Spanish would never pull this BS on you.
The power of phonetic languages.
I don’t speak Spanish, but do Spanish authors pull the same shit English ones do, where they give characters absolutely nonsense names with ambiguous pronunciations? Is it even possible? I will read a name of a character or place and spend the next 20 chapters reading the word twice or three times in different ways.
My biggest gripe with spanish is J having the “ha” sound. Juan is spelled “Hoo-an”, Jesus is “Heh-zus”, etc. If you can get over that, the rest is mostly phonetically sound, like portuguese
Portuguese, to me, sounds like this: msh msh oowow msh msh. I love it.
It’s striking how different it sounds. I have knowledge of Latin, French and German, and Portuguese sounds way more like a German dialect on casual overhearing than the one it’s derived from or its modern descendant it’s closely related to!
I think you’ll find even in Spanish Juan is still spelled Juan and Jesus is still spelled Jesus.
The english language badly needs an orthography reform
Using an alphabet designed for Latin has had some dire consequences.
Well, German has almost as many vowels as English and we’re doing just fine I think. On the other hand, French orthography is similarly fucked up although it’s a direct descendent of Latin and they don’t even have any weird sounds they can’t write concisely. So I think its just a matter of trying.
Using a Latin alphabet. Using Germanic pronunciation. Borrowing words from Spanish. Stealing words from French. Changing accent to avoid sounding Gaelic.
I have always loved the analogy that English isn’t a language, it’s three bilingual children stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat and arguing about bologna.
I have heard it analogized that English is a language that follows other languages into dark alleys to beat them up and steal their words.
All languages do, English is just a title holder
laughs in a language that makes sense phonetically
Laffs.
Langwij.
Maeks
Senz.
Fonetikly.
Ai jenyuinely wish inglish woz laik thiz
Hooked on fanəks wurked four me.
Ai red þis wiþ a soudern akcent
Laughing phonetically
English speakers laugh at you too.
Don’t kill me, it’s a joke.
Bunch of y’all didn’t watch TV with the captions on.
None of my books even had an audio track?
You have to double tap to play it.
The colour Beige was my downfall 🙈
I did this, and grew up in a ESL English only house,I pronounce so many words wrong with a perfect American accent.
Which American accent? We talken west coast standard, East Coast standard, Appalachian, Yooper, Inland Imperial, Bakersfield, Rocky Mountain North or South ya gotta he more specific.
Some names would also throw me for a loop. When I first heard how they said “Hermione”, I was quite flabbergasted.
Do you pronounce Ginny like gif or gif?
It took a long time for me to realize its basically Jenny prounced a bit different.
Oh man, I loved Her-mi-own-ee. She was my favorite character
Same. I think the official pronunciation was just JK trolling.
Just wanna share this interesting and relevant thing.
Fuck, it’s me
Unless, of course, they read books that exist just to tell you how to pronounce words. I remember seeing a gigantic book on display at a Borders years ago that was nothing but odd (and often very large medical term) words and how to pronounce them.
This is 100% my girlfriend, and I take great pleasure in never correcting her, I find it charming.
Better than my one friend. He seems to only correct pronunciations. It’s gotten to the point that he denies idioms if he hasn’t heard of them before. I don’t actively seek him out anymore.
Thing is, I know she knows exactly what she is saying. The context is correct, she knows what the words mean, she just didn’t grow up around people who spoke that wide a vocabulary, and while working in blue collar trades, she was looked down on for all them fancy college words.
She can swear with the best pipe fitters, well, because she was a union pipe fitter.
Language is so fluid, people who get too hung up on syntax and not the substance really annoy me.
When I was in the military, one of the smartest people I knew was from the bayou of Louisiana. To me, a yank, he sounded like a complete idiot, and in fact I often couldn’t understand him when we first met. Once I was able to look past his mode of speech, and actually listen to him, I realised what an ignorant fuck I was being.
Mine is full of ‘oreos’ (Oreoles), ‘emeralds’ (Admirals), ‘see-ment’ (cement), and very cute regionalisms like ‘roundy-rounds’ (roundabouts). I love it
That’s a slightly different phenomenon called a mondegreen (Hendrix singing ‘scuse me while I kiss this guy’ etc)
I feel like this is especially true for English since it seems to me there are no spelling rules that convey pronunciation. You can have 2 words spelled completely the same save from one letter and the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.
I’m not sure how this is in other languages, but in my native german (which is always said to be difficult to learn) when you understand the spelling rules you can always assume the correct pronunciation of a word. Certain letter combinations always amount to the same way of pronouncing it.
I guess this is because both languages started out in the germanic language family, but over the course of history english adapted way more from other languages and just made them their own. Including differences in spelling, but maybe not as much pronunciation. Best example is “Bologna”, which is still the italian/latin spelling, but no one near italy would call it “Baloney” .
I’m always amazed at how native speakers learn to write things like that, since you cant count on what you hear at all.
Anyone else say “ba-LO-na” for something with coarsely ground meat and heavier spice - e.g. “Lebanon Bologna” - and “ba-LO-nee” for the Oscar Mayer stuff?
You can have 2 words spelled completely the same
save from one letterand the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.ftfy:
if you read a lot then you’re well-read
The one that I mispronounced for awhile was hyperbole. I thought it was pronounced like “hyper bowl.”
Sounds like you never played Space Quest IV.
Facade. Got laughed for saying fac-aid. How am I supposed to know a c make an s sound.
That’s because it’s not the correct spelling. It should be “façade” but English keyboards lack the correct glyph. This doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it but it at least gives you a hint that you can’t use English rules and that you should investigate it further
But “hyperbolic” is exactly like you expect.
Segue for me. I pronounced it seg-goo and my mom busted out laughing.
Huh… don’t think I’ve ever seen segue written down. I’d be writing Segway if I had to.
Sounds like something you ride or a place that makes so so sandwiches.
Now that I think about it… it makes sense now! A segway is a segue between two places!
Exactly! A segue between the inventor’s life and death!
I was at the store with my partner and I was like
“What’s… kwee-know-ah?”
I’m still not 100% on how that is pronounced.
My partner looks at me and says… “KEEN-WAH???” and I’m like uhhh suuuure, that one…
I tend to read it as Sergey without the “r”.
I’ve heard segue being spoken in so many different ways that I have no fucking clue which is the correct. Se-geh, segway, se-goo-ee
The second one you wrote is the correct way to pronounce it.
That word’s spelling is a practical joke and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Challenge accepted: non-standard spellings are very common. I won’t use the obvious example, rough/though/through/tough/cough/enough/Gough, I’ll try to keep on theme. So give these ones a go: argue, vague, ague, merengue, brogue, chaise-longue, fatigue… are these all practical jokes or just accidents of lexicographic history?
What? Shit
Hi per Bol e (e as in how it sounds in see)
Man, this is ridiculous. It resembles Akkadian more and more with each passing day.
I came here to reed!
Epitome and Penchant for me. Mocked mercilessly for those two.
So apparently for the latter you can just claim to be using the american pronunciation https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/penchant
All mispronunciations can be defended with linguistic descriptivism. It’s usually a pissweak argument though!
Oh yeah, epitome for me too. It was the epi-tome.
Wait… it’s not??
I gotta check now: Oh god dammit. I never made the connection.
Mine was “banal”.
Sounds like “canal”.
Were you pronouncing it b-anal?
Bane-all
Of course not!
Sound it out they said
I did that one
The other one I was embarrassingly called out on when I was a teen was pronouncing inevitable in eh VITE able.
It’s like the Super Bowl, only better.
This is why I love spanish as my second language. You don’t have to guess what the word sounds like. Spelling and pronunciation always match.
Reading through Lovecraft’s (especially his earlier) work be like, “Hey Google! Define cacodaemoniacal…”
You’re gonna need to know what gambrelled roofs and gables are too. Dude loved his gambrells and gables.
I know how to pronounce that because I played DOOM
Caco = shit (same as caca/kaka in many European languages
Daemon = background program that does things without user input
-iacal = suffix turning the above into an adjective
So, Windows 11
Extremely loud and demonic.
Nah, Google would be like, "Sorry, I don’t understand. But I did find something else on the web. Did you mean “Cacodaemoniacal defined?”
Edit: Whoops, accidentally pasted in that word I couldn’t remember how to spell.
