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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#171

Post by kashunstva »

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...)…

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language.

I don't completely understand this. It's not a constructed language; it's a language that evolved and continues to evolve like other natural languages according to pressures exerted by a host of factors, practically none of which are consciously-decided. Exceedingly complex in some ways, vague and ambiguous in others; it's a stretch to classify English as "dumb" For natural languages, the idea of better and worse languages seems like asking whether a maple tree is better than an oak tree. Every natural language has its quirks. For English, pronunciation, as you point out is the most notable. But take Russian: its pronunciation is much more predictable, but the non-native speaker has to contend with declensions, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, etc. Chinese orthography is daunting. Trade offs abound...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#172

Post by OnlyMortal »

stevekemp wrote: post #153
OnlyMortal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It’ll be old Saxon.

Admittedly, I’d not use “telt” though I understand why it is used.

My Yorkshuh is (now) soft Wetherby. It wasn’t as a lad but I had to learn English, as a second language, when I lived abroad (NL/BE/US).

It was embarrassing to have someone translate my English to an American boss.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#173

Post by nitwit005 »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #62
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…

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.

Every language has things like that where you'll sound odd if you don't phrase things a certain way.

That's why at a certain point you just need to get experience using the language.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#174

Post by btilly »

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…

The spoken language might be easier than you'd guess.

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s to see what our best understanding of Shakespeare actually sounded like. It is surprisingly easy to understand.

They also found that he had some bawdy jokes that rhymed for his audience which no longer do rhyme. :-)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#175

Post by hfhdjdks »

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 language is not dumb. The writing system that people chose is...not that great (and you can call it dumb if you like). There was a choice between respecting phonetics or maximizing some other objective (respecting etymology or being consistent with older pronunciation or whatever). Being based on a latin script maybe wasn't ideal, but languages like swedish or german did a better job and invented letter when needed.

If you take the distribution of writing systems, I'm not sure English is particularly bad (the modern version has spaces and punctuation! Not bad, right?). It's not great either.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#176

Post by euroderf »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #163
euroderf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spelling reform is a continuum from do-nothing to full-phonetic. There's plenty of grey.

Consider tho that if English is nowadays a lingua franca, we submit its learners to a lot of mental torture, including vast amounts of rote memorization of both spelling and pronunciation. English may not be quite as obnoxious as its up-and-coming main competitor, Mandarin Chinese, but it's a difference of degree not of kind. My 0,02€; YMMV.

Start with common words that are one-offs that are assertively misleadingly spelled. Lose, gross, broad, height. There are many more.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#177

Post by gilcot »

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…

> Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there.

Sure …when, as native, you don't have to spent years leaning it that easier language …like others.

Oh wait, you dunno toki-pona nor esperanto :(

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#178

Post by gilcot »

D-Coder wrote: post #167
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…

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.

Practicing seven languages here (and knowing some others a bit) and having the same feeling. However, I'll put French (one of my primary languages) as ex-aequo.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#179

Post by MrJohz »

hinkley wrote: post #113
Angostura wrote: post #92

Earlier 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'd love for you to correct me on this, but I believe this is nonsense. The only places that discuss this are very dubious articles from infotainment-style blogs, and I can't find anything to back this up on Wikipedia, let alone anything more reputable.

IIRC, the element of truth that begets the lie here is that the Southern accent does have some elements in common with older British accents. But it's not clear whether those elements are retained from those old British accents, or whether they've simply been added into the accent later. And even then, we're talking about very specific features - I think the rhotic R is one of them? - and not the accent as a whole.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#180

Post by TacticalCoder »

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...)…

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language.

I don't know if a language can be "dumb".

Accents, on the other hand...

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