Sunday, May 31, 2009

Pentecost Pronunciations

See, no sooner had I declared there should be a pronunciation bee to help us know how to pronounce words correctly, we had the perfect example of why on Pentecost Sunday.

The second scripture reading in church today was from the second chapter of Acts, naturally. In our church we read responsively verse by verse for this reading.

The pastor read verse 9, leaving the congregation to recite verse 10.

"
9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome"

The problem, of course, is that no one was confident enough in their pronunciation abilities, meaning that as soon as pastor finished the word Asia there was a pause. Followed by a few muffled utterances that sounded like "ffrgia and pmmflia".

Until we got to Egypt. Everyone got that one right. Everyone blared that word out like nobody's business, like a collective thought of "I'll make up for it here". I found the whole situation quite comical.

Either teach us how to say uncommon words or don't make us speak them!

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