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How to pronounce the trickiest English words

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Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#41

Post by a-french-anon »

hotnfresh wrote: post #24
mkingston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti I rea…

One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.

We have dictée exercises at school, during which an entire text is read aloud and then you're supposed to transcribe it.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#42

Post by AmericanChopper »

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 agree that English is pretty stupid, and the fact that it’s completely non-phonetic is one of my biggest objections to it. But Hindi has some massively frustrating (and mostly useless) complexity as well. Having to pluralise both the adjective and noun in a sentence, and having different plural forms for feminine and masculine words is incredibly tedious to learn.

Indonesian is the best language I’ve come across in this respect, it’s very simple and entirely phonetic. It’s so phonetic that the casual written form basically doesn’t even have the concept of “correct spelling”.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#43

Post by Namari »

omneity wrote: post #37
hotnfresh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.

I beg to differ. Here's a simple example, both "eaux" (waters) and "oh" sound the exact same.

Actually they don't

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#44

Post by yurishimo »

Aloha wrote: post #30
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…

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transl…

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 greatest strength of "English" currently is that it's widespread adoption means that native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common. This goes to your point as well about transliteration.

By contrast, I am learning Dutch and it's a bit of a meme that Dutch people will switch to English if they detect a hint of an accent (excluding regional dialects of course). My theory is that they do not have an ear for it _because_ most Dutch nationals tend to also speak English at a B2+ level.

Contrast that to native English speakers, where the 3 major nations are home to a huge number of immigrants from all around the world, and it makes sense. If English speakers refused to talk with anyone that didn't have a perfect British/American/Australian accent, then nothing would ever get done.

In countries where the local population is tolerant of individual accents, I think the native language tends to thrive (Germany, China, Brazil, etc).

Edit: article link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#45

Post by oneshtein »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
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 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…

I learned how to read and write in my native language in 2 weeks at age 6, when I learned half of alphabet, because I figured out rest of alphabet on my own. I'm reading non-stop since then.

How much it takes to learn how to properly read, write, listen, and speak in English? It took me about 20 years in total, but I still cannot talk properly.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#46

Post by throwaway626 »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
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 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…

CJK characters do encode some phonetic content, it’s just an imperfect process and is more or less unreliable from dialect to dialect.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#47

Post by yurishimo »

mkingston wrote: post #15
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 someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti I rea…

Dutch (and I assume German?) has a similar verb story for various pronouns.

"She" is also "they" in both stressed/unstressed forms (ze/zij).

"His" is the exact same word as the infinitive form of "to be" (zijn).

The formal "u" can mean "you" or "you all" and it always has the same accompanying verb form, even for plurals.

The only way to tell them apart is context, like you said.

While English does have these examples as well, they tend to be with homophones and less with verb forms and pronouns.

Side note: before learning a second language, did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker? Personally, I never thought about it AT ALL until I started learning a second language as an adult.

I guess I don't know if it's similar in other languages, but at least in all of the Germanic flavors, these verbs are crucial and dictate literally every single aspect of the language. Now that I've seen this distinction, English has become more novel to me as I notice these constructions in the writing of others.

I think it says a lot about our culture that we place so much emphasis on these ideas of individualism and property that they are codified into our writing and speech so heavily. Moreover, I'm curious if there are other languages that do not emphasize these verbs and if that also plays a role in the general sentiments of people and their thoughts on collectivism and community?

I can't wait to start learning my 3rd language once I have Dutch fully under my belt! :)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#48

Post by crazygringo »

Aloha wrote: post #30
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…

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transl…

> something like 1/3rd larger than other languages

This is basically an urban legend.

Comparing vocabulary sizes between languages is essentially impossible, as what counts as a word is measured differently. (Think those long compound words in German, for example.) And using things like "total dictionary size" is similarly unhelpful because most of the words are technical or archaic, and it mostly depends on how deep a dictionary wants to go into rare words.

It's true that English has two main historical roots for vocabulary, but that doesn't mean native speakers use more words in terms of everyday normal speech. There are a handful of classic examples ("cow" and "beef", "pig" and "pork"), but they're very much exceptions rather than the rule. (There aren't dual words for "head" or "feet", or "apple" or "orange", or "chair" or "table", and so forth.)

There's zero evidence that vocabulary size is a difficulty for learning English.

(On the other hand, English does seem to overload words with multiple definitions more often than a lot of other languages -- so that definitely can be a minor difficulty for language comprehension, especially at the beginning.)

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#49

Post by tivert »

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…

> 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 ones and how linguists can reconstruct old languages that have no written records.

Re: How to pronounce the trickiest English words

#50

Post by Aloha »

crazygringo wrote: post #48
Aloha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transl…

> something like 1/3rd larger than other languages This is basically an urban legend. Comparing vocabulary sizes between languages is essentially impossible, as what counts as a word is measured differently. (Think those long compound words in German, for example.) And using things like "total dictionary size" is similarly unhelpful because most of the words are technical or archaic, and it mostly depends on how deep…

We do have lots of overloaded words, I sometimes catching myself using like definition 5 of a word - which with some of my friends I can do that - I need to code switch to something simpler when I'm speaking with people in my work environment.
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