Zee PM or Zed PM, how do you pronounce it?

[srg]

I say zed, but actually like the sound of zee! Zee,pee,emm, sort of rolls off the tongue more easily!

It does doesn't it. It's like ZeeZeeTop, ZedZedTop doesn't sound the same.

[Linzi]

It does doesn't it. It's like ZeeZeeTop, ZedZedTop doesn't sound the same.

ZedZedTop!! LOL! No, doesn't quite have the same ring does it?!

[coldfire]

It's Zed not Zee and as we are on about *******ised english what about colour not color!

[srg]

It's Zed not Zee and as we are on about *******ised english what about colour not color!

I think that's been done on here before...

[walterIsTheMan]

I think that's been done on here before...

Lol indeed it has, because it was beaten in to our American heads that we changed the English language. Yet everyone seems to forget that so did the British. You guys used to speak Middle English, then you changed it. And that came from *******ised Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Language changes over time, God forbid it should change again. The world is coming to an end because we removed the 'u' from color.

[srg]

Lol indeed it has, because it was beaten in to our American heads that we changed the English language. Yet everyone seems to forget that so did the British. You guys used to speak Middle English, then you changed it. And that came from *******ised Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Language changes over time, God forbid it should change again. The world is coming to an end because we removed the 'u' from color.

Hey we used to speak like what you get in shakespeare so I think you have a point.

[walterIsTheMan]

Hey we used to speak like what you get in shakespeare so I think you have a point.

Exactly. That's how language evolves. It changes little by little over time. One day we probably will have an entirely separate language called American. By then there will probably be Canadian and Austrailian too. Even people in the UK will probably not speak the same English in the future that they do today. Everyone keeps complaining about how we spell and speak over here, but I bet Shakespeare would complain about you guys.

IMHO, a lot of people in this thread (not all, but a lot) are using this difference in language as ammo against Americans. For the record, not all Americans have the "we're better than everyone else" mentality, and taking a cheap shot at the way we speak and spell the English language IMO isn't any better than those Americans that do have that mindset.

[TST]

Zee Pee Emm

And I'm British (just FYI)

[da_hippie]

It's Zed, learn to speak English.

[Avatar28]

It's Zed, learn to speak English.

See, this is exactly the kind of crap that Walter is complaining about and that's annoying the hell out of me about this too. Many (not all) of the non-American English speakers are complaining that American English is not really English blah blah blah whine whine whine. Sorry, news flash, it IS English whether you wish it to be or not so you might as well stop complaining. Modern British English is as far away from what English was when America was being settled as American English is, possibly even further. It certainly isn't any more RIGHT (nor vice versa).

If you hate the United States and Americans in general (which it seems that many people do), fine, it's your right I suppose. But getting hung up over what basically amounts to a different dialect of the same language is pretty silly.

[Render]

where did the split originate fromk, cuz i hate to break it to you guys, but america is the only country that traditionally pronounces it in tht manner

and another thing please pronounce lieutnenant correctly

[Eoin]

Why argue over the way a letter is pronounced?

[Avatar28]

where did the split originate fromk, cuz i hate to break it to you guys, but america is the only country that traditionally pronounces it in tht manner

and another thing please pronounce lieutnenant correctly

Read further back in the thread (around page 1 or maybe 2) for some quotes and links I posted from Wikipedia. But basically at the time the English language was undergoing change anyways. I'll go ahead and requote the relevant bit again.

n many ways, compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonology. The conservatism of American English is largely the result of the fact that it represents a mixture of various dialects from the British Isles. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the East Coast of the continent; this is largely because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time when journeys to Britain were always by sea. As such the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech, and did not imitate the changes in speech from England.

Here's some on the letter Z for you:

In almost all forms of Commonwealth English, the letter is named zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (see below). Other European languages use a similar form, e.g. the French zède, Spanish and Italian zeta. The American English form zee derives from an English late 17th-century dialectal form, now obsolete in England. Another English dialectal form is izzard, which dates from the mid 18th-century, probably deriving from French et zède meaning and z, or else from s hard.

The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout. In Semitic (Zajin) and Ancient Greek the letter was probably pronounced as [dz] (as in Italian zeta, zero). In Modern Greek, it is pronounced as [z], as in English and French.

The name of the Semitic symbol was Zayin, but this name, for some unknown reason, was not adopted by the Greeks, who called it Zeta. Whether, as seems most likely, Zeta was the name of one of the other Semitic sibilants — Tsade — transferred to this by mistake, or whether the name is a new one, made in imitation of Eta (η) and Theta (θ), is disputed. The pronunciation of the Semitic letter was the voiced S, like the ordinary use of Z in English, as in zodiac, raze.

It is probable that in Greek there was a considerable variety of pronunciation from dialect to dialect. In the earlier Greek of Athens, Northwest Greece and Lesbos the pronunciation seems to have been zd; in Attic from the 4th century BC onwards it seems to have been only a voiced s, and this also was probably the pronunciation of the dialect from which Latin borrowed its Greek words. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the symbol was apparently used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced th (ð, þ). In the common dialect (κοινη) which succeeded the older dialects, ζ became a voiced s, as it remains in modern Greek.

I haven't quoted that before, but it seems to me from reading that the original greek letter was prounounced either way depending on where exactly in Greece you were from, so apparently this debate is nothing new and goes back a few thousand years anyways. LOL.

[walterIsTheMan]

where did the split originate fromk, cuz i hate to break it to you guys, but america is the only country that traditionally pronounces it in tht manner

and another thing please pronounce lieutnenant correctly

See that is another thing I was talking about earlier, matching pronunciation and spelling. Let us look at the word lieutenant and see if we can find an 'f'. *looks carefully* hmm it doesn't seem to be there. LIEU is pronounced LOO, therefore we are saying the word how it is spelled. Plus this isn't just something we differ on. While Canada and New Zealand traditionally use the "f" sound, Britain and Austrailia pronounce it "l'tenant". So we're not the only ones speaking differently. However we are the only ones saying it how its spelled.

[walterIsTheMan]

I was just watching Family Guy, and Stuey kept yelling at the little British girl saying she didn't know how to speak lol. Not trying to insult the British, just thought it was an interesting coincidence given all this discussion about it