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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#161

Post by karaterobot »

bestouff wrote: post #52
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…

I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.

I think OC made a poor word choice with "dumb". Whether they intended it or not, no human language is dumb, they're all valid and functioning. I've studied French for many years, and will never have an intuitive sense of noun genders, it's just something I have to memorize by rote. The same is true for how complex structures of pronouns and modifiers seem to collapse into a compressed string of apostrophes when used informally. But when I ask French people how they know the gender of a noun, they shrug and say "I just do". The same is true for English's infamously fussy collection of special cases for grammar and spelling, which (as a native speaker) I never remember having to consciously learn how to navigate in speech or writing, though I must have. Your native language seems natural to you, including all the parts that outsiders may call dumb.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#162

Post by leetcrew »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
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...)…

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 has subjunctive mood, it is often used in counterfactuals like the first clause of "if I were taller, I could reach the ceiling". sometimes you can get away with saying "was" instead of "were" in these constructions, but your middle school english teacher would be disappointed.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#163

Post by Dylan16807 »

euroderf wrote: post #135
Dylan16807 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

If you're doing spelling reform, you have already decided it's worth hobbling what people have already learned in exchange for fixing things.

It is not more unnecessary than any other part of the spelling reform.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#164

Post by Dylan16807 »

tivert wrote: post #140
Dylan16807 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a valid stance, but if you want to take that attitude then reply to the person that suggested spelling reform in the first place, not me.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#165

Post by kridsdale3 »

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 asked GPT4 to re-insert latin word-components to Uncleftish Beholding to "remangle" it. The result is perfectly fine modern English. It does a pretty good job of "uncleftish-ifying" any other text if you enjoy that style.

https://pastebin.com/FCAjrckG

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#166

Post by retrac »

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...)…

It is what happens when a language freezes its orthography in time. English is spelled as it was 350 years ago. There's a great weight of history. How it was spelled in Greek, French or Latin has an impact.

Other languages do this. French spelling is heavily informed by etymology. Whether it is c or s depends how it was spelled for Latin. But more! The Latin word for finger is digitus. Today the French word for finger is pronounced something like /dwa/. But because Latin spelled it 'digitus', French spells this as "doigt". The g and t are both silent.

Japanese before the mid-20th century reforms, used kana spellings based on medieval Japanese pronunciation. So you would write the kana, which if read individually would have the value Tōkiyau - but you pronounced it Tōkyō.

The writing system for the Tibetan language is an abugida, another off-shoot of the Brahmi script, a sister I suppose of Devanagari. The spelling of Tibetan was fixed over a thousand years ago. Modern Tibetan has lost almost all its consonant clusters, yet written Tibetan includes clusters like བསྒྲུབས "bsgrubs" (i think pronounced just /tsup/ today?)

The Tibetan or French historical etymologies might be a bit more elegant than English, really. But same idea.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#167

Post by D-Coder »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
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...)…

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…

An Esperantist friend of mine who spoke ten languages said that English is the easiest language to learn to speak badly and the hardest language to learn to speak well.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#168

Post by Gibbon1 »

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…

The other thing is English speaking world hasn't had a government with enough authoritarian power to rationalize spelling and pronunciation. So pronunciation and spelling is all historical convention. Which it used to also be in most places until the government rationalized the language. This is the same reason people in the US still use English units. The government isn't willing to force the issue.

One advantage of the disconnect between spoken and written is old English literature since the great vowel shift is still readily accessible. Go back 500 years and the spoken language would be difficult but written would be easy.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#169

Post by dragonwriter »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #168
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…

The other thing is English speaking world hasn't had a government with enough authoritarian power to rationalize spelling and pronunciation. So pronunciation and spelling is all historical convention. Which it used to also be in most places until the government rationalized the language. This is the same reason people in the US still use English units. The government isn't willing to force the issue. One advantage of…

> This is the same reason people in the US still use English units.

US customary units aren't English (or Imperial) units; even the ones that share names sometimes aren't the same, and not just because of the minor adjustments when the US customary system was redefined in metric terms.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#170

Post by monknomo »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #55
bestouff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.

What I've learned about french is that the end of many words are a mash of keyboard letters including at least a few vowels with bonus points for the hardest consonants that exist (x, k, j, z, p, go wild!) which regardless of its contents is always pronounced as a vowel sound halfway between English "ew" and English "uh". Seems to happen more frequently in last names and place names than anywhere else, as well.

the last half of french words have letters out the oiseaux
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