How to pronounce the trickiest English words • Hacker News Board

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#211

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:44 AM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #195

dreamcompiler wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Why is it sexist, surely it is linguistic gender and has nothing to do with biological sex?

Of course, you can use "it", your choice.

Mind you I find the forced overlaying of sex onto language absurd, my late mother was chairman of many committees and always complained when people started calling her "chair"; I agree.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#212

Post by OJFord » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:46 AM UTC

drivers99 wrote: post #105

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 was googling whether Hindi is 100% phonetic. Is this accurate? https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment... I thought to check because if you look into Spanish for example, it is often thought to be phonetic but it really isn't 100% phonetic either.

(Not a native speaker but learning Hindi.)

Yes schwa deletion is a counter example, although it's a solid rule so you could easily say 'well that's just one thing to learn on top of the script, that it's written but not pronounced in that placement'.

A better case for 'no not 100%' IMO is the behaviour of the 'h' sound, which converts 'aha' ('a's around it) it to sound something more like 'ehe'. बहन for example means sister, if you transliterated according to IAST it would be bahan, but most would write behen, and that's how it's pronounced (or something between e and ai anyway).

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#213

Post by OJFord » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

gilcot wrote: post #181

yorwba wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" :)

In 'half-penny', however...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#214

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:10 AM UTC

psunavy03 wrote: post #80

HPsquared wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like reading German.

English is a Germanic language, closely related to Dutch and German, which was later influenced by French and Latin.

Later?

Latin was the first official language in the UK, back when Celtic and Brythonic language was widespread.

The Normans were in the UK, viking there way up our rivers and establishing the Danegeld before Normandy was Normandy and, well, before French was French.

Old French was Gallo-Romance and Middle French, AIUI, emerged with the Norse influence as the Scandinavians moved down past Britain and into Europe. Modern French, ie French, came long after the English court took on the language of the Normans (1066, and all that).

Out of this melange English was born, the next official language of England famously legislated as such by the Welsh-speaking Henry Tudor in the late C.15th.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#215

Post by ThrowAway1922A » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #110

psunavy03 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." - Terry Pratchett

I would say it does the needful.

On one single occasion I said this at work without thinking about it. I'd been working exclusively with Indian devs for months and it just slipped out.

Thankfully it was taken well.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#216

Post by benj111 » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:16 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #127

benj111 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cache, knowledge, repertoire Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k. The other 2 are french imports.

> Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k initial “kn” consistently has a silent “k”. “kn” in the middle of a word, is less consistent: “unknown” has a silent “k”, “pyknotic” does not.

>pyknotic

If you're coming up with words I have to Google, I'll stick with my "quite consistent"

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#217

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #162

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 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.

Yes, but barely -- it's literally just a single instance of using "were" instead of "was".

While Portuguese? Welcome to full sets of conjugations for past subjunctive, present subjunctive, and future subjunctive. And everybody uses them in regular speech, they're not like a formal writing thing or something.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#218

Post by pezezin » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

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…

> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.

Oh god no. I am Spanish guy living in Japan, our languages have very similar sounds, so much so that we can usually get the pronunciation right on the first try, much to the surprise of Japanese people. English speakers on the other hand tend to butcher the pronunciation so heavily that the words become really difficult to recognise.

But to be fair, the same happens the other way around. All languages adapt foreign words to their own phonology.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#219

Post by hinkley » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:40 AM UTC

mrkstu wrote: post #191

hinkley wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (mo…

When the government owned a lot of businesses it was easier to enforce it. I wonder how well it’s working now that they’ve desocialized so many things.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#220

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #216

dragonwriter wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k initial “kn” consistently has a silent “k”. “kn” in the middle of a word, is less consistent: “unknown” has a silent “k”, “pyknotic” does not.

>pyknotic If you're coming up with words I have to Google, I'll stick with my "quite consistent"

meekness banknote ... there's a lot of “kn” words where the “k” is pronounced.

Most are compounds where the “k” and “n” come from separate component words, or cases where the “k” is from the root word and the “n” from a suffix, or cases where the “k” is part of a “ck”...