There are thoughts about certain words that wedge themselves into my mind...sometimes like a grain of sand...and my mind comes back to them...again, and again - trying to unravel the root of the grain of sand.
The pronunciation for the word "banal" is one of them.
I grew up pronouncing it a certain way (\BAY-nul\) - but somewhere in a professional context - I heard someone pronounce it (\buh-NAHL\) - and from that moment I couldn't wait to get to an online dictionary and find the authoritative example of how it should be pronounced.
In numerous dictionaries, and on YouTube - more than half-a-dozen different authoritative sources all cited ONLY one (or two) correct pronunciations: (\buh-NAHL\) or (\buh-NAL\).
I was mortified.
I was certain that I had learned the word in elementary or junior high - as (\BAY-nul\) - but none of the references I found mentioned that pronunciation. I even used Google Translate for over a dozen languages - thinking perhaps I had learned this pronunciation during some of my many excursions to learn bits of over 30 different languages.
It was only today - when doing several more searches - that I landed on this Merriam-Webster dictionary page:
"There are several pronunciations of banal, but the three most common are \BAY-nul\, \buh-NAHL\, and \buh-NAL\ (which rhymes with canal). The earliest pronunciation given in our dictionaries is the now-unused \BAN-ul\ (rhymes with “flannel); it is attested to in our dictionaries back to the 1800s, but has dropped out of use. \BAY-nul\ is the next oldest pronunciation. The more recent \buh-NAL\ and \buh-NAHL\ came about through French influence, since banal was borrowed into English from French, and those two pronunciations are closer to the French pronunciation of banal. All three pronunciations are acceptable in educated speech; \buh-NAL\ is currently the most common, followed by \BAY-nul\ and then \buh-NAHL\. There is no reason to condemn any of them as incorrect"
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