Location Taken: Seagirt, New Jersey
Time Taken: February 2011
I noticed an odd quirk in my personal dialect this week.
There’s a place in Guild Wars 2 called Cursed Shore. It lives up to its name, being full of all sorts of undead and corruption and areas that are just a pain to get around. But it’s also one of the few places you can get the best crafting materials, so I still go there, and have been there a lot this week.
But that’s all secondary information. The important part is the name.
You see, I pronounce Cursed Shore with Cursed being two syllables, “cur-sed”, but when the word is on its own, I pronounce it with one syllable, “cursd”.
Now, if you check the dictionary, you’ll find both pronunciations there, so I’m not incorrect whichever way I choose. I tend to default to the one-syllable version, though.
But Cursed Shore gets the special two syllable treatment for some reason. My best guess is that it’s because they sound really awkward together if you try using the one-syllable version. You’re going from a soft syllable with a rising sound to another soft rising sound, so you try to go up even more on “shore”, and that just doesn’t quite work. They blend together as well, dropping the understandability by a lot. I keep switching from a soft “d” sound to a hard “t” sound mid-pronunciation to try to correct that, which causes my tongue to stumble some. If your personal accent uses “curst” rather than “cursd”, it’d work, but my accent doesn’t.
The two syllable version adds a falling sound with a hard ending, so it solves all the stumbling spots of the other variant. Which, I guess, is why this Shore is Cur-sed, not Cursd.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the photo, it’s not just a picture of a random shore. This was taken along the coast of New Jersey, about a year and a half before Hurricane Sandy came to visit. And yes, this spot got hit by the storm surge, and all the beach buildings and fences and what not, well, let’s just say they needed to be replaced. So in some ways, the beach this day was living under a curse of future troubles…
