Your Letters
16:18 UK time, Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Re How to Say: The "t" in Port-au-Prince is not silent in its French pronunciation - it is followed by a vowel so is pronounced in much the same way as your Haitian Creole example.
Steph, Glasgow
No discussion of easily mispronounced placenames (How to Say and Tuesday letters) is complete without a recognition of the withering look of cold death you'll get from any Cornishman should you fail to pronounce Mousehole correctly. It's a mistake you only make once...
Ashley Pearson, Hull (but raised in Cornwall)
Try and pronounce my name Ruaridh. It is pronounced Roo-Ree. But it isn't spelt like it. It is Gaelic for Red King or King of the Red Heads.
Ruaridh Williams, Colwyn Bay
Re Quote of the Day: I'm sure by now you've received a chorus of smug observations that "Hallelujah" is used in the film. I'm sure there's a pun in there, but I can't quite get a Handel on it.
Edward Green, London, UK
Monitor note: Thank you. The colleagues who've seen it forgot that point, even under direct interrogation.
So, we may not yet know the Monitor's gender, but we do know s/he is one of the few people left in the world who hasn't seen Avatar. Narrows it down.
Alex, Bristol
Mmmmm, 2 out 7 in the . Poor.
Dave, Swindon, UK
The was interesting. I wonder if anybody realises that professional commercial archaeologists, who often have two or more degrees, earn less than traffic wardens? In some companies it is as little as £13,000 a year. The commercial archaeology sector is a part of the construction industry, with archaeological excavations often required by planning law prior to building. To us it has always been about the love of the profession, but there cannot be another job which requires such extensive professional qualifications and training, which pays so proportionally little. Most similarly qualified people in other professional industries (engineering, commercial geology etc) actually start on what we expect to end up on if we stay in the commercial sector for 10 or 15 years. It is depressing to realise your dream job after years of study will pay you less than if you were a traffic warden.
Alexandra, Reading, UK
Joel (Tuesday Letters),"an university education" is incorrect actually. If the letter at the start of the following word sounds like a consonant, then we use "a". If it sounds like a vowel then "an" - in modern English anyway. At work, I park in an NHS car park, not a NHS car park. But I've not been to uni - so I'm probably wrong and I've probably got issues about it.
Claire, Kent
I definitely got a university education.
Alexander Lewis Jones, Nottingham, UK
I looked.
And I saw the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's status update.
And lo! There was a bit of a typo.
And in the distance I heard a raven cawing.
But that was nothing to do with the typo, it just added a bit of atmosphere.... See more
So I thought I'd include it.
Sorry.
Michael Thomas, via
Sarah (Tuesday letters), in that classic Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, what Gerald the Gorilla actually said was: "It's a whoop of gorillas, professor, a whoop. It's a flange of baboons."
Helene Parry, S Wales expat to Brentford
The 
