The adverbial ending -ically can be awkward to handle: in general, we have to remember to write the -al- in the middle, but not to pronounce it.

English has hundreds of adjectives ending -ic. The most common include artistic, athletic, authentic, basic, classic, cosmetic, domestic, dramatic, dynamic, economic, electric, electronic, exotic, fantastic, historic, Islamic, optimistic, organic, public, realistic, romantic, scientific, specific, static, systematic, toxic, tragic.

English also has a smaller but substantial number of adjectives ending -ical. The most common include anatomical, biological, classical, critical, economical, electrical, historical, identical, medical, musical, physical, political, practical, psychological, radical, technical, topical, tropical, typical.

(There are quite a few pairs, eg classic and classical, economic and economical, historic and historical, with somewhat different meanings or uses.)

In writing, the general rule is that both sets are turned into adverbs ending -ically (though there’s one major exception: publicly). In pronunciation, however, these are all generally treated as if they were -icly. Here are native speakers (mainly British) saying basically, typically, historically and systematically:

Of course, native speakers tend to write the way they speak, so they often leave out the -al- in writing. On the site Tripadvisor, this review has the headline “Basicly the cheapest place to stay”, and this review describes a guesthouse as “historicly interesting”. Non-natives, on the other hand, tend to speak the way they write, so they often pronounce the -al- in -ically, thereby making themselves sound foreign.

Some dictionaries tell you that it’s equally possible to pronounce -ically as /ɪkəli/, but in fact this is quite rare: learners and users who want to sound native should avoid the /ə/.

This week I’m in Rīga to teach at the University of Latvia; very near my hotel is a restaurant whose name carries an important lesson for most learners and non-native users of English.

Visitors from around the world will recognize that Steiku Haoss is a steak house. But most native English speakers probably won’t recognize that the name is a pun: haoss is the Latvian form of the word chaos, so the restaurant is also a ‘chaos of steaks’. Here’s a Latvian kindly saying it for me:

The English pronunciation of chaos is different from that in most languages. As a result of the historical English ‘Great Vowel Shift’, the five vowel letters of the Roman alphabet are often pronounced like their English names: A, E, I, O, U. For example mosaic, being, compliant, oasis, ambiguity – and chaos. Here are various British speakers saying chaos (the first is Prime Minister David Cameron):

This might be transcribed phonetically as kɛ́jɔs (or ˈkeɪɒs). It’s very different from the kind of pronunciation used by almost every other European language, including Latvian. (Different languages pronounce the initial consonant of such Greek words variously as k, h or the back-of-the-mouth fricative x.)

The important point for learners and non-native users of English, I feel, is that you should try to give international words the pronunciation appropriate to the language you’re speaking. Many non-native users of English, however, fall back on their own pronunciation of words like focus and chaos, resulting in what sounds to English speakers more like f*ck us and house (or perhaps cows). Of course, if non-natives are speaking to each other, the problem may be less.

Related post: Meet the Fockus

(Apparently there’s a Russian death metal band whose name uses the same pun.)

English has a verb to box, meaning ‘to put in a box’. A set of things which has been put in a box is therefore a boxed set.

Obviously sets of things have been put in boxes for a long time, but the concept has grown in recent decades, with the boxing of paperbacks, records, audiocassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, and has been boosted further by the rise of the multi-season TV saga. Now such sets can be accessed in e-formats with no physical box at all.

The phrase boxed set, if carefully pronounced, contains a tricky consonant sequence: bo/ksts/et. Fortunately, English allows the omission of /t/ (and /d/) under certain circumstances. One of these circumstances is when one word ends /st/ and the next starts in a consonant. This gives us the perfectly standard option in spoken English of firs’ class, firs’ pas’ the post, las’ word, jus’ kidding, etc etc. (A frozen historical example is Chris’mas.)

It also gives us box’ set. This in turn can be interpreted as a compound noun – the noun box compounded with the noun set – rather than the noun set modified by the participle boxed. The British, in fact, have taken to writing the term as a compound, box set, something which Americans seem to have resisted.

This Google Ngram of occurrences in books suggests that the British developed a mania for boxed sets in the 1970s, with the Americans starting to catch up a few years later. British enthusiasm fell somewhat, to American levels, and then in the 1990s the Brits experienced a new craze for the compound box set, apparently unshared in the US:

Accordingly, the American site Amazon.com has a category Boxed Sets, while Britain’s Amazon.co.uk has Box Sets:In pronunciation, neither Brits nor Americans are keen on pronouncing a /t/ corresponding to -ed. However, contrary to the written forms, Americans in the recordings I’ve sampled are more likely to put the main stress on the first word (as you’d expect with a compound, like box office), while Brits are somewhat more likely to put the main stress on the second word (as you’d expect with a modifying participle, like boxed wine). Americans:

Brits:

The only /t/ in those recordings is from the last of the Britons.

Two very common words which non-natives rarely pronounce like natives are don’t and won’t.

These two words contain the GOAT vowel, as in dough and woe. The GOAT vowel is a diphthong in the standard accents of America and England. This means it has a changing quality, as shown in the usual dictionary transcriptions: /oʊ/ for AmE, /əʊ/ for BrE. The transcriptions /ou, əu/ and /ow, əw/ are also possible.

But non-natives tend to pronounce these words with a short o, which is exactly what you’d expect from the majority of words written with ont: context, continent, font, horizontal, Monty, onto, pontiff, spontaneous, Toronto, Vermont, etc, etc.

Non-natives can be forgiven for finding the native pronunciation tricky. For one thing, it’s not at all common to find English words with the GOAT diphthong followed by /nt/. In fact, don’t and won’t are the only words in common use which have this sequence. (See further notes below.)

For another thing, non-natives will often hear native speakers reducing these words in running speech. The super-common sequence don’t know is so often shrunk in casual speech that there’s even a spelling for it, dunno.

There’s an issue here of style: non-natives tend to use short or reduced pronunciations of don’t and won’t even in the kind of fairly careful speech where natives would use stronger pronunciations.

Here then are some examples of don’t pronounced clearly in natural native speech. Note that it’s very common for the /t/ to be pronounced as a glottal stop – a silent gap with the breath briefly stopped in the throat – but this is not the same thing as omitting the /t/ altogether.

And some examples of won’t:

Further notes

Another word traditionally pronounced in BrE just like won’t is wont, meaning ‘custom’ or ‘accustomed’. However it’s now quite rare. This Google Ngram indicates its occurrence in books:

We still sometimes encounter the expressions ‘as was their wont’ (= their custom) or ‘as they were wont to do’ (= accustomed to do). I think today wont may alternatively be pronounced with the short LOT vowel, so that it sounds like want rather than won’t.

A super-common ont word which is pronounced neither with GOAT nor with LOT is front. This has the STRUT vowel, as in blunt.

Mayors seem to have been much in the news this week, often under tragic circumstances. An Iraqi village mayor, Ahmed Shaker, was one of over 40 people killed in a suicide bombing after a football match near Iskandariya (Alexandria). Mayor Mayeur of Brussels has been speaking out since the bombings there that claimed over 30 lives. And troubled Toronto mayor Rob Ford (pictured) succumbed to a rare liposarcoma diagnosed in 2014.

All my life I’ve pronounced mayor exactly like mare (‘female horse’), with a single long vowel, mɛː. This is probably the most common pronunciation from British TV news people. Here it is from the long-time presenter of BBC TV’s Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman:

This pronunciation can be heard in the audio clips of various dictionaries:

But another pronunciation is increasingly heard. This one has two syllables, mɛ́jə, rhyming with player and Leia:

The 2-syllable pronunciation is especially common with younger speakers, but is not restricted to them. Mayor Nir Barkat there is said by Stephen Sackur, a major figure in BBC news, who is 52. I suspect it’s arisen partly due to the spelling (compare mayonnaise, which begins mɛ́jə), and partly due to the ever-present influence of American English, which usually pronounces mayor with 2 syllables. But it’s unacknowledged as a British pronunciation in the online dictionaries I’ve consulted, and even in the variant-rich LPD.

To redress the imbalance, and because I suspect that the 2-syllable pronunciation will steadily displace mɛː, I’ve opted for the former as the recommended pronunciation in CUBE. Nonetheless, mɛː is still heard from some younger folks, as in BBC Radio 1ʼs Mayor of Where? – /hɪ(ː) kʌ́mz ðə mɛ́ː bət ðə mɛ́ː(r)əv wɛ́ː/:

Increasingly old-fashioned today is a pronunciation with a ‘centring diphthong’, eə or ɛə. Here is an example from a 1932 Pathé newsreel:

In my experience, non-natives who have learned the old transcriptions /eə/ and /eɪə/ (for ɛː words and ɛjə words respectively) are likely to pronounce them very similarly, so that payer pɛ́jə and pair pɛː risk being confused. The following might be either word:

It is in fact from prepare, said by Polish-born language teacher Michel Thomas. This kind of foreign-sounding pronunciation is actively encouraged by the transcription /eə/.