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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#231

Post by Zanni »

InCityDreams wrote: post #61
bestouff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.

As a very strict anti-nationalist - what is it about your country you are proud of? Nb I travel a lot and ask the question a lot (when appropriate). When i think of 'my country', i see nothing to be proud of. I didn't do it. I believe George Carlin summmed it up best: be proud of things you did, not countries, and stuff (sorry, can'tfind link)?

I think everyone should be proud of their country, despite its flaws. If you choose not to be, that's fine. I'm proud to be American, despite our internal strife and external belligerence. If I were born Chinese, I'd be proud of its incredible history, despite its current capture by the CCP and human rights abuses, etc. There's a difference between patriotism and nationalism.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#232

Post by Xorakios »

Symmetry wrote: post #157
tivert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one. It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new…

It's not but the Great Vowel Shift happened after spellings were standardized and was a pretty big change. For me the worst part is that my last name, Clough, was originally spelled that way to indicate it used English's guttural sound before that sound got dropped from the language and all the words with that sound got their own new pronunciations. E.g., "Though through rough boughs I push my way."

Nice!

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#233

Post by darkflame91 »

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 a native Kannada speaker, I agree. With most Indian languages, spelling bees are a laughable concept. They generally have about 35 alphabets, each associated with a specific sound and organized by type of sound. So there's no ambiguity with spelling, and pretty much any verbal sounds can be expressed in written form.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#234

Post by fomine3 »

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

Kerioki lol

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#235

Post by bazoom42 »

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...)…

> much more expressive and scientific.

While I agree English can be inconsistent and weird (esp. pronouncuation), I doubt any other language could be more expressive or “scientific”, whatever that means. Unless by “scientific” you mean regular.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#236

Post by CannisterFlux »

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.

This use has almost died out in everyday speech though. I listen to many podcasts in which different people across different age groups and backgrounds are always messing it up, e.g. "if I was good at this", which really clangs to my ears, but it's very common.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#237

Post by benj111 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #220
benj111 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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”...

As you say, they're compound words.

English is a mongrel of a language with more special cases than most of my code. But I don't think the silent k in kn is an example of that.

Flammable/inflammable Foxes/oxen. Tomato/potato (one thing I will begrudgingly admit the Americans got right) Where/were/here.

Those are actual rough edges.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#238

Post by tivert »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #164
tivert wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same. Except you can't do that. You're working on distributed legacy protocol , not some thing that you can successfully force roll-out arbitrary changes. I think you'd have less success with your proposal than getting everyone to finally migrate to IPv6.

That's a valid stance, but if you want to take that attitude then reply to the person that suggested spelling reform in the first place, not me.

I don't think he was suggesting that.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#239

Post by Asraelite »

canjobear wrote: post #60
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 grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day. English grammar is fairly simple as these things go. If you want to see some serious linguistic complexity, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.…

Not true at all. There is a general tendency for languages to trade grammatical complexity in their morphology for complexity in their syntax. English is morphologically simple, but syntactically very complex.

Syntactic complexity isn't as easy to notice at first glance as morphology, especially if you're a native speaker. This leads to the common misconception that analytic languages like English are necessarily simpler overall.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#240

Post by Asraelite »

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.

Are the counterexamples in Spanish for native words, not just recent loanwords? If so could you tell me what they are? This is something I've looked into a bit before but I couldn't find any concrete counterexamples in Spanish.
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