331–338 of 338 posts
Oh this is the place where I can finally rant about _aesthetic_, the favourite word for most music/art/movie content creators I've watched in the 2020s, one everybody mispronounces and reads it as "asthetic" which annoys me to no end, because it is totally WRONG. And I keep hearing it daily, which is maddening. "Ae" is supposed to be one sound, like the vowel sound in "egg". The "a" is silent. I'm terribly afraid eve…
Asthetic, exetera, exetera…
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> There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it. Hmm? The etymology dictionaries don't appear to back you up on this. > often (adv.): "repeatedly, again and again, many times, under many circumstances," mid-13c., an extended form of oft , in Middle English typica…
The words are obviously related. But that doesn't mean one came from the other.
You just said they weren't...?
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This is true to the bone. It's hilarious how many native speakers ignore this - even knowingly. It also goes beyond pronunciation into local slang and choice of vocabulary. In my experience "Native Speakers" often don't understand each other correctly (of course random ones, from different parts of world) - plenty of tiny misunderstandings due to the tempo of conversation. 5 random non-native speakers may have all ba…
For strictly technical communication you make a great point - we probably should try to work with a "standardized" or "international" English. That said, something about your comment struck me as deeply sad: the "funny wordplay" injects some personality and novelty into communication. I don't want to live in a world where we communicate in a strict manner for utilitarian purposes only (including at work).
But English speakers that I talked with (or listened to online) love actual wordplay. It's part of their culture. Tiny rhymes, replacing words with wrong ones that sound similar and "everyone knows what he meant".
Anything that you could comment as "pun intended" or "pun not intended" might be super hard to grasp for a foreigner. It often requires listener to know correct pronunciation and some phrasal verbs to get it and often knowing some facts from that country. I usually understand these things when said by Americans, but lack knowledge to understand similar "puns" by other nations. I know for a fact that most of my colleagues don't understand most of those. They might get that there was a joke there, but they won't know if it's commenting the topic positively or negatively.
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This is true to the bone. It's hilarious how many native speakers ignore this - even knowingly. It also goes beyond pronunciation into local slang and choice of vocabulary. In my experience "Native Speakers" often don't understand each other correctly (of course random ones, from different parts of world) - plenty of tiny misunderstandings due to the tempo of conversation. 5 random non-native speakers may have all ba…
> Non native speakers tend to get to the point more easily. Interesting. I've noticed this, but have always attributed it to being a product of the British education that most of them received, being from Commonwealth countries. > It's easier for themselves. It's also much more clear. I tend to code switch into a more precise dialect when in a professional setting. The words I choose are often a bit more specific, bu…
On your accent I would not care much. You should not try to change your accent for others and you don't need to. Speak slower. That's a number one hint. If you can't force yourself to simplify your vocabulary just be consistent with it - it will soon be clear from context what it means. Also feel free to rephrase and summarize once in a while as it is a way of implementing both of those hints.
A lot of courses on Coursera, Pluralsight or similar platforms utilize that consistently (Udemy is a mess of different approaches). Default speakers speed is super low, vocabulary is super consistent within a course. Course is painfully summarizing every few minutes, at the start of a chapter, end of it, every few chapters. I've seen complains about that, but it I think such repetition works.
I asked "cloud you please speak a bit slower" a few times when I was talking on the phone in US (calling a store, library, etc.) and people seldom complied. But that's a huge aid yet I ignored it until a pilot of a small, loud plane on my trip asked my party to "speak slower so we can understand each other". Communication was over headsets and apparently it's simply good practice regardless of the language.
On your vocabulary - "us Foreigners" may have learned English from same books or Cartoon Network shows. We often have issues with same vocabulary. You in one paragraph used:
convey, enunciate, consonants - I had to pause at those. I've been thought what a consonant is 25 years ago but used it maybe 10 times since then. My fault entirely, but still. Enunciate is completely new to me. Convey I figured out from context, I knew it only from context of "conveying a survey".
"professional setting", cadence, abbreviate - such use of "setting" would be understood by more advanced speakers, in my opinion. Others might treat "setting" as an option to tweak in yaml file. Cadence I know as it's a "bicycle thing", but I don't think all of my colleagues would grasp that at first read.
Abbreviate and omit - are one of those things I'm sure we were told in school about, but is used less often one might think. It should be clear if used consistently in a larger text.
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In most of these cases the final B is itself silent but elongates the previous wovel for me. "dumb" is pronounced longer than "dum", and it's the U that gets elongated. The difference is subtle, but my native tongue has "long wovels" so I'm trained to detect the difference.
Paljon suomalaisia täällä?
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It's not that simple, for starters 'the a is silent' isn't really right, because it's just a modern rendering of æ, there is no 'a' (or 'e') really. Secondly, æ pronunciation differs depending on etymology (here, Latin's borrowing from Greek). Thirdly, the (ancient) Greek pronunciation changed over time anyway. So how far back do you want to go for 'original' and 'correct'?
> So how far back do you want to go for 'original' and 'correct'? As far back as the pronunciation guide from modern English dictionaries. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic Yours is a nitpick over the nature of æ that doesn't invalidate my point that most people mispronounce that word.
If a dictionary is in disagreement with native speakers, it is the dictionary that will change, not the other way around.
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In American English, unlike British English, œ and æ have mostly been collapsed into e. Compare encyclopaedia, foetus, faeces, diarrhoea, oestrogen. (But exceptions spelt the same way in both dialects: phoenix, oeconomics). If you'd like to encourage what you consider the correct pronunciation, I'd suggest favouring the spelling esthetic , which I do see but less commonly.
Perhaps interestingly, in some languages like German and Hungarian, (o)estrogen is written with just an ö and no e (Östrogen, ösztrögén).
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> Google translate must have failed me here And there's your mistake: don't use Google translate for single words. Use a dictionary for that - it'll tell you that both variants exist and even denotes that "sutil" is the Brazilian one :) Single words don't carry enough context for statistics-based approaches like Google translate and even then, Google translate is not even very good compared to alternatives like deepl…
Interestingly, the first translation dictionaries I tried also showed me "sutil" (and only this form). I had to actually search for Portuguese language dictionaries to even see the form "subtil". Probably happens because Brazil has so many more Portuguese speakers than Portugal? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-portugue... https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-portugu... These two do…
Definitely. Similar to how most websites (even European ones) use American English instead of British English.
Interestingly, Portuguese children are adopting a lot of Brazilian Portuguese words now because of Youtube (since Brazilian content is so much more common than Portuguese content).