Acaí [ah-sigh-EE]
What: A species of palm tree from the Amazon rain forest, best known for its health-giving reddish-purple berry.
How you pronounce it: It’s not ACK-ah-ee, it’s not ah-KAI, and it’s not ah-SIGH. It’s ah-sigh-EE, with a soft c and a stress on the last syllable.
For the spelling that tricks many English speakers, you can blame the early Portuguese explorers of Brazil, who saw indigenous rainforest people eating a strange and luscious palm tree berry that they called in their Tupi-Guarani language ïwaca’i (something that cries or expels water).
The Portuguese wrote this down as açaí, but in Portuguese the c comes with a squiggly cedilla at the bottom that makes the c sound soft, and there’s an accent on the i. The result is something very close to the original pronunciation. Since English doesn’t come equipped with softening cedillas and accents, the result is a very untasteful rendering of a very tasty fruit.
Disclaimer: I do NOT own the contents in this book nor the image featured in the book, I just gathered it all up from the internet and the information included in this book is for educational purposes only. All rights belong to its rightful owners.
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Mispronounced Words
RandomLanguage is a beautiful, but complicated thing. A word can start out one way in one place, but by the time it gets spread across the world, it's become an entirely different thing. In other words, you may be mispronouncing tons of words without even...
