#also brought to you by all the pronunciation polls on here where none of the options make ANY sense | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coquelicoq · 2 years ago

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there's nothing that makes me realize how ridiculous homegrown pronunciation guides are like watching other people from oregon try to tell people not from oregon how to pronounce "oregon". there is a bumper sticker you see here that instructs people to say "ORYGUN", and i, as a person who knows what the desired end result is, have no idea how you're supposed to get there from "orygun". what is that y doing there? the sound it is representing is a SCHWA. on what planet is a y the most logical option for that sound??

a REAL pronunciation guide for this word would be more like "it's like saying the phrase 'or a gun', except you stress the word 'or' and you don't stress the word 'gun' at all. actually it's more like saying the phrase 'or again', with stress on the 'or'. but only if you also pronounce those words the way i pronounce them. obviously. otherwise you're shit out of luck." but that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker now does it.

#also brought to you by all the pronunciation polls on here where none of the options make ANY sense #there's two things you have to understand: 1) english orthography makes no sense. with vowels in particular #so whatever vowel you're including in your phonetic spelling of a word is probably going to be ambiguous #2) people have different accents than you! this means people pronounce the same word in a different way than you do!!!#you might pronounce a vowel in a way another person can't and vice versa!#but the thing about ORYGUN in particular is that the people who think that's a good way to explain how to pronounce oregon #speak THE SAME DIALECT AS ME. we have the same accent! and yet i have no idea what they're going for!#fun with pronunciation #oregon #my posts

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