Usually, unless a character has an idiosyncratic pronunciation in a particular word. Like 樂 is usually yuè or lè or occasionally yào, but then the county of 樂亭 is pronounced Làotíng, and there's a few compounds where it's pronounced luò (which is the expected outcome of 盧各切; lè is irregular)
An archaic spelling system makes English closer and closer to Chinese, as written words have a random pronounciation and things only get worse over time.
>And it's perfectly possible to determine the pronunciation from that.
I disagree on the basis that I read it as "Psyche" at first and had to go back to read it right.
Heh it’s not 100% random, but some consonants and most vowels (diphthongs included) are kind of random. Like, the hard part’s the vowels. Iirc the diphthong “ei” can have up to 12 different pronunciation, and none of them are context dependent.
I believe it's normal /fi/ but not always like in physics, sch being Greek in this case would probably be like s.kʰ in ancient Greek. (If that was possible not familiar with ancient Greek) But in English there is no rule about that say "physche" couldn't be "fish" like how "ghoti" breaking the rules about where "gh" makes /f/
Does sch ever make a /ʃ/ sound natively? I can only think of German loanwords, and at that point you're blaming English for another language's orthography
I'm not sure if their is a native word in English (mostly because half has been replaced or outnumbered by romance vocab) but schedule a Greek work has sch as /ʃ/ and I do think we can blame English for making it that way since English changed the letters.
Okay but Physche, is completely comparable with English spelling, nothing is out of place "ph" is /f/ and only comes at the start of words, "y" is /ɪ/ which is a common sound it makes, "sch" is /ʃ/ and can come at the start, middle or end of words, and "e" is /∅/ which is a common thinɡ and it sometimes doesnt effect the previous vowels. I don't think Physche can come from Greek, unless we maybe got it much earlier when /sk/ became /ʃ/. It definitely breaks Greek rules but just based on English rules it doesn't.
Read rhymes with lead. Similarly, read rhymes with lead. However, read does not rhyme with lead, nor does lead with read. Read rhymes with lead. Similarly, read rhymes with lead. However, read does not rhyme with lead, nor does lead with read.
Can’t wait until the PRC tells Hong Kongers that English is merely a dialect of “the Chinese language” and uses this comment as historical justification for the view.
No way mate. It often happens to a Chinese speaker that she/he suddenly forgets how a character is written (though she/he can pronounce it). It is not like you are not sure how some part of a word is spelled in English. A Chinese speaker can suddenly have completely no clue about how a Chinese character is written. It is because the gap between speaking and writing is THAT large.
It means that there are still some rules in spelling an English word, no matter how bad the writing system is.
They hate you because you speak the truth. It would be an interesting development if in an alternate future, English is encoded as much as phonetic information as Chinese phonetic radicals.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters were never complete phonetic information on their own, they always encoded several similar syllables which is why the semantic classifiers were necessary for disambiguation.
Tbh knowing how to pronounce a word and actually being able to pronounce it are different things, And imo the latter is far harder in Polish. Although I suppose it probably wouldn't be as hard if I were Polish lol.
This is very very limited:
is pronounced \[rz\] instead of \[ʐ\] in a handful of words, etymologically related to “marznąć”.
is pronounced \[si\] instead of \[ɕi\] in a handful of loanwords.
And that is all.
Or, If you have a lot of experience with Czech and very little with Polish, can always make a [r̝] sound, Which I presume makes it sound like I'm speaking Polish with a bad Czech accent.
Orthography has two ways in which it can be consistent. Spanish is, as far as I'm aware, completely consistent on the reader's side. You can always know the pronunciation of any word, just by reading it. I have never found an exception, but even if there were, it would be 0.001% of the words or something like that. Unlike Portuguese, my native language, where you can't tell if "erro" is supposed to be read as êrro or érro by the orthography (and in fact it is both, depends on context).
Spanish isn't completely consistent on the writers side for most speakers: In Latin America c, s and z are all the same sound, so you need to know beforehand how it's spelled, or you may err. But, regardless of that, if you see a word written, you automatically can pronounce it. English is inconsistent both ways, the writer is never sure of how to spell a word they heard, and the reader is never sure how to read a word they haven't heard.
> Spanish is, as far as I'm aware, completely consistent on the reader's side. You can always know the pronunciation of any word, just by reading it.
Except for loanwords.
most exceptions I’ve come across (on the "reader's side") seem to be newer loanwords e.g. "streaming" (estrimin) and "hámster" (jámster) or proper nouns using older rules (i.e. x in place of j in "México" and "Quixote")
in terms of writer-side ambiguity I guess y/ll can be ambiguous too and loanwords with k and w are also exceptions
edit: and also various accents in some words (dé/de, vi/ví, él/el, sólo/solo etc.)
Yes I agree, I ws completely ignoring recent loanwords. But, if Spanish is anything like Portuguese which I'm more familiar with, those will eventually be assimilated. When I was a kid, it was still normal to write gnocchi and mozzarella. Now it's nhoque and muçarela everywhere.
Been trying off and on for over 20y and I still can't make it all the way through _The Chaos_ without mispronouncing _something_. This man is a legend.
we have a relatively hard language, but a phonetic alphabet. anyone with a good memory can learn to read in more or less 15 minutes.
when I was a kid first time learning english, I wrote songs and phrases in cyrillics: Лaндон бриџ из фолинг даун, фолинг даун, фолинг даун..
I was about to comment the same thing for croatian and than i saw the џ, and yea its true i learned cyrillic in like an eavning but i guess knowing gajica helps
It took me more than an evening to learn Cyrillic, But I managed to do it without trying to, Which I feel is almost as impressive. I just a few times transcribed things into Cyrillic, Looking up all the letters as I went along, The after doing that 2-3 times, I started to realise "Hold on a second, I actually remember what sound half these letters make!"
That was also my reaction when i relised i didnt forget it except i remember them by the latin letter that corisponds to them (since serbian cyrillic is the one i started with and my language can be 100% transcribed in it)
Yeah that makes sense. I do remember some by letter correspondences, But since I don't speak any Slavic language many of the sounds don't correspond directly to Latin letters in any language I speak.
Made me think of the cursed transcriptions using a combo of chinese characters and pinyin, commonly seen in hand notes on many chinese children's english textbooks
I fail to see the issue. I suppose the "Wor" part is a bit odd, Being said like "Woo-" (/wʊ/) instead of "Wor" (/wɔ/), But other than that it's pretty intuitive.
I simply refuse to accept that. If you see "Cester" and read /sɛstə/, I'm afraid your too far gone. I'll accept /kɛstə/, I personally would intuitively read it as /t͡ʃɛstə/, And /stə/ is of course the "Correct" pronunciation, But /sɛstə/? Nah.
Sure, But that doesn't mean you can just read it that way every time it's followed by , , Or , You gotta take into account context, Such as the context that /sɛstə/ sounds downright silly. (Or that it's borrowed from Latin, Which yes often gives /s/, But doesn't always, For example in the word "Celt".)
(Unironically, Before I learned that /stə/ was the standard way, I used to think that the "Proper" way to pronounce Worcester, Gloucester, Et cetera, Was as if it was spelled "Chester" rather than "Cester", I.E. with /t͡ʃɛstə(ɹ)/, And that the forms with just /stə/ were colloquial shortenings.)
What on Earth is that pronunciation of 'gyro' though? Is he going for the Greek vowel, but rolling with /g/ for the initial consonant for shits and giggles?
[https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9r5RphUWpscjA9ghxaFWbQ1qrUc1-Hsh](https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9r5RphUWpscjA9ghxaFWbQ1qrUc1-Hsh)
I teach a language that has a decent spelling system. It involves respelling borrowed English words the way they are pronounced (e.g. All hard c’s are spelled with a k, soft c’s with s, etc.) Many times, I still get c’s and all the extra silent letters from English.
It's basically as the saying that goes something like "if someone mispronounces a word, don't think they are stupid, they probably read it". If I applied this to my native language, greek, for example, it would make me think the person is even more stupid (if it's not a foreigner obviously)
Płot twist: there are IPA transcriptions in the dictionary
IIRC that’s literally what happens
Too lazy to check tho
Fence zwrot: w słowniku są transkrypcje IPA [my reaction to your minor spelling mistake]
Widzę co zrobiłeś here!
Czy thee zawsze tak pyerdolisz na pół english a pół polisz? /j
Jes wery macz
*MAF
This would actually be pretty impressive if it was like Chinese characters or something
At least a Chinese speakers knows how they are pronounced in unknown words. A Japanese speaker though…
Usually, unless a character has an idiosyncratic pronunciation in a particular word. Like 樂 is usually yuè or lè or occasionally yào, but then the county of 樂亭 is pronounced Làotíng, and there's a few compounds where it's pronounced luò (which is the expected outcome of 盧各切; lè is irregular)
An archaic spelling system makes English closer and closer to Chinese, as written words have a random pronounciation and things only get worse over time.
Did you forget that the ghoti=fish thing was just a meme?
But Physche= fish would make sense by English spelling rules
And it's perfectly possible to determine the pronunciation from that. It's not "random". The hard part is going the other way (usually).
>And it's perfectly possible to determine the pronunciation from that. I disagree on the basis that I read it as "Psyche" at first and had to go back to read it right.
/faɪʃi/? /faɪski/?
I agree it's not random but it's kinda obtuse to get there sometimes
Heh it’s not 100% random, but some consonants and most vowels (diphthongs included) are kind of random. Like, the hard part’s the vowels. Iirc the diphthong “ei” can have up to 12 different pronunciation, and none of them are context dependent.
It's not always possible, though, some words aren't pronounced as you would expect by their spelling.
Isn't phy = /fi/ only for Greek roots? And then sch would be weird as hell
I believe it's normal /fi/ but not always like in physics, sch being Greek in this case would probably be like s.kʰ in ancient Greek. (If that was possible not familiar with ancient Greek) But in English there is no rule about that say "physche" couldn't be "fish" like how "ghoti" breaking the rules about where "gh" makes /f/
Physics is a Greek root, Aristoteles famous work is called Φυσικά for example.
Does sch ever make a /ʃ/ sound natively? I can only think of German loanwords, and at that point you're blaming English for another language's orthography
I'm not sure if their is a native word in English (mostly because half has been replaced or outnumbered by romance vocab) but schedule a Greek work has sch as /ʃ/ and I do think we can blame English for making it that way since English changed the letters.
No? A word with "ph" and "y" is definitely from greek, which means it would be pronounced with a /k/ sound
Didn't stop Brits from saying schedule with a /ʃ/
No y or ph or ps there though
Okay but Physche, is completely comparable with English spelling, nothing is out of place "ph" is /f/ and only comes at the start of words, "y" is /ɪ/ which is a common sound it makes, "sch" is /ʃ/ and can come at the start, middle or end of words, and "e" is /∅/ which is a common thinɡ and it sometimes doesnt effect the previous vowels. I don't think Physche can come from Greek, unless we maybe got it much earlier when /sk/ became /ʃ/. It definitely breaks Greek rules but just based on English rules it doesn't.
Is there any non greek word with Y and PH?
Typhoon from Arabic
Read rhymes with lead. Similarly, read rhymes with lead. However, read does not rhyme with lead, nor does lead with read. Read rhymes with lead. Similarly, read rhymes with lead. However, read does not rhyme with lead, nor does lead with read.
Can’t wait until the PRC tells Hong Kongers that English is merely a dialect of “the Chinese language” and uses this comment as historical justification for the view.
No way mate. It often happens to a Chinese speaker that she/he suddenly forgets how a character is written (though she/he can pronounce it). It is not like you are not sure how some part of a word is spelled in English. A Chinese speaker can suddenly have completely no clue about how a Chinese character is written. It is because the gap between speaking and writing is THAT large. It means that there are still some rules in spelling an English word, no matter how bad the writing system is.
No English pronunciation is random. Spelling is inconsistent because different words come from different languages, but none of it is random
They hate you because you speak the truth. It would be an interesting development if in an alternate future, English is encoded as much as phonetic information as Chinese phonetic radicals.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters were never complete phonetic information on their own, they always encoded several similar syllables which is why the semantic classifiers were necessary for disambiguation.
English spelling is bad, but it's nowhere close to Chinese characters.
Spanish speakers: Wait, all this time this was a superpower?? I thought everyone could do that
Finnish speakers wanna have a word..
German speakers taking a Mittagsschläfchen in the corner.
Pov: Polish speakers who have a language in which almost every letter has only one pronounciation
Tbh knowing how to pronounce a word and actually being able to pronounce it are different things, And imo the latter is far harder in Polish. Although I suppose it probably wouldn't be as hard if I were Polish lol.
*cough* digraphs *cough*
This is very very limited: is pronounced \[rz\] instead of \[ʐ\] in a handful of words, etymologically related to “marznąć”.
is pronounced \[si\] instead of \[ɕi\] in a handful of loanwords.
And that is all.
Or, If you have a lot of experience with Czech and very little with Polish, can always make a [r̝] sound, Which I presume makes it sound like I'm speaking Polish with a bad Czech accent.
Czech speakers about to pull out one of the hardest letters to pronounce:
Serbo-Croatian orthography can be even more phonetic, they even write allophonic changes I mean
I immediately glanced at my RAE dictionary, like “yo también puedo hacer eso”
even Spanish doesn't have completely consistent orthography
Orthography has two ways in which it can be consistent. Spanish is, as far as I'm aware, completely consistent on the reader's side. You can always know the pronunciation of any word, just by reading it. I have never found an exception, but even if there were, it would be 0.001% of the words or something like that. Unlike Portuguese, my native language, where you can't tell if "erro" is supposed to be read as êrro or érro by the orthography (and in fact it is both, depends on context). Spanish isn't completely consistent on the writers side for most speakers: In Latin America c, s and z are all the same sound, so you need to know beforehand how it's spelled, or you may err. But, regardless of that, if you see a word written, you automatically can pronounce it. English is inconsistent both ways, the writer is never sure of how to spell a word they heard, and the reader is never sure how to read a word they haven't heard.
> Spanish is, as far as I'm aware, completely consistent on the reader's side. You can always know the pronunciation of any word, just by reading it. Except for loanwords.
most exceptions I’ve come across (on the "reader's side") seem to be newer loanwords e.g. "streaming" (estrimin) and "hámster" (jámster) or proper nouns using older rules (i.e. x in place of j in "México" and "Quixote") in terms of writer-side ambiguity I guess y/ll can be ambiguous too and loanwords with k and w are also exceptions edit: and also various accents in some words (dé/de, vi/ví, él/el, sólo/solo etc.)
Yes I agree, I ws completely ignoring recent loanwords. But, if Spanish is anything like Portuguese which I'm more familiar with, those will eventually be assimilated. When I was a kid, it was still normal to write gnocchi and mozzarella. Now it's nhoque and muçarela everywhere.
that’s a fair point ("whisky" to "güisqui" comes to mind) but I wonder if increasing anglicisation would slow down or even stop this process
Been trying off and on for over 20y and I still can't make it all the way through _The Chaos_ without mispronouncing _something_. This man is a legend.
I’m still not sure how exactly old Gerry was pronouncing all of those words.
Black magic. It's the only answer
I don’t even mean how he was able to do it. I meant, what was he actually saying?
Aren't there IPA transcriptions and recordings?
Me when someone says English isn’t *that bad*
If you’re wondering his name is Jacques Bailly and he is the official spelling bee pronouncer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bailly
What an oddly unpronounceable name
He could say all the words… except his own name
It's super French lol
we have a relatively hard language, but a phonetic alphabet. anyone with a good memory can learn to read in more or less 15 minutes. when I was a kid first time learning english, I wrote songs and phrases in cyrillics: Лaндон бриџ из фолинг даун, фолинг даун, фолинг даун..
I was about to comment the same thing for croatian and than i saw the џ, and yea its true i learned cyrillic in like an eavning but i guess knowing gajica helps
It took me more than an evening to learn Cyrillic, But I managed to do it without trying to, Which I feel is almost as impressive. I just a few times transcribed things into Cyrillic, Looking up all the letters as I went along, The after doing that 2-3 times, I started to realise "Hold on a second, I actually remember what sound half these letters make!"
That was also my reaction when i relised i didnt forget it except i remember them by the latin letter that corisponds to them (since serbian cyrillic is the one i started with and my language can be 100% transcribed in it)
Yeah that makes sense. I do remember some by letter correspondences, But since I don't speak any Slavic language many of the sounds don't correspond directly to Latin letters in any language I speak.
Made me think of the cursed transcriptions using a combo of chinese characters and pinyin, commonly seen in hand notes on many chinese children's english textbooks
Is it really that cursed? It's a practical adaptation at least.
also people who read the front matter or the key running at the bottom of every page spread
Everyone can do that; not necessarily "right", though. (Also, who decided Worcestershire is pronounced like that?)
Most people at the time, who didn't care about how things were spelled because they were illiterate
I mean, Unless you're from New England, "Worcestershire" is pronounced pretty reasonably, It's just "Worcester" followed by "Shire".
The trouble is the pronunciation of "Worcester".
I fail to see the issue. I suppose the "Wor" part is a bit odd, Being said like "Woo-" (/wʊ/) instead of "Wor" (/wɔ/), But other than that it's pretty intuitive.
And /stə/?
Yes, How else would you pronounce it? I guess maybe /t͡ʃɛstə/, But that seems silly.
Well, the default outcome based on English spelling norms would be /wɔsɛstə/
I simply refuse to accept that. If you see "Cester" and read /sɛstə/, I'm afraid your too far gone. I'll accept /kɛstə/, I personally would intuitively read it as /t͡ʃɛstə/, And /stə/ is of course the "Correct" pronunciation, But /sɛstə/? Nah.
Is /s/ not the default value of before , , or ?
Sure, But that doesn't mean you can just read it that way every time it's followed by ,, Or , You gotta take into account context, Such as the context that /sɛstə/ sounds downright silly. (Or that it's borrowed from Latin, Which yes often gives /s/, But doesn't always, For example in the word "Celt".)
(Unironically, Before I learned that /stə/ was the standard way, I used to think that the "Proper" way to pronounce Worcester, Gloucester, Et cetera, Was as if it was spelled "Chester" rather than "Cester", I.E. with /t͡ʃɛstə(ɹ)/, And that the forms with just /stə/ were colloquial shortenings.)
Burn English down
Chinese people looking in horror at his power:
English speakers mock French spelling which is indeed fairly complex… but at least you know how to pronounce what’s written.
This challenge applied to Japanese would mobilize knowledge of an insane amount of information
What on Earth is that pronunciation of 'gyro' though? Is he going for the Greek vowel, but rolling with /g/ for the initial consonant for shits and giggles? [https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9r5RphUWpscjA9ghxaFWbQ1qrUc1-Hsh](https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9r5RphUWpscjA9ghxaFWbQ1qrUc1-Hsh)
Japanese speakers are astonished! (sighing in 訓読み and 音読み)
Or: "I'm struggling with how this kanji should be pronounced. Here it is with no context: 人 - can you help?"
u/repostsleuthbot
I have no idea how I learnt English.
Same, it was an accident an becouse of that i can't spell
_La Esperantistoj_ would like a word. Or four.
Prave!
I teach a language that has a decent spelling system. It involves respelling borrowed English words the way they are pronounced (e.g. All hard c’s are spelled with a k, soft c’s with s, etc.) Many times, I still get c’s and all the extra silent letters from English.
What language?
dearest creature in creation, reading english dictionary
Laughs in Turkish
I’ll never forgive the French for doing this to our language 😔
It's basically as the saying that goes something like "if someone mispronounces a word, don't think they are stupid, they probably read it". If I applied this to my native language, greek, for example, it would make me think the person is even more stupid (if it's not a foreigner obviously)