Singapore Expats

We had a little conversation about divorce pronunciation.

There are people pronounce divorce that sound like dievorce and some people confirmed that it is the right pronunciation. First time I heard that, I was confuse and thought people were saying something that relate to death or hair coloring. But nope, they were talking about divorce.

Did my google search about how to pronounce divorce properly and till now, I have not found anything that sound like dievorce. So, I was wondering whether there is anyone know the origin of it?

Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG-pqv0Ojog

singlish pronunciation doesn't count.

I watch that youtube couple days ago. Did google search with "how to pronounce divorce" and found nothing that sound like dievorce (some malaysian and singaporean pronounce it that way).

I've been in Singapore for 37 years now. They have a lot of peculiarities when it comes to pronunciation. But it's to be expected considering English is not their mother tongue, but may be their first language - sort of, so they are bound to have some difficulties with some words without a lot of practice. Another good example are Indians trying to pronounce words starting with the letter V like visit (comes out with a W sound like wisit) even though their English is pretty good by local standards.

Yeah, and what's with this "fla" instead of "flower" when referring to the bread mix? Am I missing something? I don't think there's any other country that uses "fla", other than the US as a shortcut for "Florida".

I mean no objections of course, but it's weird how it seems to be the case so locally and persistently.

Any etymologists in the house?

Max Headroom wrote: ↑

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 9:29 am

Yeah, and what's with this "fla" instead of "flower" when referring to the bread mix? Am I missing something? I don't think there's any other country that uses "fla", other than the US as a shortcut for "Florida".

I mean no objections of course, but it's weird how it seems to be the case so locally and persistently.

Any etymologists in the house?

Not an etymologist, and chipping in late on this one. I suspect the pronunciation of the word was more like FLA-uh back in Brit colonial times and it became easier over time for the locals to pick up the first sound alone. You can still hear this pronunciation over here on the Cambridge dictionary site https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... lish/flour