Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to pronounce the trickiest English words

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 245 posts

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#51

Post by tivert »

Bhilai wrote: post #3

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)…

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking.

I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grating.

> I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)

IMHO, the only dumb thing about English is the cultural tendency of its speakers to not modify spelling of foreign words as they are imported, even when those languages have completely different sound assignments (see Pinyin).

However, once a word has a standard spelling, it makes sense to keep it even as pronunciation changes.

> You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.)

That's the remnant of an old grammar rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut. It's from Proto-Indo-European and was apparently still present in Sanskrit.

> Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.)

There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#52

Post by bestouff »

tivert wrote: post #51
Bhilai wrote: post #3

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)…

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grat…

I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#53

Post by mkingston »

yurishimo wrote: post #47
mkingston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti I rea…

Dutch (and I assume German?) has a similar verb story for various pronouns. "She" is also "they" in both stressed/unstressed forms (ze/zij). "His" is the exact same word as the infinitive form of "to be" (zijn). The formal "u" can mean "you" or "you all" and it always has the same accompanying verb form, even for plurals. The only way to tell them apart is context, like you said. While English does have these example…

> did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker?

Definitely not to the extent that I'm having to for French! At the moment I don't have a lot of spare time to think (eek) and reflect on this, but regarding those verbs, French definitely has some different usage of them when compared to English including sometimes using "have" where we'd use "be", and vice versa, which is a little jarring at first.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#54

Post by mkingston »

a-french-anon wrote: post #41
hotnfresh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.

We have dictée exercises at school, during which an entire text is read aloud and then you're supposed to transcribe it.

I need this for practice. Perhaps I ought to use text-to-speech and then transcribe the audio back to text and compare.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#55

Post by HappMacDonald »

bestouff wrote: post #52
tivert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grat…

I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.

What I've learned about french is that the end of many words are a mash of keyboard letters including at least a few vowels with bonus points for the hardest consonants that exist (x, k, j, z, p, go wild!) which regardless of its contents is always pronounced as a vowel sound halfway between English "ew" and English "uh". Seems to happen more frequently in last names and place names than anywhere else, as well.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#56

Post by mkingston »

yurishimo wrote: post #44
Aloha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transl…

Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English. If you look at this Wikipedia article, the first entry for English when sorting by headwords is around 140k. German by example is around 100k for it's lowest entry. At the high end it's approaching 400k for German and 470k for English. I'm omitting the Wikipedia dictionaries for all languages. I suppose that doesn't disqualify your point either. For me, the…

> native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common

Interesting to read this; I had developed exactly the same hypothesis about French speakers: that they're less accustomed to a variety of accents (with the obvious caveat that it's even more risky to generalise from an anecdote than from data!).

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#57

Post by Shish2k »

Bhilai wrote: post #3

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)…

English is the PHP of human languages: Random vaguely-useful-looking bits from other languages copied & duct-taped together with no sense of consistency in either the syntax or the standard library...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#58

Post by addaon »

beeforpork wrote: post #26
Bhilai wrote: post #3

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)…

> English is a pretty dumb language Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.

> Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.

Are you suggesting that language is /not/ man-made?

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#59

Post by avgcorrection »

yurishimo wrote: post #44
Aloha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transl…

Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English. If you look at this Wikipedia article, the first entry for English when sorting by headwords is around 140k. German by example is around 100k for it's lowest entry. At the high end it's approaching 400k for German and 470k for English. I'm omitting the Wikipedia dictionaries for all languages. I suppose that doesn't disqualify your point either. For me, the…

> native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common

So you assert.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#60

Post by canjobear »

Bhilai wrote: post #3

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)…

> English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day.

English grammar is fairly simple as these things go. If you want to see some serious linguistic complexity, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs

Post reply on HN