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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#111

Post by hinkley »

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…

On the topic of food; livestock, which were raised by peasants, kept their Germanic names. Meat was expensive though and usually went to nobility, or people catering to them (learn the language of the occupier if you want to get ahead).

So you get ham from a pig, beef from a cow, and mutton from a sheep.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#112

Post by hinkley »

btilly wrote: post #89
CoastalCoder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Old English had 5 genders, ... Would you mind elaborating on this? I know almost nothing about the topic, but IIUC from Wikipedia, Olde English only had 3 genders: [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Gender

The way I learned about it, in addition to masculine, neuter, and feminine, there was also a distinction between weak and strong. So a man would be strong masculine, a body weak masculine, a girl weak feminine, and a woman strong feminine. Add in neuter and you get 5 genders. But reading https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html , there were also 2 weak neuter nouns, eage and eare. Which are now eye and ear. Not sure how tha…

I never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse.

As a native speaker it might not be so bad. But as a second language it means that at some point you're taking a class that consists largely of learning to beg your betters for favors. Which I don't think is ever going to sit well with students of quasi-democratic nations. Doubly so for more stereotypically cantankerous ones.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#113

Post by hinkley »

Angostura wrote: post #92
btilly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. And when the spelling was largely fixed by William Caxton, who pronounced the words with a 15th century Kentish accent

The rumor is that after the Revolutionary war, English nobility affected an accent change to distance themselves from those Americans, and that a historically accurate miniseries about the American Revolution should feature British Officers with something approaching a southern drawl, rather than the modern posh British accent.

Basically the American South did not get the memo about changing English accents.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#114

Post by Balgair »

tivert wrote: post #49
btilly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one. It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new…

English is drifting as we speak, literally.

Look at the shifts going on right now in the great lakes area. Lots of vowels are changing around.

Charlie Berens is a comedian that focuses on great lakes and midwestern life. His accent, though suped up for views, is somewhat representative of the state of the vowel changes going on right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKFReM16N4Q

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#115

Post by Koshkin »

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...)…

The variability in pronunciation is a blessing in disguise. How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'?

The American English is an infinite source of pride for me, because of how different it is from other related languages. Where everyone else is using 'ss' to stress the need for the sound 's', we proudly say 'z' when we see 'ss'. Scissors: 'sizerz'! I even hear 'azum' (assume) once in a while.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#116

Post by StuffMaster »

clauderoux wrote: post #33
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...)…

Among European languages, English is maybe the language with the less consistency, when it comes to writing, but it is far from being the only one. French is another one, and English borrowed not only a lot of French words, but a lot of them were borrowed with their old French spelling. To understand why English and many other European languages have such weird spelling rules, you have to start with the initial reaso…

>The Romans modified and adapted the Etruscan alphabet, which was borrowed from the Greek, who borrowed it from the Phoenicians , etc. to their own language.

Also as I recall those are each unrelated languages so the letter/sound congruity dropped markedly at each transition.

(I'm not sure if that's the correct way to put it. Also I tried to sound really smart in writing it.)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#117

Post by hinkley »

psunavy03 wrote: post #80
HPsquared wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like reading German.

English is a Germanic language, closely related to Dutch and German, which was later influenced by French and Latin.

As a native English speaker, it can be distracting to hear someone speaking Dutch in a movie. Your brain keeps trying to make it into accented English, because it sounds almost like it due to pacing and common syllables. The brain latches onto a handful of borrowed words and tries to interpolate the rest.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#118

Post by computator »

lotsofspots wrote: post #70
silvestrov wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with English is the lack of different "you"s. If I say "you can't do that", what does this mean? 1) "you" as a concept: nobody at all can do this. 2) "you" as a specific person: only one person can't do this. Other people can do it. 3) "you" as a group: Nobody in the group (or the group as a whole) can do this.

I like how the phrase "I didn't say she stole my wallet." changes meaning completely depending on which word(s) you emphasise.

It's fun to spell out 7 the different meanings you can get:

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Tom saw it happen and he's the one who said she stole my wallet.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. You're making up something I never said.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Maybe I suspected her, but I never actually said it.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Someone stole it, but I don't know who it was.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She took it, but for safekeeping after I forgot it at the restaurant.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. I did see her steal a wallet, but it wasn't mine.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She stole my money but left the wallet exactly where it was.

It's a great example of how written speech doesn't capture all the nuance of spoken words. Well, italics helps, but hearing it makes a bigger impact.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#119

Post by dfawcus »

mkingston wrote: post #21
benj111 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cache, knowledge, repertoire Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k. The other 2 are french imports.

You and I know that, but it's not important or useful to a non-French speaker learning English. To those people, those are merely English words. And indeed, they are English, even if they're French imports. I think even a lot of English speakers don't realise the depth of this: "cul de sac" is a fun example that a lot of people I ask don't realise comes from French (or another language, for that matter).

I always preferred "Dead End", but "Cul-de-sac" seems to have taken over with the road sign planning departments since the 70s.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#120

Post by Freak_NL »

popularonion wrote: post #97
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…

We do Anglicize pronunciation of loan words, heavily. "Karaoke" is actually a good example of that: https://forvo.com/word/karaoke/#ja

"Carry-Oky"

Brr…

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