[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

Anybody past the age of 6 that says axe instead of ask.

[SAJ]

The problem with this thread (unavoidable, sadly) is that there are simply too many adaptive pronunciations of words in the American version of the English language. This has recently been reemphasised to me, because I live in Panamá and am engaged a bit in helping the local students with English pronunciation.

Their teachers, Panameños all, are perfectly bright, but somehow have learned their pronunciation in an Español-ish manner. Even the teachers can not believe the number of adaptive/exceptional pronunciations in English. The pronunciation of common words such as 'woman' drives them a little nuts. I'm using the sentence, "The woman never reads a book." as an exemplar. This helps somewhat, but, brother, for a full course, the number of exemplars would be utterly enormous.