3 ms·

Honestly I'm not sure what difference there is between "photograph" and "photography" (now I looked it up and I would never have guessed) but most languages tha

Honestly I'm not sure what difference there is between "photograph" and "photography" (now I looked it up and I would never have guessed) but most languages that have sound changes like that just change the letters between variants of a word, instead of keeping the same letters and changing their pronunciation. In Dutch, long vowels that turn into short vowels make things like meer/meren (single/plural). In German, you would have Land/Länder (single/plural as well). French also does it with say, régler/règlement (verb/substantive). English does it too in some cases, with say wife/wives. So it could very well be something like photögraph/phötagröphy. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Smaug123 8y ago
If we only added the schwa (ə) to the script, then in my Received Pronunciation accent, it would be "photəgraph" versus "photogrəphy". On the other hand, English has an astonishing ability to replace vowels with schwas; pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable spoken as "ə".
- psergeant 8y ago
  > pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable spoken as "ə" Making learning a language where the vowel sounds are the important one a freakin’ nightmare for Anglophones.
- vorg 8y ago
  > English has an astonishing ability to replace vowels with schwas That only works with the unstressed vowels [1], so we have "phətogrəphy" because "to" is a full stress and "phy" is a half stress. [1] Except in NZ English, where the ɪ-sound ("i" as in "if") and schwa (ə) are pronounced the same.