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How do English speakers know to read "fah-sah-dism" and not "fah-kah-dism"?

by 627467 8y ago

function_seven 8y ago
Context. If I saw the word alone with no surrounding context, I might pronounce it the 2nd way. Or at least be unsure.
Synaesthesia 8y ago
Like a lot of things in English, you just learn it, doesn’t always make sense. It’s similar to facial.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  or facade
pessimizer 8y ago
When English borrows words from other languages, it tends to keep them as close to their original pronunciation as the average English speaker can wrap their tongue around, and if the original word was written in a Roman alphabet, to not change the spelling at all. So when pronouncing an unfamiliar English word, speakers look for markers and patterns in the spelling that indicate what language the word is borrowed from (a process that starts with shearing off or reducing standard prefixes and suffixes.) Only after determining a source language is the pronunciation attempted. This happens mostly subconsciously, and is used as a marker of social class. http://zompist.com/spell.html http://zompist.com/spell.html edit: I'm excepting the notorious British hatred of pronouncing recent French borrowings in a French way, "herb" "valet" etc. The relationship between French and English has an enormous amount of history and death behind it. Also, something like 80% of English words are borrowed, but the other 20% make up 90% of utterances.
rdiddly 8y ago
Ha ha, see my comment, currently right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 I'm a native English speaker but I've had enough education in French that I really miss the cedille, and find it distracting that it's not there. Likewise with the accents aigus on résumé. Without them, some part of my brain always reads it as resume (i.e. rə ZOOM). But in the latter case, I wouldn't actually do it, because in America at least, it seems to really call attention to itself and mark you as someone trying to signal "Oh look you heathens and plebes how European and cultured I am!" Whereas the ç, I feel like you kind of need it, and I would use it if I were the one writing façade or façadism.

How do English speakers know to read "fah-sah-dism" and not "fah-kah-dism"?

by 627467 8y ago

How do English speakers know to read "fah-sah-dism" and not "fah-kah-dism"?

function_seven 8y ago

Context. If I saw the word alone with no surrounding context, I might pronounce it the 2nd way. Or at least be unsure.

Synaesthesia 8y ago

Like a lot of things in English, you just learn it, doesn’t always make sense. It’s similar to facial.

wavefunction 8y ago
or facade

pessimizer 8y ago

When English borrows words from other languages, it tends to keep them as close to their original pronunciation as the average English speaker can wrap their tongue around, and if the original word was written in a Roman alphabet, to not change the spelling at all. So when pronouncing an unfamiliar English word, speakers look for markers and patterns in the spelling that indicate what language the word is borrowed from (a process that starts with shearing off or reducing standard prefixes and suffixes.) Only after determining a source language is the pronunciation attempted. This happens mostly subconsciously, and is used as a marker of social class. http://zompist.com/spell.html http://zompist.com/spell.html edit: I'm excepting the notorious British hatred of pronouncing recent French borrowings in a French way, "herb" "valet" etc. The relationship between French and English has an enormous amount of history and death behind it. Also, something like 80% of English words are borrowed, but the other 20% make up 90% of utterances.

rdiddly 8y ago

Ha ha, see my comment, currently right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 I'm a native English speaker but I've had enough education in French that I really miss the cedille, and find it distracting that it's not there. Likewise with the accents aigus on résumé. Without them, some part of my brain always reads it as resume (i.e. rə ZOOM). But in the latter case, I wouldn't actually do it, because in America at least, it seems to really call attention to itself and mark you as someone trying to signal "Oh look you heathens and plebes how European and cultured I am!" Whereas the ç, I feel like you kind of need it, and I would use it if I were the one writing façade or façadism.