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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#221

Post by kergonath »

Wohlf wrote: post #196
popularonion wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was not the point they were making. The context is the previous post that said English just accepts foreign words without changing them. It does not, and loan words like karaoke are mangled in English just as in any other language. Hence you agree with the parent.

(Karaoke is not a gotcha or a complete fluke; it’s discussed all over the thread)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#222

Post by GuB-42 »

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...)…

Is there any language that is not "dumb" in some way? Maybe Esperanto, but that's a constructed language.

And Esperanto would probably be a better choice for an universal language, but no one really "chose" to use English. The US being the big winners of WW2 combined with the UK being a major colonial power at the time international trade developed probably helped.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#223

Post by dragonwriter »

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 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

I dunno what you mean by "have to" here, but English, like most languages, has both a limited set of phonemes and unique patterns of how they are combined and how stress is distributed, and, like most languages, loanwords will usually have their pronunciation changed to fit that phoneme inventory and construction patterns.

English, because any phonetic interpretation of its spelling is more what you'd call guidelines (or may be just jokes) than actual rules is probably less likely to change the spelling of loan words from other languages that use the same alphabet or one with a well-established transliteration, but the actual pronunciation is a different story.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#224

Post by dragonwriter »

winnit wrote: post #86
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…

In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it…

> For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling,

"bureaucracy" is the English word, but the French word is "bureaucratie" (which is closer to the Norwegian spelling than the English is.)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#225

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#226

Post by scarface_74 »

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...)…

Did you ever have to learn “Order Force” when learning English?

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#227

Post by Sylamore »

hinkley wrote: post #117
psunavy03 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As a native English speaker, it can be distracting to hear someone speaking Dutch in a movie. Your brain keeps trying to make it into accented English, because it sounds almost like it due to pacing and common syllables. The brain latches onto a handful of borrowed words and tries to interpolate the rest.

I've experienced this in real life, I was on a committee that rotated meetings between the US and The Netherlands.

During a policy session in Zaandam with some Dutch, UK, Spanish and US peers we had a moment when our Dutch hosts had an excited conversation in Dutch but since it was a tech conversation both myself and the UK member blurted out at the same time that our Dutch must be getting better because we understood most of what they just said and didn't need them to translate it for us.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#228

Post by scarface_74 »

ThrowAway1922A wrote: post #215
x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny enough, I’m from south GA. But when I speak on conference calls to customers, I try to speak without my natural accent especially since many non native speakers especially who aren’t in the US seem to struggle to understand my natural accent.

I was using my normal “consultant voice” with some clients in Tennessee and as I started talking to them, I naturally without thinking started being less careful and throwing some “y’all’s” and southern twang came out.

I heard second hand that they thought I was mocking them. I had to explain I was born and raised in South Georgia and that was my natural voice.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#230

Post by jmholla »

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.

I don't think that's as ironclad as it says. For example, I wouldn't say a little new knife. I would say a new little knife.

Edit: I see that even the article calls out that this rule is not ironclad.

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