Robot /ro.bit/

[Barnhart]

American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> writes:
>
>Of course the early pronunciation may have been taken from Czech
>(e.g., I think, "robotnik"), but since my ignorance of Czech
>pronunciation is virtually total I cannot assess this possibility.

My father (born 1900) as a young man in a community theater while a
student at the University of Chicago played a role in R.U.R.  With a
twinkle in his eye he would say that his part was to go off to repopulate
the planet with humans.

On-topic, he usually said something more like /RUB it/. I think his
life-long friend Reason A. Goodwin (the word judge on Password and a
teacher of Russian and speaker of some eight languages) advised him that
that pronunciation was closer to the Czech.

Regards,
David

barnhart at highlands.com

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