Kamala Harris, Anthony Fauci among top mispronounced names of 2020; Check out the list

The United States Captioning company which captions and subtitles real-time events on TV and in courtrooms has compiled the list of most mispronounced words and America’s disease expert Anthony Fauci and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are on top of the list. According to the reports by Associated Press, the captioning company said that it surveyed its members to generate the list. A senior linguist at Babbel, Todd Ehresmann said that the list reflects a year dominated by presidential politics and the coronavirus pandemic.

Read: Merriam-Webster And Dictionary.com Choose Same 'word Of The Year': Pandemic

Here are top mispronounced names of 2020 

Ehresmann also broke down the proper pronunciations for the commonly misspoken words. He wrote, ‘Anthony Fauci (AN-thon-nee FOW-chee): Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’, Bangtan Sonyeondan (PUNG-tahn SOH-nyun-dahn): The full name of South Korean K-Pop band ‘BTS’, which translates as “a group of bulletproof boys” or “bulletproof boy scouts; iannis Antetokounmpo (YON-nis AHN-de-doh-KOON-boh): Greek basketball player who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks and was named the NBA’s ‘Most Valuable Player’ this year; Isaias (ees-ah-EE-ahs ): The name given to a powerful hurricane that caused significant damage to the East Coast and Caribbean this summer; Kamala Harris: The Vice President-Elect.

The Associated Press has reported Harris’ first name is pronounced KAH’-mah-lah” — or, as she explains in her biography, “‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark; Leonardo da Vinci (lee-oh-NAR-doe dah-VIN-chee): The Italian painter, architect, and engineer who created the ‘Mona Lisa; Mahamayavi Bhagavan Antle (mu-HAH-muh-yaw-vee bag-AH-wahn ANT-uhl): The full name of wildlife park operator ‘Doc’ Antle, who shot to fame in the Netflix documentary series ‘Tiger King’; Nevada ( nev-ADD-ah ): Homestate of Las Vegas that played a central role in the presidential election; Yosemite: The famous national park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, it was notably mispronounced by President Trump in August. Multiple sources list its pronunciation as (yoh-SEM-it-ee)’.

Read: MoS Muraleedharan Hails Kamala Harris' Achievements On Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

In a separate development, two Dictionary companies declared a similar ‘top’ word as their 2020 word of the year for the first time: Pandemic. Experts at Oxford English Dictionary noted that the word gained popularity and entered mainstream usage due to the COVID-19 crisis this year. Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com chose ‘pandemic’ specifically as it started to trend after WHO declared a global health emergency citing, that an epidemic had ‘swelled’ to a pandemic crisis. 

The search volume for pandemic sustained the highest levels on-site over the course of 2020, dictionary.com informed in a release. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster.com told AP that the word picked up when the first US COVID-19 fatality was recorded and a cluster outbreak broke out on a cruise liner. 

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(Image Credits: AP)