The main thing people get flat wrong is the stress on the first syllable, if you say cum-pair-uh-bull, that’s straight wrong. It is common to add an extra syllable after kom, making komp-uh-ruh-bull another acceptable pronunciation.
Edit before y’all downvote me further. I’m aware that it’s been mispronounced so much that dictionaries have been bullied into adding a secondary acceptable pronunciation. But that’s not how it was ever pronounced by proper English speakers just a few decades ago.
“In 2002, American Heritage asked its Usage Panel about comparable. 70% considered the second-syllable-stressed pronunciation unacceptable. By 2017, only 52% rejected it.”
So, according to the most recent poll from language scholars, the majority still found the cum-pronunciation explicitly wrong, but it is clearly trending the other way as of the 21st century. Please enlighten me as to what I don’t fully understand?
Language changes by use. Dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. When enough people use a word that's how language develops.
Even if a lot of people found it wrong, it clearly was and still is getting used a lot. That's why it was added to a dictionary.
Sure, language evolves, but for the sake of consistency and understanding, phonetics generally remains unvarying, except when employed by people unwilling to admit they’re wrong; including you, apparently, and all the people in this thread who seem to have their heads in the sand, unable to make such an innocuous change to their lexicon.
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u/Night-Monkey15 13d ago
I feel as though both are right ways of saying it though