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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#141

Post by pomian »

hinkley wrote: post #112
btilly wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stereotypical…

Formality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us. Please sir, sir I could I sir ask you sir, to possibly pass the cheese, sir. So, of course we over correct and throw in more sirs(or ma'ams) willy nilly.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#142

Post by vharuck »

hinkley wrote: post #112
btilly wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stereotypical…

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

I've only passed the N4 exam so far (about the skill of a Japanese elementary school student), but I fear the polite speech rules I've already learned. It's easy to conjugate verbs a little politely (-masu at the end, or desu for "to be"). Being more polite is a beast. There are different verbs to tack on depending on the basic verb, your relation to the person you're speaking to or speaking about, and whether it's a request, offer, or statement.

Then there are polite pronouns, polite particles (those are like prepositions), and it's usually polite to refer to things obliquely.

All that, and I'm sure I'm missing or misunderstanding a huge portion of the style.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#143

Post by bumbledraven »

crazygringo wrote: post #85
Paul-Craft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, really? Let me introduce you to the "order of adjectives" rule: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/grammar-bizarre-weird-rule-... Talk about bizarre! Every native speaker has this internalized, but they never teach it in school.

Oh believe me, it's definitely taught in school -- it's a part of every standard ESL curriculum. Generally third or fourth year. (Although if you miss class that week you might never see it again.) It's a weird one, but also pretty easy to internalize just through experience. It's not like anybody's usually stringing together five adjectives in regular speech. If you just learn a single prototype phrase like "ugly li…

I think GP means it doesn't come up in primary or secondary school grammar lessons for native English speakers.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#144

Post by signal11 »

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… I am native Hindi speaker

Pretty much every one of your criticisms is true for every human language. Calling any of them “dumb” is more a reflection of yourself than of the language.

Eg Hindi has grammatical gender, which could be pretty wtf to say, Bengali speakers, or speakers of Hungarian, but that doesn’t make Hindi “dumb”.

> better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific

“Scientific” … sigh. Human languages are not scientific. All of them have quirks. All.

You want a “scientific” (ish) language, learn Lojban. Then you can speak with other Lojban speakers.

English isn’t “special” by any means, and history and politics — and also the history of technological progress — have played a role in what it is today. Arguably many other languages could have played this role: French, Mandarin, anything.

But what matters is that people can, and do learn it as a second language enough to make it useful as a de-facto link language.

If you’re actually interested in learning why English is the way it is, I recommend the “History of English” podcast. It starts with PIE so you may even learn something about Sanskrit and Hindi along the way.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#145

Post by wsinks »

Man, WSJ lets me down again.

I've been following Julien Miquel for most of this year. Not _actually_ following him, but occasionally checking out how his youtube channel has progressed. It started with my gf showing me one of his videos for a word that I had never even heard of. What struck me at first was how inadvertently sensual he had made that specific video. And then, how in a 30 second video he butchered incredibly common pronunciations of "this" (thaaas) and "word" (werd).

Not that it's a problem. I'm in awe of his ability to chunk up and produce so many videos. He's found a niche and is filling it. I wonder if it actually pays him that much. I'm not sure, since most videos have only tens of views.

He does troll pronunciations too, like for the word "XXXXXXXXXXX", where he just says the letter X over and over. Maybe that was a test video.

I'm so in awe of him and I was hoping to learn more, and this article doesn't actually contact him or interview him or anything. What a tease! And they even get the lead wrong. Do people _choose_ Julien Miquel? Or has he SEO'd his way into the top of google results? I argue the latter. To this day, I would not choose Julien's choice of how to pronounce any English word. I might let him be a part of many different informed options..

I recently saw the website on here for YouGlish. That's the same niche, solved so much better.

But for now, Julien Miquel is probably my favorite 2023 performance artist, whether he's trying to or not.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#147

Post by amenhotep »

btilly wrote: post #11

Try to read The Chaos aloud to demonstrate that you, too, do not know how to pronounce English: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html Just as an example, did you know that the placement of a comma can change the pronunciation of a word? It can, and that poem has an example where it does!

I take pedantic exception to that - the comma isn't changing the pronunciation of a word, it's changing the structure of the sentence so that where before context made it clear that word A was meant, now it's homonym word B is the only option. It's not one word changing its pronunciation, it's two words that are written the same but pronounced differently. Very important distinction. It would be interesting to know if there was an actual case where a comma changed the pronunciation of a word.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#148

Post by gingerrr »

wongarsu wrote: post #93
tivert wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

How does mapping spelling to sound work in languages like English that have homophones?

"wear", "where", "were-" (as in werewolf), "weir" (in some regional dialects) can all be pronounced identically in modern English. If we map them all to a single spelling, is that an improvement to readability and understanding?

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#150

Post by AlexAndScripts »

nullhole wrote: post #146

Related, one of my favourite jokes is to correct another person's pronunciation of pronunciation when they say to a third party "the correct pronunciation of is " (Is pronunciation pronounced "pro-noun-see-ation" or "pro-nun-see-ation"?)

I had this discussion last week. I say the former because it's more consistent (nobody says "prenunced").
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