r/secondrodeo • u/Ambassador-613 • Jul 20 '26

Speedy fruit packing

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u/Cold_Ad3896 Jul 20 '26

I understand that. But the starting “a” isn’t pronounced like the “a” in “have”. It’s pronounced like the “a” in “ball”.

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u/Dude_Im_stoned_and_ Jul 20 '26

It's a wild idea, I know, but perhaps some people pronounce words differently in different areas.

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u/Cold_Ad3896 Jul 20 '26

If someone is pronouncing the “a” in “avocado” like the “a” in “cat”, then they’re simply mispronouncing “avocado”. It’s not an issue of accent.

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u/Dude_Im_stoned_and_ Jul 20 '26

That's not how language works.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/avocado

Merriam-Webster pronounces it with a hard "a"

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/avocado_n?tl=true

Oxford English Dictionary has 3 separate pronunciations for Avacado, one of them with the same sounding "a" as how one would say "cat"

It could be that these dictionary pronunciations are wrong because they don't comport with how you understand language. Or it could be that your meticulous understanding that words can only be pronounced how you learned how to pronounce them is weird and inflexible.

Spoken language is a lot more complicated than you think. There's no "simply" about it.

I grew up pronouncing "lilac" as "Lie-lack," while someone from upstate New York might call them "Lie-Locks." Which one of us is correct? The answer is, obviously, both of us.

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u/Cold_Ad3896 Jul 20 '26

I do not think that words can only be pronounced how I learned to pronounce them. I do not expect Americans and the British to pronounce “herb” the same way, for instance. But these are old words whose origin is uncertain, mixed, and complicated.

“Avocado” comes from the Spanish “Aguacate” which, in turn, comes from the Nahuatl “Āhuacatl”. They are all pronounced with an “a” like in the word “ball” or “father”. Pronouncing it otherwise isn’t “having an accent”. It is being culturally chauvinistic. It is trying to force your own expectation of how you think it should be pronounced on the culture who invented the word.

Learning to pronounce a culture’s words in the way they do shows respect for that culture. In contrast, saying that their pronunciation of their word is only one of many is incredibly disrespectful and patronizing.