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

101–110 of 245 posts

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#101

Post by Adverblessly »

iainmerrick wrote: post #63
crazygringo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, every language out there is dumb, and English isn't especially dumb. Yes, its particular wart is pronunciation, and then also phrasal verbs especially [1]. But what are the dumb things English doesn't have? Noun genders (why?). A hundred different suffixes for regular verb conjugations (ugh). Subjunctives all over the place (maddening). A character-based script that isn't phonetic at all (e.g. Ch…

English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc. Am I right in thinking En…

There are no special twists in that AFAIK there are no rules that specify for example that "Mathematics" needs to be transformed into "Matematika", but a lot of words do get some sort of alternate English pronunciation that is not the same as the original, even when the original is perfectly possible in English. Your example of "karaoke" (which most people pronounce in English as keriyoki) is one such example. Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

And of course, not all sounds even exist, "Hummus" has a Het sound, not an 'h' and is pronounced as khoomoos, not haamas. Gaza is closer to being Raza than Gaza, etc.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#102

Post by baq »

btilly wrote: post #20
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 what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere. Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" an…

I’d like to give the word ‘bass’ at least an honorable mention.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#105

Post by drivers99 »

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...)…

I was googling whether Hindi is 100% phonetic. Is this accurate?

https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment...

I thought to check because if you look into Spanish for example, it is often thought to be phonetic but it really isn't 100% phonetic either.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#106

Post by Tao3300 »

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 most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat.

However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#107

Post by Dylan16807 »

euroderf wrote: post #69
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…

> > (Write, Right, Rite.) > There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing. Most spelling reform proposals for English ignore this. Many would-be reformers try to cut directly to some particular phonetic spelling scheme, which throws away a key benefit of having homophones. Disclaimer: like many English speakers, I too have my own spelling reform scheme, with the key difference that mine i…

That's a really bad benefit. If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same.

It's not like English avoids words that have very separate meanings spelled and pronounced the same way.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#108

Post by graypegg »

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...)…

I think people value their language being up-to-date enough to describe their own slice of human history MORE than how confusing it is for a new learner.

Loan words/all new words/complex grammar rules brought into languages aren’t done for fun, it’s because there’s a concept that they need to describe. (Or a class divide they need to define)

No commonly spoken language has ease-of-learning its priority. Just not as important as building on the language you have now.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#109

Post by hinkley »

Tao3300 wrote: post #106
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 most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat. However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Sp…

We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself.

It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#110

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #82
iainmerrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc. Am I right in thinking En…

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." - Terry Pratchett

I would say it does the needful.
Post reply on HN