Etymology of a word, often gives a new prospective on a use of a Term.

Lack of stict education, and laziness leads to the misuse of derived words. Changing a word to sound better… NO! Try pronouncing the word properly. When words are derived from an ancient source and travel thru a different country, the words absorb into their language. So while Old English and Middle English might have similar words that derived from a similar root word, they were spoken differently. Then English absorbed the words differently. You can see this in the difference between British English vs American English. British often take their derived words from Old English. Not the same for American English which has absorbed words from MANY cultures. Thus we pronounce words in Germanic, Spanish or other cultural ways. Look at the word Route and Router.

Route: A road or travel path.

Some pronounce this as “Root” as in the song “Route 66″ (Root 66).

The proper derived pronunciation is “R-ow-t” as in ‘Trade Route’.

A IT guy uses a ‘Router’ to network computers. (R-ow-ter)

Which is correct? Commonly English says that -ou is an ‘ow’ sound, correct? But English Route is taken from the middle-english (Germanic) word Route. Middle English pronounces -ou the same way.. the -u sound as in my Grandpa’s last name ‘Lutringer’ is pronounced L-oo-t-ringer.
Now let’s look at the Merriam websters dictionary. They say that Route is pronounced with a ü, which is the same lettering in my Grandpa’s name?!? What is this? Route is a oo sound. R-oo-te? Ahh the derivation of this word comes from the Vulgar Latin word ‘Rupta’, Thus presenting why the British and Americans pronounce Route differently and how words similar to this dual derived word can confused the utter nonsense out of anyone learning the English language. Multiple root languages blended, makes it harder to learn.

Back to Separate.
Has anyone seen “Bill and ted’s excellent adventure”? Did you pay attention to Socrates when he said his name? We commonly say “Sock-ra-tees” when we pronounce it. Socrates kept fixing the boys pronunciation to “So-Kra-Tees”.
But what does this have to do with Separate?
It derives from the Latin ‘separatus’ past participle of ‘separare’. Think Socrates… “Se-Puh-raht”. Anyone remember their “Schwa” E’s in school?
Separate: ?se-p(?-)?r?t
Thus the confusion from ESL’s as they flounder on the strange symbol and think a Schwa ?- just sounds wrong as an A, but in fact… it is an ‘a’.
Separate is mispronounced “Se-peh-raht”, leading people to forget how to spell it, as the educators who taught them ‘FAILED’ miserably to teach elocution and proper verbal usage.
After reading this, I hope you glimmered something about a language. It is true that if education slips and we allow the youth to ‘typo’ their way into the future, the English language is bound to drift into ‘L33t’ speak or we allow ‘text’ ghetto spelling to become common redefined spellings for words that used to have a proper derivation. If you change a words spelling, it loses its connection to the word that spawned it.

se-p(?-)?r?t
Say-Puh-Raht

PS. No I am NOT an English Major. I just paid attention in school. So Trolls, who are trying to make themselves feel better by pointing out minor grammatical errors in internet blogs… bugger off.

To Lisa: English makes ALL the sense in the world. If you investigate the whom, what and where a word came from. Read the root words and understand the influennce of the cultures it passed thru.

Separate is a pretty straight forward word. It’s the Schwa E that confuses the issue. People forget that it’s an -uh sound and not an -eh sound. Therefore Sep-eh-rate or Seperate it’s a mispronounced word. Used with the Schwa E and enunciated correctly, the word is spells and sounds as it appears and makes much more sense from a root word perspective.

To TheMarshal: We do NOT pronunciate the verb and the adjectives differently.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/separate
Look at the descriptions:
sep·a·rate verb \?se-p(?-)?r?t\
sep·a·rate adj \?se-p(?-)r?t\
sep·a·rate noun \?se-p(?-)r?t\

It’s social laziness and geographic inflection that has people sounding the words differently. Why? because they just don’t care? Perhaps bad teachers? Ignorance? Shrug.

Knowing is Half the Battle! … and now you know!