4 ms·

They may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both

by bloak 5y ago

They may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both English and German, for example, have almost-homophones that children typically learn to distinguish by learning the spelling rather than by hearing the subtle difference in pronunciation? If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I suppose it's an interesting phenomenon that some (but not all?) languages have subtle phonetic differences that even native speakers cannot always easily distinguish.

yorwba 5y ago
> If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. E.g. take the example on page 2 of http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminare/sse_stufen.pdf http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminar... : LOITETOTSUFARENiSTLBÖD. In Standard German, that would be "Leute totzufahren ist blöd." Except for switching L and B, the original isn't wrong about the pronunciation: <eu> represents [ɔʏ] and <z> represents [ts], so using <oi> and <ts> instead is perfectly reasonable.
- tremon 5y ago
  It doesn't seem perfectly reasonable to me. Using "totsufaren" instead of the correct spelling because the 't' sound is already in 'tot' destroys consistency with hinzufahren, auszufahren. And I'm not convinced that 'oi' and 'eu' represent the same sound in German, since 'eu' is a diphthong and always sounds long, whereas 'oi' is a short vowel followed by a glide: [oᶦ].
- bloak 5y ago
  > I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. Represent the pronunciation accurately, or the children's pronunciation accurately? It's a bit more interesting in English because a common mistake in English is to pronounce a word as it's spelt. For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent ... OK, that's me being prescriptive, but well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. I suppose parents and teachers have different incentives here: parents want their children to resemble them, make a good impression, and sound educated; teachers want the children in their care to get good marks in written tests and exams. Knowing how to spell diarrhoea is less important nowadays in real life, because of computers. If you don't want to look stupid you still have to know it's guerrilla marketing rather than gorilla marketing, though. Computer will tell you how many Rs in guerrilla.
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    > Well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. If you are going to teach the hoi polloi to write, and make an issue over spelling, this sort of thing seems predictable, though two centuries seems a long time for it to become noticable.
    - dctoedt 5y ago
      I love the term "the hoi polloi." Yes, technically the English word the is redundant (because the Greek word hoi is also "the"). But the redundancy makes the term more-quickly understandable. From a UI/UX perspective — with the correct primary goal being not slavish brevity but service to the reader — here the redundancy is a good thing. (Cf. "ATM machine.")
      - dunham 5y ago
        Yeah, my pet theory is that English has naturally evolved to repeat the last word of acronyms to disambiguate them.
  - 5y ago
oytis 5y ago
Quite the opposite, there are some dialects (e.g. Vologda dialect) where they are pronounced differently, there is a term for that, it's called "о́канье". But the norm is that a native speaker can't differentiate between the two unless he/she has other clues apart from the sound of it. I can imagine you can detect slight unconscious difference that an educated native speaker introduces by means of computer analysis of sound samples etc., but it's not a phonetically significant difference for a human.

by bloak 5y ago

yorwba 5y ago

> If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. E.g. take the example on page 2 of http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminare/sse_stufen.pdf http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminar... : LOITETOTSUFARENiSTLBÖD. In Standard German, that would be "Leute totzufahren ist blöd." Except for switching L and B, the original isn't wrong about the pronunciation: <eu> represents [ɔʏ] and <z> represents [ts], so using <oi> and <ts> instead is perfectly reasonable.

tremon 5y ago
It doesn't seem perfectly reasonable to me. Using "totsufaren" instead of the correct spelling because the 't' sound is already in 'tot' destroys consistency with hinzufahren, auszufahren. And I'm not convinced that 'oi' and 'eu' represent the same sound in German, since 'eu' is a diphthong and always sounds long, whereas 'oi' is a short vowel followed by a glide: [oᶦ].
bloak 5y ago
> I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. Represent the pronunciation accurately, or the children's pronunciation accurately? It's a bit more interesting in English because a common mistake in English is to pronounce a word as it's spelt. For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent ... OK, that's me being prescriptive, but well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. I suppose parents and teachers have different incentives here: parents want their children to resemble them, make a good impression, and sound educated; teachers want the children in their care to get good marks in written tests and exams. Knowing how to spell diarrhoea is less important nowadays in real life, because of computers. If you don't want to look stupid you still have to know it's guerrilla marketing rather than gorilla marketing, though. Computer will tell you how many Rs in guerrilla.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  > Well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. If you are going to teach the hoi polloi to write, and make an issue over spelling, this sort of thing seems predictable, though two centuries seems a long time for it to become noticable.
  - dctoedt 5y ago
    I love the term "the hoi polloi." Yes, technically the English word the is redundant (because the Greek word hoi is also "the"). But the redundancy makes the term more-quickly understandable. From a UI/UX perspective — with the correct primary goal being not slavish brevity but service to the reader — here the redundancy is a good thing. (Cf. "ATM machine.")
    - dunham 5y ago
      Yeah, my pet theory is that English has naturally evolved to repeat the last word of acronyms to disambiguate them.
- 5y ago

oytis 5y ago

Quite the opposite, there are some dialects (e.g. Vologda dialect) where they are pronounced differently, there is a term for that, it's called "о́канье". But the norm is that a native speaker can't differentiate between the two unless he/she has other clues apart from the sound of it. I can imagine you can detect slight unconscious difference that an educated native speaker introduces by means of computer analysis of sound samples etc., but it's not a phonetically significant difference for a human.