#PRONUNCIATION

[thecurioustale]

love it when you look up a word’s pronunciation and only get the formal Linguist zalgotext-style version.

Yep. =[

It used to be that pronunciation guides were put there to help people pronounce words. Now they often serve as this weirdly passive-aggressive Brahminist virtue signaling prescriptivism. Gosh, that's a mouthful, but what I mean is that most people can't penetrate this crap, and the people who stick it there in place of a real pronunciation guide know this. They do it on purpose, under the paper-thin pretense of linguistic precision, basically because gatekeeping is a power trip.

In everyday usage—and here I'm only speaking of the American context; other English-speaking contexts can have their own parallel lanes when needed—people just need to be told the relatively short list of common vowels. That's 90% of the way there or better. More than good enough!

And when they are deprived access to a pronunciation guide they can actually understand, their only alternatives are to either not use the word, thus validating the gatekeeping and self-imposing the stratification, or to use it blindly and hope for the best.

This actually came up for me just a couple days ago. I wanted to double-check the standard English pronunciation of the Latin word extremus. Conceivably there isn't one, because there was no entry on Wiktionary for English usage and several other dictionary sites didn't have an entry at all. I only got as far as Wiktionary's Latin IPA Pronunciation Key, which, astoundingly, had no translation aids to offer for the English speaker at all, and no English-language sound examples. So either you already know the functions of the various IPA symbols, or you don't. And if you already know them, you would be looking up the key!

Wiktionary is my dictionary of first recourse online ever since Dictionary.com became so slow because of ads. I still prefer them for their content, but Wiktionary is very good too, and it loads instantly, even if it lacks near-fit search result capabilities (so you'd better know how to spell the words you look up exactly right!). But, yeah, they definitely have some weak spots inflicted by the local Brahmin. The good news is that the actual entries of words for use in English have a little more assistance available. But some of the other languages, not so much.

I think it's amazing that Wiktionary has English-language definitions of words in other languages at all! But it could use some accessibility improvements to be sure.

love it when you look up a word’s pronunciation and only get the formal Linguist zalgotext-style version. like damn i guess i’m not using that word.

[neosatsuma]

Let's talk phonics!

Every English vowel can make two basic sounds: what's called a short sound, and a long sound. Take the letter E, for example. A short E can be found in the words met, bet, and set. A long E can be found in the words meet, seat, and treat. (You might notice the two vowels in a row in these words; double vowels in English almost always make the vowel sound long!)

In standard American English, "coffee" is pronounced with a short O sound, such as in the words dog, log, and cough. The IPA symbol for this vowel sound is ɒ. An easy way to spell this sound without using IPA is "ah" -- as in when the doctor asks you to stick out your tongue and "say 'aahh!'"

This is not to be confused with the short A sound, as in the words apple, cat, and axe. The IPA symbol for this vowel sound is æ. An easy way to spell this sound without using IPA is simply "a" (with no "h" after it).

Accents will slightly (or largely) alter our vowel sounds and how we might think to spell them; "coffee" sounds different with a British accent than an American one. But now that we know how to talk about vowel sounds, let's rephrase:

Does "ko-fi" sound identical to "coffee" (typically, for Americans: a short O followed by a long E)?

Or does it rhyme with lo-fi (typically, for Americans: a long O followed by a long I)?

Or does it sound like something else?

[latinare]

How do we know/guess how Latin was pronounced?

I can't find the post where I talked about this before, but basically there are two ways.

1) Because Latin transitioned from a living language (in the Roman Empire) to the language of scholars and clerics (in the Middle Ages) without a gap, the pronunciation was passed down from teacher to student. It almost definitely shifted a bit over time though, due to human error and the lack of recording devices. This handed-down version is called Ecclesiastical Pronunciation.

2) In the early 20th century (iirc) scholars attempted to compensate for shifting pronunciation by reconstructing how Latin might have been pronounced in Ancient Rome. The version they came up with is called Classical Pronunciation.

There are valid reasons for choosing either pronunciation, and you'll meet latinists hotly in favour of each. 😜

[foldingfittedsheets]

I, like I suspect many of the tumblr populace, ran into the issue in my youth of reading a lot of words I never heard spoken. My vocabulary has always been above average but my implementation is often flawed.

Like the day I told my dad I was the epitome of something and he laughed in my face. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t correctly intuit the emphasis. (Mine was Ep-i-TOME vs Ep-i-to-ME).

My dad didn’t apologize for his rudeness but after my initial disgruntlement I just learned to roll with it. I’d get corrected and laugh it off. Some words were more frustrating though because it necessitated having to rework the word in my brain every time I read it. Like a few years ago when I learned I’d had “seneschal” wrong for decades. (I can’t explain why I thought it was sen-shull and not sen-es-shawl)

I learned that I had harbinger wrong during a Transformers movie without needing to embarrass myself. Thanks, Shia Lebouf. (Har-bing-er (wrong) made way more sense than har-binge-er (right) but no one asked me)

At this point in my life though I’ve managed to work out most of the kinks. I don’t often get corrected anymore.

But there’s one other snag that crops up between me and my beloved. I’ll confidently say a word and they’ll go, “That’s not how that’s pronounced.”

“Yes it is,” I’ll say, very firmly. Because in these cases I’ll generally have heard with my ears and repeated a word verbatim. I’ll know I heard it, so it can’t be wrong.

And pretty much every time I’ll be saying the British pronunciation instead of the American one. I’ve consumed enough British media that often it’s the only time I heard certain words said and I never realized American English handles it differently.

In some cases I’ll switch to the accepted American one. But they can pry machismo out of my cold dead hands, the American version is so stupid I can’t even handle it. I now recognize we stole the Spanish word but we made it worse.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[makewavesandwar]

Reblog to escape containment, just curious here!!

[worrywrite]

Let's settle this.... Once and for all!

Reblog to start a riot.

[gg-ladybug]

Unsolicited Miraculous Ladybug Headcanon: Adrien Agreste doesn’t know how to properly pronounce his own name. Sure, he SETTLES with one, but on a theoretical level, he has no idea with what intention he was named with.

Mind you, it’s not even because of anything nefarious— he just had two very different nationalities for parents. The French and British pronunciations were used interchangeably, because Emilie and Gabriel often argued on a daily basis about how Adrien is ‘supposed’ to be said. (Have you ever seen an Englishman and a Frenchman argue about culture? It’s thermonuclear.)

Ah-dree-uhn vs Ay-dree-uhn is a battle that has been waged within the Agreste household for years

(Based on a very real conversation I had with a English-French person named Adrien on my trip to France)

[culmaer]

*NOTES : I know, the precise realisation of /ʌ/ varies a lot by dialect but don't worry about that. I'm mostly curious about /g/ vs /dʒ/ and /i:/ vs /aɪ/

if you're an non-native speaker, choose how you'd say it in English. or the option closest to your native language. only choose "other" if it's really very different. in which case please leave it in the tags/notes !

[janmisali]

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet

[oediex]

I love learning new alphabets and I've been thinking about how my name would be written in the two languages I'm learning that don't use a Latin alphabet.

I think in Korean it would be:

우디 or 욷이 (I don't really know if there is a difference in pronunciation between these two)

And I think in Arabic it would be:

ودي

If you know either of these languages, I would love to know if I've guessed right? The pronunciation of my name rhymes with the English "goodie".

[mapsontheweb]

Pronunciation of the first syllable of the name of Europe in world languages

by cmzraxsn

hi, enough people liked my last map where I looked at the pronunciation of Bulgaria, so I've made one with the pronunciation of Europe. A lot less consensus this time! As usual, the caveats apply about linguistic maps that depict monolingual regions always being a bit dodgy. And sorry about too many colours. Feel free to add in other languages if you know them or give corrections (politely!).

Names of Europe fall into two main categories: those derived from the Greek Εὐρώπη via the Latin Europa, and those derived from the Chinese 歐洲 - however, the latter is an abbreviation of a loanword from Latin Europa.

Some African and Native American languages use alternate exonyms, however - the most common being the word Ulaya or Bulaya, in Bantu languages, derived from an Arabic word meaning "government" or "authority".

The one exception in the map is Vietnamese, because Châu Âu is derived from 歐洲 but the morpheme order is reversed! And shout out to Sranantongo which uses "Ropa", just getting rid of the first syllable altogether.

Map template is derived from the one used on linguisticmaps.tumblr.com (heavily edited), and the language data mainly comes from wikipedia and wiktionary. Some phonetic transcriptions may not match the colours exactly, I've tried to fit them to the closest where I can. Use your common sense and don't nitpick too closely, please.

[wronghands1]

[first-witch]

I'm just curious, because I have one way to pronounce it, and some other people were disagreeing with me, so what do you all think?

Reblog for higher sample size