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One thing on the rhyming - you say on one page it rimes with 'lover' and on another that it rhymes with 'hover'. In many people's accents, these are spoken quit
by JBorrow 5y ago
One thing on the rhyming - you say on one page it rimes with 'lover' and on another that it rhymes with 'hover'. In many people's accents, these are spoken quite differently...
- cmckn 5y agoI know you’re correct, but I cannot for the life of me remember or imagine how people pronounce these differently, even after having it explained many times. Is “hover” done like “over” (long ‘o’)?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- have_faith 5y agoHo as in hot, lo sounds like lu from lush.
- Ballas 5y agoI think hov-er and huv-er.
- cromulent 5y agoLover (and plover, the bird) are pronounced with the "o" sounding the same as the "u" in "cut" or "gut" or "puck". Hover is pronounced with the "o" as in "hop" or "hot".
- jhgb 5y ago...and this is why IPA was invented.
- celticninja 5y agoIndian pale ale? Seems like this has upset some people. https://www.google.com/search?q=ipa&oq=ipa&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0i273j0i433l3.1799j0j4&client=ms-android-xiaomi-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=ipa&oq=ipa&aqs=chrome.0.69i5... First hit on Google is for India Pale Ales. I always heard the phonetic alphabet referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet. It doesn't seem very international given that it is entirely in English. Also Russia has its own version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_spelling_alphabet#:~:text=The%20Russian%20spelling%20alphabet%20is,army%2C%20navy%20and%20the%20police https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_spelling_alphabet#:~.... So IPA is a bit of a misnomer I feel.
- danaris 5y agoThe International Phonetic Alphabet isn't just "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie"—in fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with the NATO "Phonetic Alphabet", and anywhere you heard that referred to as the International Phonetic Alphabet was just simply wrong. It's an actual alphabet, designed to represent all the phonemes humans actually use in speech—not just in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
- celticninja 5y agoEither way the acronym is ambiguous at best.
- jhgb 5y agoHow is IPA ambiguous when talking about pronunciations of words?
- celticninja 5y agoWell I googled IPA and the first Wikipedia hit (2nd result) was India Pale Ale, which is the acronym I am familiar with. The first link was to https://ipa.co.uk https://ipa.co.uk Web results The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising: IPA So I think calling it ambiguous is ok, you are if course free to disagree, but what I said wasn't fundamentally incorrect. But it seems like HN has a bee in its bonnet.
- patmorgan23 5y agoIf someone has no idea what IPA is, how are they supposed to figure it out when there's a bunch of other things that have the same acronym?
- patmorgan23 5y agoAlso, ALL acronyms are ambiguous. That's why it's best practice to say the actual thing you're talking about then put the acronym next to it the first time it's used.
- j1elo 5y agoFun fact: the "o" [in "lover"] sounding the same as the "u" in "cut" is actually an "a" in spanish.
- Y_Y 5y agoNot in my accent! I think you'll have to be more specific. (both accents fairly neutral, English from England, Spanish from Spain)
- j1elo 5y agoThat's curious. I have never heard the word "cut" being pronounced without the "a" sound (in the vecinity of how "cat" sounds in "category") by someone who had a neutral English accent. Where is it from?
- jaclaz 5y agoAs fun as that, also in italian. Though of course the British pronounciation of vowels is far from being as "clear cut" as in spanish or italian.
- cannam 5y ago> Is “hover” done like “over” (long ‘o’)? No, it's not that - at least in British English - referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English, "hover" uses ɒ ("LOT, blockade, song") while "lover" uses ʌ ("STRUT, untidy, trustee, sung"). In British English, plover (the bird) rhymes with lover but not with hover. I always have difficulties in the opposite direction, namely imagining how such vowels can be merged - a classic for me was a programming manual once that told me "char" (the keyword) should be pronounced care, "like the start of the word character". Confused the heck out of me, since where I come from the vowel at the start of the word character is nothing like the one in care.
- jacobolus 5y agoThis British pronunciation of hover https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/hover https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/hover does not sound at all like the vowel in 'lot' or 'song'.
- lucian1900 5y agoLook up lot and song on the same website, it’s the same vowel. Then compare with lover, an entirely different vowel is pronounced.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jacobolus 5y agoI did look up lot and song at the same website. The audio examples of British pronunciations provided for those two words use an entirely different vowel sound.
- leoedin 5y agoI'm British, and sitting at my desk saying "hover" "lot" "song" over and over again. They're definitely very close. I say hover like hoh-ver, which is very similar to the vowel I say in lot (loh-t) and song (soh-ng).
- bdwjn 5y agoJust don't pronounce the P as a separate letter.
- wyattpeak 5y agoI don't think that's the problem the clarification is designed to address. A plover is a type of bird, and in some accents it doesn't rhyme with either lover or hover. Nevertheless, the parent is right, in my accent hover and lover don't rhyme either. All three have different vowels.
- taejo 5y agoIn my accent, lover, hover and clover have three different vowels in the first syllable. Plover rhymes with lover for me. Does it rhyme with clover for you?
- wyattpeak 5y agoYeah, it does. I suspect it's not the standard pronunciation in my region, since Wiktionary lists it as an alternative American pronunciation and I'm Australian, but for whatever reason that's how I pronounce it.
- SamBam 5y agoI expect that many people pronounce "plover" as "clover" if they saw it written down first before they heard someone who knows the pronunciation say it. There are plenty of words like that in English. I pronounced it as rhyming with "clover" too before learning that it's actually incorrect.
- wyattpeak 5y agoThat's possible too, though I don't subscribe to the idea that a widely used pronunciation can be incorrect.
- taejo 5y ago
- madeofpalk 5y agoIt's funny because I wouldn't have thought twice about how to pronounce it if it just never mentioned the rhyming thing, but now I can't stop saying plover, hover, lover. Plover, hover, lover. I've never seen a title like "Redis (rhymes with "Candice") is an in-memory..."
- wongarsu 5y agoBut you have probably noticed that close to nobody pronounces debian correctly (deb-ian, like the names), or gif (whichever is right), or PNG (ping), or the people pronouncing dogecoin as dog-e-coin, etc. Confusion about how to pronounce something is extremely common, due to most open source communication happening in written form, and English being a weird language where pronunciation and spelling seem mostly unrelated to each other.
- 7952 5y agoMaybe we need to have a latin/binomial nomenclature like in species naming. So pluvialis apricaria instead of golden plover. mensa elephantus for PostgreSQL. mensa parvus for SQLite. The purpose is to have an agreed name in all languages, and not worry much about pronounciation. Now what about Oracle...
- chaosite 5y agomensa pythia?
- arthurcolle 5y agomensa diabolica?
- imron 5y agoAnd both options are different to how I first read it (rhymes with clover).
- SamBam 5y agoThat's how I always pronounced the bird (rhyming with clover), but looking it up now, it does actually rhyme with "lover." It's just "lover" with a "p" in front. (And it's the same for US vs British English, that is, they can both use the rule "p + lover" and pronounce it correctly respectively.) "Hover" is more ambiguous, though. It can rhyme with "lover" or have a rounder "o" sound.
- whatever1 5y agoFreaking English. Can't we revamp the dictionary to make the alphabet truly phonetic? So many of the words have dubious pronunciation. To the point that if you have just read a word in a book, there is no guarantee that you can pronounce it.
- Symmetry 5y agoNot while using an alphabet with just 5 vowel letters. Switching to IPA would do the job, though.
- TchoBeer 5y ago5 vowels, and then 25 more vowel combinations (e.g. ea)
- Symmetry 5y agoI don't think those 25 combinations are enough to cover all the cases of unique vowel sounds, diphthongs, and pairs of distinct adjacent vowels that you find in English. 'ea' for instance is ambiguous between sounds like those in 'great', 'deal', and 'creatine'.
- resoluteteeth 5y agoThat's impossible to some degree because English pronunciation varies so much across dialects. Or rather, you could make writing phonetic but then spelling would have to vary by dialect.
- bloak 5y agoYes, they are different in standard British English: hover /ˈhɒvə/ lover /ˈlʌvə/ rover /ˈrəʊvə/ The bird "plover" is like "lover": /ˈplʌvə/
- afandian 5y agoNot only that, but (at a guess) I'd say think the southern /ʌ/ sound in Plover might come out more /ɔ/ in northern English? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arxanas 5y agoThis is an oversight. We settled on "lover" a while ago for this reason, it should be updated.
- nawgz 5y agoHuh, I learn something new each day. I definitely would consider these words to be "very" rhyming and can't even envision which one mutates in other accents. Thanks!