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Processes pronunciation audio3/23/2023 ![]() That is why I have put some time into this. When I used it a while ago, a native English speaker from the US was not fond of it and used process-es afterwards. I have once learnt from a British university teacher of Business English that process-eez is right, long ago. Finally, it might also just improve the sound of e/i-ss-es endings. Generally, “eez” cases might just flag something special. “process-eez” might come from the rare plural long u “-us” ending of the Latin u-declension of “processus” (which is just an intransitive participle converted to a noun). Wrapping up in advance (due to the long text) Was tempted to hear it as ‘injusticies’, to make it less irritating.Īn American Dialect Society mailing list post from 1995 mentions premises and biases.Ī Meditec article “ Forming Plurals of Medical Words” says “an interesting evolutionary process is the English translation process of adding a mispronounced final syllable, “eez” as in “abscesses”, “interstices”, “processes”. Sister (can’t remember her name), talking about ‘little injusticeez’. ![]() I heard something like that about 10 years ago, from Ralph Nader’s Perhaps the reason is similar to the processeez/processuz difference.Ī Newsgroup Archive of an thread “ “processeez” - a history of mispronunciation and a prognosis, please” also has some useful information and interesting anecdotes: Most Americans pronounce the last syllable “LESS”, but I’ve found that many people from Britain pronounce it “LEEZ”. It reminds me of the way Los Angeles is pronounced. I don’t think I use it for lotuses, but I’m getting less and less certain. Now I know better I also use it for the word fetuses: feetusseez and I think I have heard this on CNN. Was easily convinced that it was an ideosyncracy of mine. Less than a week ago I was corrected by my wife for saying processseez and I’ve heardīiaseez, premiseez, promiseez, and a couple more. What’s interesting is that this neomorph is spreading. premises (the plural of premise/premiss often used in plural)Ī sci.lang thread “ Processeez or processuz” on Google Groups provides some further evidence about pronunciations like this:.There seems to be more limited evidence for this pronunciation of plural “-es” being used in the following words: Other possible words and further discussion I went through the 31 pronunciations of lattices indexed by Youglish and didn’t find any that had. Having an unstressed syllable before the /s/ seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the irregular plural /siːz/ pronunciation to exist. It may be relevant that auspices and interstices are both words that are frequently plural. Interestingly, the OED records a 17th-century spelling variant “intersticies”, although it’s unclear to me if that could be related to the modern pronunciation with /i/ or /iː/. Interstices (the plural of interstice), according to the AHD you can also hear this pronunciation in many of the Youglish examples for this word. Other words like this: biases, auspices, intersticesĪltough processes is the most well-known word like this, there are at least three other nouns that would regularly be pronounced with /sɪz/ in the plural form, but that are apparently sometimes pronounced with /siz/ (or /siːz/):īiases (the plural of bias): mentioned by Mitch in a commentĪuspices (the plural of auspice), according to Merriam-Webster (the pronunciation with /si:z/ is regular for the homograph auspices that is used as the plural form of the rare word auspex) I haven’t heard of anyone pronouncing the third-person singular verb form processes with anything other than /sɪz/ or /səz/. Note that processes seems to only be pronounced with /siz/ or /siːz/ when it is a plural noun. The second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary was published in 1934, so it would appear that the pronunciation of processes with a “long e” sound in the last syllable has been around for some time. Webster’s Second International lists it as a third-choice pronunciation.“ Analyzing and documenting our processeez“, by Conrad Weisert, 7 January 2010, says Although the pronunciation for process with a long (o), (prō ′sĕs′), is more usual in British and Canadian English, it is an acceptable variant in American English.However, because this pronunciation is not uncommon even in educated speech, it is generally considered an acceptable variant, although it still strikes some listeners as a bungled affectation. But process is not of Greek origin, and there is no etymological justification for this pronunciation of its plural. ![]() Usage Note: In recent decades there has been a tendency to pronounce the plural ending -es of processes as (-ēz), perhaps by analogy with words of Greek origin such as analysis and diagnosis. The online American Heritage Dictionary entry for process says:
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