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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#191

Post by mrkstu »

hinkley wrote: post #109
Tao3300 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat. However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Sp…

We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself. It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a…

Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German?

Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#192

Post by msrenee »

Symmetry wrote: post #158
kitd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did they? I'd love an article about that if you have one handy.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#193

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

dragonwriter wrote: post #154
pomian wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Living proof of this is the that when translating from English to my local Slavic language Google Translate strips out all instances of "please". I felt like it sounded rude but it actually stops me from sounding overly pleading and a little pathetic.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#194

Post by a_e_k »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #107
euroderf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > (Write, Right, Rite.) > There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing. Most spelling reform proposals for English ignore this. Many would-be reformers try to cut directly to some particular phonetic spelling scheme, which throws away a key benefit of having homophones. Disclaimer: like many English speakers, I too have my own spelling reform scheme, with the key difference that mine i…

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.

Anecdotal, but I feel like I tend to do subconsciously alter my diction a bit when the word is ambiguous from the context. I may use a slightly different voice inflection or stress or pacing to help disambiguate.

Think of someone lingering on a punned word to emphasize the joke, for example.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#195

Post by Symbiote »

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.

I consider this sexist and will continue to use "it".

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#196

Post by Wohlf »

popularonion wrote: post #97
iainmerrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We do Anglicize pronunciation of loan words, heavily. "Karaoke" is actually a good example of that: https://forvo.com/word/karaoke/#ja

Funny you mention karaoke, the Japanese do the exact same thing to a much further degree.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#197

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles.

Are you suggesting that England, the very definition of imperialist settler colonialism, is itself the product of imperialist settler colonialism?

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#198

Post by kergonath »

Adverblessly wrote: post #101
iainmerrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are no special twists in that AFAIK there are no rules that specify for example that "Mathematics" needs to be transformed into "Matematika", but a lot of words do get some sort of alternate English pronunciation that is not the same as the original, even when the original is perfectly possible in English. Your example of "karaoke" (which most people pronounce in English as keriyoki) is one such example. Israel…

> Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

Should it, really? The concept of Israel dates back millennia; which was the original prononciation? Should we all say it as it was in Aramaic back in the day? The h/g cases you mention are a good example: many languages just don’t have these soundsIn cases like bilingual countries, which of the prononciation is supposed to be canonical (bearing in mind that the linguistic borders shift significantly all the time)?

Arguing about the prononciation of proper nouns always seems foolish to me. There is no solution to these questions.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#199

Post by Tagbert »

otteromkram wrote: post #186
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.

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.

if the adjectives are out of order, they will be understood but the speaker will seem a little odd and not native.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#200

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ta23 wrote: post #19
alserio wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is the c++ of languages. Wildly useful and used, has accrued eons of complexity, has original sins coming from its parents' and everybody uses it differently

>has original sins coming frome its parents Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess. And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English. Where an "a" i…

The chaos that is English vowel spelling comes from the fact that vowels in English are relatively unimportant in differentiating words, and thus allow for a lot drift before becoming unintelligible. If you replace all the sounds in the previous sentence with a long 'a' as in "cane" you'll sound ridiculous, but pretty much intelligible. Even more so if you replace all the vowels with some sort of "shwa" vowel.

This creates a lot of English accents, which fundamentally disagree about the pronunciation of different vowels. Even if the accepted spelling accurately represents how the writer speaks, it could be absolutely different from how the reader speaks.

It also creates a tendency to let unemphasized vowels slip into a generic "au"-ish sound, which is where the "o" in "ball" comes from.

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