7 ms·
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folk
by taeric 1y ago
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet.
And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea.
Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoAt least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.
- palmfacehn 1y agoThe confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay". The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.
- dinfinity 1y agoEh. Only sometimes. Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing. English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.
- wmgries 1y agoSome Americans clearly must do this, but personally, I've never heard this in my life until I saw it on a YouTube video of a British person complaining how Americans pronounce words. Obviously, your experience may vary - it's a big country.
- palmfacehn 1y agoThe transatlantic dispute over "aluminum/aluminium" seems minor when you consider how English is used globally. Even within Britain, there are considerable variations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Anglosphere_Map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Anglos...
- tracker1 1y agoThe one that gets me, as an American is nuclear vs nucular. Both have been in use verbally and written for decades... academics have adopted the former, even if the latter was more common in most early use. And that's just one, pretty recent example.
- Thorrez 1y ago>It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language Which is worse, being unable to correctly pronounce a word (but still being close enough to be understandable) or being completely unable to write a word? https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago...we all agree that the right pronunciation of "nitch" is "neesh", though, or at least I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary. People just genuinely don't know how to pronounce it because they've only seen it written. One that still gets me personally is "hyperbole"--I know how it's pronounced but when I read it, I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not. I don't think I've ever made the mistake while reading out loud to someone yet, but it will likely happen some day and when it does I will feel very stupid.
- dtech 1y agoI'd argue that is mostly because 1) people follow audiobook or TV series pronunciations and 2) most discussions happen online and not in verbal form. This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoAs someone who has listened to The Stormlight Archive (and The Wheel of Time with the same two narrators), the differences are absolutely there, but they're relatively small. Fantasy novels predate the widespread popularity of audiobooks. It used to be quite expensive to distribute a large enough volume of audio. The old "books on tape" cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.
- jawilson2 1y ago"It's pronounced Jandalf!"
- bee_rider 1y agoI don’t think he could be taken seriously with a name like Yandalf.
- dctoedt 1y agoReminiscent of a tweet about the death of the inventor of the GIF, who reportedly said it should be pronounced "jif" — the retweeter's comment was, "I guess he's with Jod." https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818 https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818 (not there anymore; maybe the account holder ditched Twitter)
- throw7 1y agocue GIF pronunciation war.
- coev 1y agoIt's not pronounced "jraphics interchange format", therefore hard G
- cobbaut 1y agoAnd yet it is gif like in gin and giraffe...
- trealira 1y agoAnd yet there's also girl, gift, gimp, gill, gibbon, and giggle.
- cobbaut 1y agoBut but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right? TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.
- trealira 1y ago> But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right? Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs. > TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin. You learn something new every day!
- pif 1y ago> English is not a phonetic language. Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is. The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.
- taeric 1y agoCounter point, anyone that claims English isn't a phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing system is. Or what a gesture language is.
- pif 1y agoI'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.
- taeric 1y agoThat isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
- pif 1y agoI have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
- taeric 1y agoNo it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc. Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
- WalterBright 1y agoI learned to read phonetically, sounding out the words. It worked very well. No other scheme for learning to read has worked remotely as well.
- bell-cot 1y agoNo Professor or "expert" in the Education field ever advanced their own career by advocating for simple & obvious things which actually worked. /s?
- taeric 1y agoI think I was too swayed by Sold a Story; but I am heavily convinced that the non phonics based attempts to teach reading was a massive disaster. And not just for reading literature, but also for reading math. Without learning to effectively interact with symbols, people grow to think they either get the math or they don't.
- coffeeling 1y agoYeah, English orthography is a hot mess, but it's still fundamentally phonetic and alphabetic. Just try to learn to read Japanese or Chinese, and you'll very quickly come to miss English's pile of nonsense.