If you are one of those people who have a difficult time preventing your jaw, lips, tongue and throat from turning the two-syllable word ‘jaguar’ into a harrowing, three-syllable vocal adventure, then I don’t have to tell you that you’re one of those people. In fact, just reading the title of this post may have caused you to break out in a cold sweat at the thought of saying ‘jaguar’ in public. Well you are not alone.
Not only are there a lot of people who have difficulty pronouncing ‘jaguar’ as a two-syllable word, that includes sports announcers who are ostensibly paid to speak clearly. Given that those announcers probably threw everything they could at their own struggle, you would be forgiven for thinking the problem can’t be solved. On the contrary, however, I think most people can make progress by following a few simple steps.
That said, in the scheme of things this is obviously a trivial issue, and if you don’t care how you pronounce ‘jaguar’ then you shouldn’t let anyone else tell you you’re doing it wrong. Not only is there no stigma, but some of the variants I have heard over the years have been quite charming. If how you say ‘jaguar’ does bother you, however, please read on.
As to how this tendency is acquired, I think it is likely an unintended but inevitable consequence of how reading is usually taught. Specifically, when confronting new words readers are taught to sound them out, which works great if the new word is ‘dog’ or ‘trudge’ or ‘blast’. Unfortunately, if you try to sound out some words — ‘debacle’ say, or ‘epitome’ — you’re not only going to come up with the wrong pronunciation, you’re going to internalize that mispronunciation because that’s how brains work. (Case in point, I still have that problem with ‘debacle’, albeit in reverse. I don’t have any trouble saying it, but when I read it I always hear it wrong — like ‘monocle’ — then I have to back up and consciously read it correctly.)
Tell anyone who is learning to read American English at any age to sound out ‘jaguar’, and odds are that you will actually generate the three-syllable ‘jag-yoo-are’ which may then torment that person the rest of their lives. Not only is ‘jaguar’ an odd word to begin with, but in the United States we have very little occasion to ever talk about jaguars, so few people hear the word before they read it. We have mountain lions and cougars and pumas — all of which are the exact same animal — but no jaguars, except in sports or the occasional zoo.
Making matters worse, the English language — including American English — is notoriously difficult to learn precisely because it has so few reliable rules, and so many exceptions to the few rules it does have. For example, how would you tell someone who was new to American English to pronounce the ‘ua’ sound? Is that ‘wa’? Is it ‘oo-ah’? Is it ‘you-ay’?
Whatever your answer, consider this short list of ‘ua’ words, each of which is distinct from the others in how that vowel cluster is pronounced:
graduate
guarantee
guard
jaguar
quart
truant
You can see the problem. If ‘guard’ is pronounced ‘gard’, why isn’t ‘quart’ pronounced ‘kart’? Or if ‘quart’ is pronounced ‘kwort’, which isn’t ‘guard’ pronounced ‘gword’?
The antidote to this linguistic madness is to forget how words are spelled or even what they mean and focus only on pronunciation — on the sounds of the words as they are typically spoken. That’s how kids learn for the most part, which is also why most kids have spelling problems later in life, not pronunciation problems. If you were one of the unfortunate ones, however, who were encouraged to sound out the completely absurd word ‘jaguar’, then you’re going to have to do a little drilling to move past that glitch.
To begin, read through the following list of two-syllable words with only one goal in mind — to make all of the words rhyme. Don’t think about what they mean, if anything, just make them all sound exactly the same, except for the leading consonant in the second syllable. (If it helps you can read them silently, hearing them in your head, but at some point you should speak the words out loud.)
jag-bar
jag-car
jag-dar
jag-far
jag-jar
jag-lar
jag-mar
jag-par
jag-tar
jag-war
If you have trouble the first time you get to the last word in the list, don’t freak out. Unlearning something takes more time than learning it wrong to begin with. That said, if you do focus only on the rhyming component of each word in that list, chances are you’ll be saying ‘jaguar’ as a two-syllable word in no time.
After you have worked through that long list a few times, slowly, focusing on rhyming each word, you should see some improvement. When that happens you can adopt a truncated list for practice in the wild, whenever you have a minute or two to speak out loud without calling attention to yourself. For example, this four-beat mantra is easy to remember:
jag-bar
jag-car
jag-dar
jag-war
Finally, a word of caution. Don’t obsess about how you speak, even over one word. The goal here is to just improve how you say ‘jaguar’ in casual conversation. You don’t want to think too deeply about how you speak, lest you create new problems for yourself down the line. A few minutes a couple of times a day should internalize your new, two-syllable pronunciation.
— Mark Barrett
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