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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#151

Post by wongarsu »

gingerrr wrote: post #148
wongarsu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

English has plenty of words that have different meanings but are are spelled and pronounced the same. An arm is either a limb or a weapon. A break is either a pause or a physical defect. A trunk can be a piece of clothing, a part of a tree, a cloth-covered chest, or the rear compartment of an automobile. A bat can be an animal or a stick. And while some of these words are related, some have completely different origins and just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same in contemporary English. The stick "bat" is from Old English batt, derived from Welsh and Celtic, the mammal from Middle English bakke, derived from Old Swedisch/Danish/Norse.

If you "cleaned up" English spelling, the same would happen with wear, where and were-. If the distinction were important for understanding, it would be equally important in spoken language and the pronunciations wouldn't have converged.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#152

Post by kitd »

Balgair wrote: post #114
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…

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

English is drifting as we speak, literally.

Ha, nice :)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#153

Post by stevekemp »

OnlyMortal wrote: post #75
HPsquared wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like reading German.

Well yes. My dialect is somewhere towards German (more so Dutch). I write, “learnt” rather than “learned”. Past perfect and past imperfect from a Germanic view. “I learnt” and “I have learned”. “I learned” sounds wrong. Source: Yorkshuh.

Only this evening I was trying to explain to my child that "telt" was the same as "told", with extra emphasis and implied overtones..

Source Yorkshuh and Scottishland!

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#154

Post by dragonwriter »

pomian wrote: post #141
hinkley wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Kind of ironic, in that English lost the ability to make formality distinctions because its speakers were so consistently formal to each other that the language lost its informal second person singular pronoun and associated conjugations.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#155

Post by stevekemp »

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…

> Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English.

I suspect it depends upon the type of language; consider the difference between "I fell" and "I fall". There's a different word there for doing something in the past. (Obvious examples are run/ran, pay/paid).

In other languages you might use a suffix on the same root-word. So in English you need to learn more words. You can't have a simple rule to say "I read" vs "I read in the past". The word you use is .. different, and you have to know it if you want to be correct.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#156

Post by stevekemp »

oneshtein wrote: post #45
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…

I learned how to read and write in my native language in 2 weeks at age 6, when I learned half of alphabet, because I figured out rest of alphabet on my own. I'm reading non-stop since then. How much it takes to learn how to properly read, write, listen, and speak in English? It took me about 20 years in total, but I still cannot talk properly.

Much harder. I listen to my six year old boy read Finnish and English. Finnish is trivial, the pronunciation follows the spelling.

English? A word like "night" turns into "nig-hut" which kinda makes sense, but is also completely wrong. There are so many times when I have to say "No, actually you say XXX".

Speaking is fine, mostly. Though there were a few *years* where I had to say "Mommy is a woman, so you say 'she' not 'he'." as Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns. "Your friend is a girl so you say 'her ball', not 'his ball'". That took a long time to sink in, even though he was fine when people spoke to him he'd almost always get it wrong when women/girls were involved - and even Finnish adults make those kind of mistakes quite often. ("I have a girlfriend, his name is Sally".)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#157

Post by Symmetry »

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…

It's not but the Great Vowel Shift happened after spellings were standardized and was a pretty big change.

For me the worst part is that my last name, Clough, was originally spelled that way to indicate it used English's guttural sound before that sound got dropped from the language and all the words with that sound got their own new pronunciations. E.g., "Though through rough boughs I push my way."

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#158

Post by Symmetry »

kitd wrote: post #152
Balgair wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

English is drifting as we speak, literally. Ha, nice :)

English's two most common other intensifiers, "really" and "very" (verily), got their start the same way.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#159

Post by Beijinger »

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 am not native speaker but I find English a superior language. And if other languages are better for business, why do the Angelsax countries outperform the world?

I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead - For goodness sake don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother, And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, come, I've hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#160

Post by wsinks »

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"?)

Pro-nun-see-ay-shun
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