Today I will address a set of words that many of us have been mispronouncing our whole lives.

First, a question: Are you rhotic? I am. That means, like many Americans, I pronounce my r’s, as /r/’s, no matter what, across the board, even when they fall at the end or in the middle of words and even when they precede consonants. If you’re Bostonian or Southern or English, you may be non-rhotic or selectively rhotic or even intrusively rhotic (“the Shahr of Iran”).

That’s all just fine. Poly-rhoticism makes the world go round. But the pronunciation issue I want to address bedevils rhotics alone. And bedevil us — or me, anyway — it does.

Next, another question: Did you remember how, etched right on the CD of “Diamond Life,” the first album of the jazzy English singer Sade, which came out in 1985, there was a pronunciation guide to the singer’s name and it was given as SHAR-DAY? OK. That was weird.

What about the Hitchcock film “Sabotage,” whose opening frame defines its title term and gives the word phonetically as “SAB-oh-tarj”? The plot thickens.

Or how about how some people say GER-tuh for the German philosopher Goethe? Or others say YAR-mukah for the Jewish skullcap instead of YAH-mukah? Or what about how the name of Babar, Jean de Brunoff’s fictional elephant, had his French name phonetically represented for English speakers as BAR-BAR?

Or, weirdest of all, how about how people say “er,” with a voiced “r,” as if they taught themselves how to stutter by reading — English novels or comic books — instead of stuttering the organic way, by fumbling for words with a hum or a dopey open-vowel sound like “uh”?

What’s with all the rogue r’s? — This question just must have bugged you, if you’re rhotic, meaning you’re a person for whom “er” and “eh,” when spoken aloud, sound different.

That’s right! If you catch the er/eh difference, you, my friend, are rhotic! To other, non-rhotic people — English people —“er” and “eh” sound indistinguishable! When they transcribe sounds made by the human tongue and larynx, like “er,” they use the “r” not as a separate consonant to stop the vowel sound but as a way to inflect that vowel. So Sade is not SHAY-day, it’s — in American colloquial phonetics — SHAH-DAY.

Please say that you have not understood this entirely until this moment. Because it was a real breakthrough for me. If Sade’s name is said as Sharday, like Chardonnay without the donn, then, for rhotic me, there’s a. . .hard, glassy shard in it. It’s not a cool-jazz cognac name; it’s a throat-scraping fragment of the cognac bottle.

The problem is that it’s the enterprising, empirizing British who first transliterated Hebrew and Yiddish and Turkish into the Roman letters of the English alphabet, and for them יאַרמולקע or the Turkish yağmurluk comes through as yarmulke. Say that word with a fancy Thurston Howell accent: you got it! But say it with a rhotic yarm — like a rhotic farm — at the top and you’re SOL at shul, I’m afraid.

Similarly some of the stubborn sounds in German, like the u-umlaut, or ü, were also transliterated by the British (the same ones to whom Firenze sounded like Florence). The British, in charge for Europe of the English letter set, represented the ö as oe, as pronounced it as “er” — where “er” is our “uh.” Goethe or Göthe is rightly said, by rhotics, as something like “GUH-tuh.”

Once you see that we rhotics have inherited some non-rhotic English transliterations and false phonetics that don’t work for us you’ll be free to find the true pronunciation of crucial foreign words, like Bah-BAHR, the elephant. Think of it as the last blow for American linguistic independence: Let non-rhotic transliterations SAB-oh-tahge us no more!