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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#181

Post by gilcot »

yorwba wrote: post #139
Arc_Orion wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I do, as do many other non-native I know, unless you write it "shouldn't" :)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#182

Post by yurishimo »

stevekemp wrote: post #155
yurishimo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And then the continuous! “I have fallen/was falling.”

Irregular verbs are not unique to English, but I guess there probably are more of them in the common lexicon. This is probably true is lots of language with irregular verbs. The irregular ones are irregular because the sounds have been adapted to flow better in everyday parlance.

The nice part of most irregular verbs however is that they are also common. If you read regularly or consume lots of content in the language, they will come up over and over again.

Is this something that non native English speakers struggle with early on in the language or does it feel more like a constant battle even past B2?

In Dutch, I’ve largely just accepted that I’m going to screw up irregular verbs until I can start reading novels on my own. I assume at that point the exposure will help drill them into my brain like reading as a young child did in English.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#183

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

> At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language.

Except for ships, which are always feminine in English. It feels very weird to me because gendered noun categories are unusual for English and ships are just about the only counterexample that remains.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#184

Post by dreamcompiler »

iainmerrick wrote: post #63
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…

English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc. Am I right in thinking En…

You often have to modify pronunciation when you translate a word to Japanese because most Japanese syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. So an English word that ends with a consonant will need a vowel added (unless the consonant is n, which is allowed to be a standalone sound in Japanese).

The word "consonant" would probably have to be pronounced "konsonantu" in Japanese.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#185

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #183
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…

> At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Except for ships, which are always feminine in English. It feels very weird to me because gendered noun categories are unusual for English and ships are just about the only counterexample that remains.

That's a tradition, or possibly a convention, not a language rule. All inanimate objects are 'it'.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#186

Post by otteromkram »

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.

Not so sure if this is ironclad.

Like, if someone messes up the order of adjectives, a native/fluent English speaker would still understand what they're trying to say.

The author also introduces Cambridge, Oxford, whatever, when the first ordering is pretty standard.

For example, the common term for an tiny, aged woman in the US is, "little old lady." Size, then age, then the rest.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#187

Post by Izkata »

silvestrov wrote: post #67
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...)…

My biggest problem with English is the lack of different "you"s. If I say "you can't do that", what does this mean? 1) "you" as a concept: nobody at all can do this. 2) "you" as a specific person: only one person can't do this. Other people can do it. 3) "you" as a group: Nobody in the group (or the group as a whole) can do this.

3 would be "you all" or "y'all"; it's from a particular dialect in the US, so might sound odd, but would be understood.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#188

Post by Izkata »

Scoundreller wrote: post #72
mkingston wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I know that, but it's not important or useful to a non-French speaker learning English. To those people, those are merely English words. And indeed, they are English, even if they're French imports. I think even a lot of English speakers don't realise the depth of this: "cul de sac" is a fun example that a lot of people I ask don't realise comes from French (or another language, for that matter).

Meanwhile in France they generally don’t call it a “cul de sac” anymore but rather an “impasse”. You’ll see a mix of the two in Quebec. That red octagon sign in France will say “STOP”, but in Quebec, “Arrête”.

In English (or at least the US), a cul-de-sac doesn't end with the red stop signs. Those are dead ends. Cul-de-sacs are where a street ends in a pseudo-roundabout like the image here: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cul-de-sac-pros-cons-369724...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#189

Post by pcrh »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #165
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…

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

That's fairly impressive to be honest. Correctly interpreting "uncleft" as "atom", for example.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#190

Post by Izkata »

btilly wrote: post #25
gilleain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is where, exactly. It is not obvious :)

I'll give a hint that people can choose not to try to read if they want to find it for themselves. ¿qɹǝʌ ɐ ɹo lɐɯᴉuɐ uɐ ,,sǝop,, sI

Huh, there's an asterisk on that word.. but no footnote. I never noticed that before, but is this page missing something that was in the original?
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