Itās a phenomenon unofficially known asĀ āreaderās accentā and itās very common! Because English has so many words (in fact considered to be the language with the greatest number of words) lots of people, and in particular those who read a lot as children, will encounter a word in writing long before they hear it spoken. Theyāll develop the idea of what the word will sound like in their head, and only realize when they hear it spoken that their idea was different than the common pronunciation.Ā
Iāve even had it where Iāve known words as spoken words, and Iāve known words as written words, and itās taken me a significant amount of time to realize that they were the same word.Ā One example I can think of is the word indictment. I always thoughtĀ āindictmentā was pronouncedĀ āin-dict-ment,ā and it was only when all these police indictments started happening on the news (with the news crawls below the words being spoken) that I realized it wasĀ āin-DITE-ment.āĀ
So yeah, never feel bad for discovering that a word in English is pronounced differently than you wouldāve expected. English has had influence from SO many other languages over the centuries as it developed, and as a result, many of our pronunciation āguidelinesā are borrowed from the languages the words originally came from. Itās massively inconsistent, and itās one of the reasons that learning English as a second language is so difficult.Ā
As my favorite poster in the campus writing center used to proclaim:Ā
āEnglish: A language that lurks in dark alleyways, beats up other languages, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.āĀ
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