Colonel and régime were borrowed from French, which most likely explains their weird pronunciation in English. Régime sounds roughly the same in both languages, but I have no idea how colonel became "kernel" in English.

My pet peeve is "definately," which is definitely not a word!

Yet you wish us to abide by them.

I was flabbergasted when my English teacher in high school taught us that the English system is so complex,...

It is complex.

For those of you with children, you'll probably understand this:

It's a pain in the butt to try to get a small child to understand that when there's an E at the end of a word, the E is silent, and the first vowel is long. If there's not an E, the vowel is short. It's wierd rules like this that make our language so difficult/complex to understand.

We have an ESOL (English as a Second Language) instructor, who assists foreign, likely non-English speaking, students. It's no wonder they have such a difficult time.

Try this sentence with the different ough sounds:
Through the rough cough and hiccup plough* me through.
* British spelling for plow


Glenn: English gramma?? That would be an English grandmother. Grammar would pertain to the language.

Just a Canadian perspective, eh?

Nope that would be grandma

Touche! Sorry, my keyboard isn't bilingual. Pronounced tooshay.

As said by a dear friend of mine " Proper English... pfftt.. no such thing nowadays "

I find most of the Europeans(in my experience) can't differentiate between the words "Loose" and "Lose". Personally I love English, it's a wonderful language.

Listening to a podcast, I heard an English guest use the word "beta" pronounced "beeta". I didn't understand what that meant until the host noted that that was how beta is pronounced in England. On another podcast an English co-host pronounced beta as "beeter". Where does the "r" come from? Do dictionaries in England have the "r" sound at the end?

brianL, That is the kind of writing style I like to read in stories, very descriptive and by the end of the book, I've really learned something.

At some period in the past the French language was enforced in England (and maybe the surrounding areas),

so people had to adopt French sounding speech to avoid prosecution. And quite a bit of the language stayed when they left.

It's true, they say that English is the most expressive language.

I only hope that prose can be found in stories and the

engineering and scientific spec writing can be found in places like this.

Some very good examples here, thank you for the replies.

Loose and lose is one of my favourite stumbling words too. I have to picture a "win or lose" banner to make the right choice.

I think, here in Australia beta is taken from the Greek letter, and yes, I agree, nearly everybody says it differently. Another good word from more recent history, "Linux".

Cheers, Glenn

Something I hate (other than the errors listed in my sig) is people saying, "if I would have done this, then...". NO!! That's just wrong.

Not quite right. After the Norman invasion in 1066, Norman-French (differences from French-French?) became the language of the Ruling Class, but the rest of the population carried on as before.
The reason English is such a rich language is because we've borrowed words from so many other languages.

To make this more Linux related, how about the pronunciation of GNU and Gnome. According to the dictionary, the word "gnu" as in the animal is pronounced like "new". However RMS decided that the "G" should be pronounced in GNU. The problem is the pronouncing a "g" sound followed by an "n" sound is impossible unless you cheat by inserting a vowel sound. So which vowel sound?
Some people pronounce the "g" in Gnome and you have the same problem. In the dictionary "gnome" which describes the diminutive mythical humanoid creature, the letter "g" is silent. Many people pronounce it "nome", others "guh nome" and others "gah nome" and others "geenome". GNU and Gnome have so many pronunciations due to trying to pronounce the unpronounceable.

For some people, whose native language is not English, saying GNU with both consonants at the beginning is not that difficult, actually. It's no trouble for me, for example.

What do you people think of using plural pronouns when referring to a single person just to be "politically correct"? That's the thing that makes me laugh sometimes... "Everybody should brush THEIR teeth twice a day!" Gee, really?

I have no problem saying words like "ignore", "signify", without an extra vowel sound between the g and n. I remember reading somewhere that in the Middle Ages, the k in words like "knight" and "knife" was not silent, maybe it was the same with g.

That is correct because we are refering to 'everybody', a plural. If we were to say he or she then we use a singular his or her teeth. I think the problem comes from when we say something like 'everybody is ok' which is using everybody in the singular. Same for 'everyone'.