PronunciationManual is much better: https://youtu.be/1A4P-wadRbc
How to pronounce the trickiest English words
131–140 of 245 posts
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same thing with many Slavic languages that aren't mutually intelligible, like Polish or Slovene and Croat. I wonder if there is a concept of Hamming distance for languages.
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Pronunciation drifts in all languages. But usually languages take some effort to have either a clear mapping from spelling to pronunciation (when you read it you can pronounce it) or from pronunciation to spelling (when you can pronounce it you can spell it); or some compromise that tries to achieve both. Hence when pronunciation drifts too far that eventually causes the word to be spelt differently too. Meanwhile En…
People are very resistant to spelling reform, and it doesn't help that english has enough accents/regions where it is spoken, that no unified spelling is going to be sensible for all english speakers.
I mean, look at Carnegie's attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
some wins, but didn't go anywhere, really
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#134Sorry 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.
I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depending upon language, dialect, and other factors. A language might possibly have an orthography that is 100% accurate to the phonemic inventory, but only for a single dialect. As soon as the dialect changes or another dialect emerges, the orthography will have to change to be 100% accurate.
For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t".
Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v].
* Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography.
Voice Alveolar Taps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...
Voiceless Alveolar Plosives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
w/v allophony in Hindi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony...
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > (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.
Why unnecessarily hobble readers that have already learned the homophone sets by heart ?
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#136Dearest creature in creation, study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse words like core, corpse, horse and worse ...
It's a testament to the poem's truth that you misquoted: "corpse, corps, horse and worse"
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#137Sorry 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...)…
But I hate that Hindi has gender for objects and a bunch of other languages have this rule too which makes it unnecessarily complex.
Cool username btw. A buddy of mine is from there.
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'll let you look at modern English spellings - Know, though, thought etc etc and decide for yourself whether that looks like a transcript of southern American english:)
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depen…
The comment you replied to links to a Reddit comment giving examples of schwa deletion in Hindi that is not represented orthographically. Nothing to do with allophony, just "if you were to read this word as written, you'd pronounce a vowel here, but you shouldn't". To give an English example, it's like writing "should not" even though you don't pronounce the "o" in "not".
Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > (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.
> If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same.
Except you can't do that. You're working on distributed legacy protocol, not some thing that you can successfully force roll-out arbitrary changes.
I think you'd have less success with your proposal than getting everyone to finally migrate to IPv6.