words like “rough,” when they DID pronounce the gh guttural sound and it didn’t sound like “f.”
I once heard it said that before long we’ll have a spoken language and a written language.
I only know English and Spanish, and Spanish there is almost no guessing, you look at a word and you know how to pronounce it. Very few exceptions. I’m sure other languages are tricky like English.
French is very straight-forward in terms of spelling and pronunciation, most of the time. It has a lot of diphthongs and vowel clusters, but they are consistent, beau being one example. (Boh, slightly nasalized).
Thus, l’eau (water) and l’oiseau (the bird) have the “eau” pronounced the same.
Armchair: le fauteuil. There seem to be a lot of vowels but every Frenchman will pronounce it the same.
There are a few oddities, such as
Ripe: mûr (with the circumflex)
The wall: le mur (without the circumflex)
However, both words are pronounced the same.
L’hibou (the owl), le genou ( knee), le chou (cabbage)...no mystery to how to say them.
Grow, brow
Sew, few
Said, maid
Done, tone
Fear, bear
Bunches of them in English. Understandable how confusing it can be to people new to the language.
@JLeslie That’s what I was looking for. Thing is, taking “said” and “maid” as an example, it’s possible that originally they WERE pronounced the same. Our language changed so that they no longer do. I mean, I can hear a Scot say the word, “said,” with the same pronunciation as we say “maid.”
The English language is around 87% phonetically consistent
It’s that remaining 13% that gives everybody fits.
But its also why the most effective method of teaching reading and spelling is by using Phonics. Once you’ve got the majority percentage down pat then the rest kind of sticks out like a sore thumb as the target for rote memorization.
The problem was that for so many years the American system abandoned Phonics and replaced it with the “Look-Say” method. Remember the whole “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Run, run, run.” Nonsense?
Finally they came back to their senses and Phonics made a comeback.
But millions of adults who were children of that era are left with the frustration engendered by having to learn each word as a separate entity as if it had no relationships to others.
Asian languages which use separate characters for each word have to do that from necessity.
But English has a perfectly good alphabet and the relationships of words to it and each other was bypassed for way too long.
No wonder people think English is a total mess. Actually only 13% of it is a mess (which at least makes it more manageable than a total mess :)
@gailcalled French is only straightforward until it comes to verbs. hate those bastards
@Buttonstc I was taught with Sally and Spot and I was taught phonetically. It was slightly post me that they did the see the word and picture together and memorize. Cat, dog, table, etc. I’m sure it varied a little by school district accross the country.
@Symbeline: But isn’t the pronunciation straightforward? That’s difference from the forms…
Il partit pour que nous eussions la salle à nous-mêmes.
Wouldn’t everyone pronounce that sentence the same way, even if none of us knew what it meant?
Yeah, verbs are a whole diffierent topic. English actually has easier verbs than the romance languages. Spanish has a different ending for each person, meaning whether it is first person, second, third, singular, plural. English has much fewer suffixes to know and understand. There are some irregular verbs of course, but there are in Spanish also, and I assume all the Latin root languages.
@gailcalled No you’re right; it IS straightforward. For all the letters and weird combinations that some French words require…it really isn’t as complicated as it looks, as you know. I was just making an unrelated joke about how the thousands of French verbs piss me off. You and I were talking about it once and I told you how much trouble I used to have with that at school haha.
@Symbeline: I remember.
(And I just found this;
Si je l’eus vu, je l’eusse acheté.)
And that’s my last word. I will not try to find a translation for “that pisses me off,” unless you want to provide one. (Not our old friend, chier, I hope.)
@gailcalled Si je l’eus vu, je l’eusse acheté.)
SEE?? That’s so EVIL. I mean, nobody will actually freakin SAY that. By the gods. Then again I do feel some slight pride at the entirety of the language trying to be preserved. Gotta admit that’s cool, but…fuck.
Lol no, I won’t talk about our old friend chier today. But you could say, ça me frustre. Technically translating it meaning wise, that’s the closest I can come up with for being pissed off. You could also say c’est fâcheux, but that really just means that something has the potential to piss you off if you have to deal with it, rather than it meaning you’re pissed off. For all intents and purposes though, it works.
Je m’emmerde apparently means “I am bored.” Too bad. I had hopes for s’emmerder.
And how subtle is “the thought that something has the potential to piss you off in the future” can be expressed in one rather than fourteen words?
(Thanks for my laugh-of-the-day.)
Emmerder can also mean being annoyed. If someone is pissing you off, you can say, tu m’emmerde. Shit is pretty versatile, isn’t it?
And how subtle is “the thought that something has the potential to piss you off in the future” can be expressed in one rather than fourteen words?
Haha, there probably is one word, or some simpler expression to denote this. Québec slangery has a few things…ça va être beau. Sarcastic, of course. Say there’s a debate on here and you say something you just know is going to rifle some people, you can say that, if you predict that people are going to jump down your throat for what you said. Or if you go to work and know it’s going to be a busy day and you’re just not up to it…ça va être beau. Meaning, of course, it’s going to suck/piss you off. Being a slang rather than anything else though, it can apply to a lot of things, but the sarcasm which denotes something negative remains the same. I think in English, its equivalent can be something like; oooh boy.
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