pronunciation encountered

[Doug Harris]

I heard an odd pronunciation today, on NPR:  casualties as caz UL ities.
The report was from Gaza, by someone who clearly wasn't a native speaker
of English.
dh

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>
>>>Last evening I had dinner at a relative's house.  Never met her or her
>>>family before.  They all seemed surprised at my unfamiliarity with
>>>oxymoron
>>>pronounced as . ok ZIM uhr uhn
>>>
>>>Anyone ever heard this?  It must be a spelling pronunciation, with
>>>em PHA
>>>sis on the wrong sy LAH bull.  I didn't hear anyone there say the word
>>>film-as one or two syllables.
>>
>>new to me.  but i had a crisis of self-confidence and went to check
>>the OED.  both pronunciations have primary accent on the third syllable.
>>
>>arnold
>>
>Beat me to the punch--I was sure this would turn out to be an
>officially received secondary pronunciation, based on other Greek
>words, but evidently not.  (Does anyone know how it would be stressed
>in Greek?)  Maybe David's relatives were thinking of Cimarron.
>Actually, it appears that there is someone named (I hope
>pseudonymously) "Ox Cimarron" who's quite active on the yahoo.com Q
>and A site.  That would correspond to the above pronunciation of
>"oxymoron" except for a secondarily stressed /a/ on the final
>syllable as opposed to the destressed schwa David reports.  If I were
>going to stress "oxymoron" on the antepenult, that's how I'd do it.

>LH

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