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Millstone85
2021-02-05, 07:42 AM
I just came across this compilation (https://youtu.be/DR8s1Ai6_xM?t=20) of Chris Perkins and Planescape: Torment pronouncing Sigil with a hard G.

So it is official that the city isn't pronounced the same as the symbol. Some characters even take offense if you forget that.
We can excuse the fact that you slaughtered two yugoloths before you realized where you were, outsider, but you pronounced the name of our fair city 'Sijil,' not 'Sigil,' and there can be no excuse for that!

But how is it actually played, in your experience? Did you follow or ignore "Siggle" lore?

Bonus question: And you, fellow French players, have you ever played in "Siguil"?

Mastikator
2021-02-05, 08:00 AM
To me Sigil is one of those things that only exists on the internet, I thought it was Sijil but I guess Sigil with a hard g is the correct way to say it. Sounds kinda ugly though.

Xervous
2021-02-05, 08:04 AM
Sounds kinda ugly though.

Similar to Jif as a file extension?

Millstone85
2021-02-05, 08:23 AM
Similar to Jif as a file extension?I found a GIF of a gith fighting a giff bearing the sigil of a faction of Sigil.

Lacco
2021-02-05, 08:28 AM
Sidžil.

What...?

RedMage125
2021-02-05, 08:31 AM
The confusion arises because "sigil" as in "the floor of the wizard's lab contained a summoning circle lined with arcane sigils for conjuration and abjuration"...that is pronounced "sijil".

"Sigil" as in "the City of Doors" is correctly pronounced "siggle".

It does sound ugly.

But so does pronouncing "Demogorgon" as "DEE-mo-gor-gun". But that's what's technically correct.

Planar stuff often has weird pronunciation. I go with official sources as much as possible. The Baldur's Gate games were what helped me learn to pronounce "drow" (rhymes with "how", as in "how do you do?"), "tiefling" (TEE-fling), and "genasi" ("gen-AH-see", hard "g").

As an aside, "GIF" as a file extension...I know the guy who made them said it's pronounced "jif", but the first letter stands for "graphic", not "juraphic".

Eldan
2021-02-05, 10:59 AM
I just don't care about how English people pronounce obviously non-English stuff like Demogorgon. That's a perfectly phonetic word with a pretty clear etymology. I mean, if we let English speaker have their say, we'd pronounce Acheron as Esheron and Asgard as Æsgard.

Same for Sigil. Sijil is weird. Though, to be fair, Siggle is even weirder and it never occured to me before today that anyone could pronounce it like that.

Unavenger
2021-02-05, 11:31 AM
I just came across this compilation (https://youtu.be/DR8s1Ai6_xM?t=20) of Chris Perkins and Planescape: Torment pronouncing Sigil with a hard G.

So it is official that the city isn't pronounced the same as the symbol. Some characters even take offense if you forget that.

But how is it actually played, in your experience? Did you follow or ignore "Siggle" lore?

Bonus question: And you, fellow French players, have you ever played in "Siguil"?

I always pronounced the symbol with a soft G but the city with a hard G - mainly because I heard it spoken before I saw it written down, so I copied the correct pronunciation.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-05, 02:45 PM
I've always pronounced it with a hard G because that's how the guys in my first D&D group said it the first time I ever heard of Planescape.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-05, 05:34 PM
I call it Sijil no matter what people say or think it is. Thats what it is to me and those inhabitants who insist otherwise can deal with it, insisting on proper pronunciation is on par with those peoples who insist on linguistic purity in terms of not mattering.

icefractal
2021-02-05, 06:14 PM
I always thought it was "Sijil" (pronunciation-wise), and that still sounds better to me, but in fact I think I've only discussed it in writing, not speech.

Tanarii
2021-02-05, 07:57 PM
Sigil not sijil. OTOH I mispronounce the word sijil as sigil anyway, so it already sounds "correct" to me. Like many D&D words, they're ones you never hear in real life, so it's easy to get them wrong when you only ever read them.

As a teen I spent an entire session calling the alcoves in a module "ack-lowves" before my friends had enough and corrected me.

is it Vaas or vayce?
Is it Bra-zier or Bray-zer?
Is it boo-lay or bull-ette?

(About the only one that gets my goat is when people call dark elves drough instead of drow.)

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-05, 08:45 PM
In this thread:
The GitP forum discovers linguistics for the first time.

Ok guys, I have shocking news for you:
The idea of each word having one objectively correct pronunciation is LAUGHABLE. And in many instances, wrong.

For instance, the following word:
Crayon.
Some pronounce it "CRAY-on"
Some pronounce it "Cran"

Both are correct.

How about "Coupon?"
Some pronounce it "COOP-on"
Some pronounce it "KYOO-pon"

Again, both are correct.

How about the ever-debated "GIF?"
Welp, according to how linguists do things, (Go look at how people say it, and then describe how people actually pronounce it) the most common is hard-G "GIF", by a fairly big margin.
"JIF" is in second place
And pronouncing it "G-I-F," letter-by-letter is the rarest.

So you'll get fewer odd looks with hard G. But those top two are still both correct for now. The bottom one is weird but probably not wrong.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-06, 02:22 AM
For instance, the following word:
Crayon.
Some pronounce it "CRAY-on"
Some pronounce it "Cran"

Both are correct.

How about "Coupon?"
Some pronounce it "COOP-on"
Some pronounce it "KYOO-pon"

Again, both are correct.

I object! On the grounds that "cran" and "kyoopon" are both ridiculous. :smallbiggrin:

Mastikator
2021-02-06, 02:38 AM
In this thread:
The GitP forum discovers linguistics for the first time.

Ok guys, I have shocking news for you:
The idea of each word having one objectively correct pronunciation is LAUGHABLE. And in many instances, wrong.

For instance, the following word:
[examples]
So you'll get fewer odd looks with hard G. But those top two are still both correct for now. The bottom one is weird but probably not wrong.

If there's no wrong way to pronounce a word then maybe there can be no rong waj to spell them aythr?

Seto
2021-02-06, 03:53 AM
I've always pronounced it with a soft "dj". And in French, as "Sigille", as in "vigile".

GeoffWatson
2021-02-06, 04:29 AM
If they wanted it pronounced with a hard g, they should spell it differently from the real word that is pronounced with a soft g.

Taffimai
2021-02-06, 08:05 AM
If they wanted it pronounced with a hard g, they should spell it differently from the real word that is pronounced with a soft g.

My thoughts exactly. There are so many options: Siggil, Síguil, even Sigill (because fish have gills not jills)... This isn't a case of a city name that has existed for hundreds of years where the original spelling is still kept even though the pronunciation has evolved over time, it was knowingly created in a language with non-transparent orthography. Imo if you're creating a situation where casual fans are highly likely to mispronounce your fictional name and those more familiar with the work must either put up with that or sound like pedants, then you're committing a creator faux pas.

RedMage125
2021-02-06, 08:19 AM
Sigil not sijil. OTOH I mispronounce the word sijil as sigil anyway, so it already sounds "correct" to me. Like many D&D words, they're ones you never hear in real life, so it's easy to get them wrong when you only ever read them.

As a teen I spent an entire session calling the alcoves in a module "ack-lowves" before my friends had enough and corrected me.

is it Vaas or vayce?
Is it Bra-zier or Bray-zer?
Is it boo-lay or bull-ette?

(About the only one that gets my goat is when people call dark elves drough instead of drow.)
I just had someone the other day talking about Simulacrum (pronounced it "simm-ul-AY-crum"). Had to remind them that it's the same root word as "simulate" or "simulation". If anyone's curious, it's "si-myuh-LA-kruhm".

Brazier is "brei-zhr". It's not supposed to sound like "brassiere".

Bulette, according to the 2e Monstrous Manual, is pronounced "boo-lay". That's the only pronunciation I've ever noticed in an official book.

And I must confess I used to say "drough". Baldur's Gate 2 made me realize I was wrong. There was an official pronunciation guide on the old wotc site back in the day. I, regrettably, no loner have the link.


In this thread:
The GitP forum discovers linguistics for the first time.

Ok guys, I have shocking news for you:
The idea of each word having one objectively correct pronunciation is LAUGHABLE. And in many instances, wrong.

For instance, the following word:
Crayon.
Some pronounce it "CRAY-on"
Some pronounce it "Cran"

Both are correct.
Nope. Neither is "crown" (and yes, some people say it like that).

It's "KREI-aan".

Webster's Dictionary is very specific about that. Other pronunciations are due to regional dialect differences. Variations of a correct way to pronounce a word.

Saying "both are correct" or "there's no correct way to pronounce a word" is like saying "there's no such thing as an accent". Hell, I'm from Michigan, and like most Michiganders, when I say the word "both", it comes out sounding kind of like there's an "L" in it ("bolth"). Does that mean it's "correct" to put an invisible L in the word? No. It's a regional dialect. And it's just how it sounds. Michiganders tend to use a lot of nasal cavity resonating in our pronunciation. Has something to do with the humidity of the region.


How about "Coupon?"
Some pronounce it "COOP-on"
Some pronounce it "KYOO-pon"

Again, both are correct.
Also wrong. One does not drive a "kyoop" De Ville. One does not overthrow a ruler in a "kyoop" (or "kyoo") d'etat. A "Blow of Mercy" is not a "kyoop" or "kyoo" de grace*. It's pronounced "Koo-pon".

*On that note, the last word of that is not pronounced "grah". "Coup De Grace" is not pronounced "koo de grah". THAT would be spelled "Coup De Gras", and would mean "Blow Of Fat". "Coup De Grace" means "Blow Of Mercy" and is pronounced "koo de grahs".



How about the ever-debated "GIF?"
Welp, according to how linguists do things, (Go look at how people say it, and then describe how people actually pronounce it) the most common is hard-G "GIF", by a fairly big margin.
"JIF" is in second place
And pronouncing it "G-I-F," letter-by-letter is the rarest.

So you'll get fewer odd looks with hard G. But those top two are still both correct for now. The bottom one is weird but probably not wrong.

This one caused debate, because it is an acronym. I still maintain that pronouncing the letter that stands for a "hard G" word with a "soft G" is...bizarre, if not blatantly stupid, but I can't find any fault with saying "G-I-F" letter by letter.

Yuki Akuma
2021-02-06, 09:09 AM
Fun fact: trying to spell things out phonetically just using normal letters doesn't work, because different dialects and accents pronounce those letter combinations differently than you do. Use the IPA, guys. Or just stop trying to do this. :smalltongue:

Anyway, yeah, words can be pronounced differently, but place names generally have one accepted pronounciation in any given language.

You'd be more used to this if you lived in the UK, I'd wager.

Source: I actually went to college for this stuff.

Unavenger
2021-02-06, 09:12 AM
My thoughts exactly. There are so many options: Siggil, Síguil, even Sigill (because fish have gills not jills)... This isn't a case of a city name that has existed for hundreds of years where the original spelling is still kept even though the pronunciation has evolved over time, it was knowingly created in a language with non-transparent orthography. Imo if you're creating a situation where casual fans are highly likely to mispronounce your fictional name and those more familiar with the work must either put up with that or sound like pedants, then you're committing a creator faux pas.

Weirdly, even WotC themselves now have a policy of ignoring the origins of the words (https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/172231932758/how-do-you-pronounce-ixalan-since-the-plane-is) when they decide on the pronunciations of places, which is why you get M:tG planes like Ixalan (Pronounced "IX-a-lon" rather than "EE-sha-lon") and Ravnica (Pronounced "RAV-ni-ca" rather than "Rav-NEETS-a").


I still maintain that pronouncing the letter that stands for a "hard G" word with a "soft G" is...bizarre, if not blatantly stupid

The S in laser stands for a word beginning with a soft S but I have never heard anyone pronounce it "Lacer" rather than "Lazer" under any circumstances for as long as I've lived. I pronounce it gif rather than jif too, but the logic here is clearly faulty.

Palanan
2021-02-06, 10:18 AM
Originally Posted by GeoffWatson
If they wanted it pronounced with a hard g, they should spell it differently from the real word that is pronounced with a soft g.

Yeah, this.

I have a feeling that the hard-g variant was a mispronunciation that became fixed for some reason—probably because, like Tanarii, someone hadn’t heard it spoken before, and they ended up reinforcing it in their social circle.

Although that quote from the Planescape Campaign Setting seems more than a little tongue-in-cheek, approaching GotG levels, so I wonder if they’re just not making fun of their own mispronunciation. I know very little about Planescape, but it never occurred to me not to pronounce it with a soft g, just like the real word.


Originally Posted by Unavenger
Weirdly, even WotC themselves now have a policy of ignoring the origins of the words when they decide on the pronunciations of places, which is why you get M:tG planes like Ixalan (Pronounced "IX-a-lon" rather than "EE-sha-lon") and Ravnica (Pronounced "RAV-ni-ca" rather than "Rav-NEETS-a").

As policies go that’s not too impressive, although I do wonder if one blog post counts as a comprehensive statement.

But something like Ixalan, which so plainly echoes Nahuatl, is almost made ridiculous by the “official” mispronunciation. There’s an opportunity here to give people an introduction to the real-world inspiration (https://jimharbor.tumblr.com/post/164976715220/exploring-ixalan-the-religion-of-the-sun-empire) behind the lore, but they seem to be going for the lowest common denominator.

For instance, I assumed Ravnica was something like "rav-NEEK-ah," since I've never heard it pronounced by anyone; but "rav-NEETS-a" sounds much more interesting. That gives it a little more depth than just a random fantasy word.

anthon
2021-02-06, 12:30 PM
Sick Jill sans 'ck'

I ran Planescape when it came out, had all the box sets - even the many useless ones - and the audio disk. Sigil like the idea of a symbol. Rhymes with Vigil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil

one of the best designed settings in the history of AD&D. It managed to do what Spelljammer tried to do, but failed, and what Ravenloft managed to do by pissing off players - without pissing off players:

gather a bunch of people from different campaign settings together into a new, strangely familiar, but somehow unique world.

Sigil was like the Gaming Convention version of a Setting, complete with cosplay.

RedMage125
2021-02-06, 02:09 PM
The S in laser stands for a word beginning with a soft S but I have never heard anyone pronounce it "Lacer" rather than "Lazer" under any circumstances for as long as I've lived. I pronounce it gif rather than jif too, but the logic here is clearly faulty.

Wait a tick. Can you name even ONE word that starts with an "S" that uses a "z" sound?

But when used in the middle of a word (like "laser"), a single "s" can sometimes have that sound.

Tanarii
2021-02-06, 03:12 PM
Wait a tick. Can you name even ONE word that starts with an "S" that uses a "z" sound?

But when used in the middle of a word (like "laser"), a single "s" can sometimes have that sound.

Not to mention plenty of people say "Lay-ser" and not "Lay-zer". I've even heard it pronounced something like "Lay-shure".

Millstone85
2021-02-06, 03:39 PM
I have a feeling that the hard-g variant was a mispronunciation that became fixed for some reason—probably because, like Tanarii, someone hadn’t heard it spoken before, and they ended up reinforcing it in their social circle. Although that quote from the Planescape Campaign Setting seems more than a little tongue-in-cheek, approaching GotG levels, so I wonder if they’re just not making fun of their own mispronunciation.I read somewhere that it is exactly what happened. The Planescape writers made the hard g canon as an in-joke regarding someone on the team.

137beth
2021-02-06, 05:23 PM
I've always pronounced Sigil with a soft G.

Luccan
2021-02-06, 05:44 PM
If there's no wrong way to pronounce a word then maybe there can be no rong waj to spell them aythr?

Historically speaking, no, not as long as people knew what you meant. Before we started printing dictionaries that could be spread all over the place it was very hard to get consistent spellings, even from people who wrote a lot. Even for their own names.

Edit: I've always pronounced it like sijil, like the word (at least how it is for English speakers I've known). I don't think I'd make that big a deal out of it, but if I'm running Planescape I'm not going to have anyone complain about how it's really pronounced. That's obnoxious enough in real life. I assume people don't know how the city's name is "really" said because the early material didn't come with a pronunciation guide.

SleepyShadow
2021-02-06, 06:21 PM
Since I'm currently running a Planescape game, I have NPCs pronounce it both "Siggle" and "Sijil", and some of them get cranky if you "mispronounce" it :smallbiggrin:

Eldan
2021-02-06, 06:43 PM
The original Latin has a hard g. So that's what I use. Don't care what English does.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-06, 07:14 PM
Planar stuff often has weird pronunciation. I go with official sources as much as possible. The Baldur's Gate games were what helped me learn to pronounce "drow" (rhymes with "how", as in "how do you do?"), "tiefling" (TEE-fling), and "genasi" ("gen-AH-see", hard "g").

Oh god, don't get me started on 'genie' and 'djinni' having two separate meanings in D&D. One's just a corruption of the other. Which goes mean it should logically be a soft g there.


In this thread:
The GitP forum discovers linguistics for the first time.

You've never seen the 'how is drow pronounced' thread, have you? Rhymes with bow, for the record.

Actually I think we've had more than one of those? Gygax apparently used a shorter o, so it rhymed with know, but the longer o to rhyme with plough might actually be more common.


Did you know that the Clan in Vampire the Masquerade is pronounced Brew-zhah? Even Bloodlines gets that one wrong but it's specified in the 1e core.

The one I see often is mispronouncing 'daemon' as 'demon'. Which is not without precedent, see encyclopaedia, so I'll switch to demon if corrected, but it's notably widespread (the word is technically 'day-mun' with a short u, at least in my accent).

Taevyr
2021-02-06, 07:43 PM
You've never seen the 'how is drow pronounced' thread, have you? Rhymes with bow, for the record.

Well, I think we all agree it rhymes with bow; we just might disagree on whether it's bow, the weapon, or bow, the courtly movement to greet someone. I always went with the latter.


Personally, I pronounce it "SI-gill", as in fish gills. "Sijil" still sounds way better than "Siggle" though, in my opinion.

Unavenger
2021-02-06, 08:20 PM
Wait a tick. Can you name even ONE word that starts with an "S" that uses a "z" sound?

But when used in the middle of a word (like "laser"), a single "s" can sometimes have that sound.

The point I was making is that the way a word is used in the word whose initial is part of the acronym has no bearing on the actual pronunciation in that acronym, which still stands.

...Not that this has any real bearing on "Sigil" anyway, although much of the rest of the gif discussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1AL2EMvVy0) (like trying to find words like "give", "gift", "giant" or "giraffe" and then realising that they don't really support a precedent one way or the other) is more pertinent to this discussion.

Luccan
2021-02-06, 08:44 PM
Oh god, don't get me started on 'genie' and 'djinni' having two separate meanings in D&D. One's just a corruption of the other. Which goes mean it should logically be a soft g there.



You've never seen the 'how is drow pronounced' thread, have you? Rhymes with bow, for the record.

Actually I think we've had more than one of those? Gygax apparently used a shorter o, so it rhymed with know, but the longer o to rhyme with plough might actually be more common.


Did you know that the Clan in Vampire the Masquerade is pronounced Brew-zhah? Even Bloodlines gets that one wrong but it's specified in the 1e core.

The one I see often is mispronouncing 'daemon' as 'demon'. Which is not without precedent, see encyclopaedia, so I'll switch to demon if corrected, but it's notably widespread (the word is technically 'day-mun' with a short u, at least in my accent).

I've seen the drow thing discussed before, but I don't think I've heard a single person pronounce it "dro". I think even the D&D computer games with voice acting that I've played have been pretty consistent on the "ow" pronunciation.

Quertus
2021-02-06, 09:02 PM
Personally, I pronounce it as rhyming with "giggle" - both because that matches the seriousness of Planescape, and because a magic sigil is something that is already a thing.

Lord Torath
2021-02-06, 09:09 PM
Sigil the city in Planescape? I rhyme it with giggle.
Sigil the magical rune: gets the 'j' sound. Rhymes with vigil.

Drow: Yes, I know BG II rhymed it with cow, but I rhyme it with snow.
Here's the link to the old thread Anonymous Wizard was talking about: Drow like snow (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?386804-Drow-like-snow)
(It's dead, so don't post in it unless you want a Thread Necromancy warning from the Mods.)

Eldan
2021-02-06, 09:21 PM
Actually, Genie is probably from Latin Genius, so it is different from Arabic Jinn.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-07, 12:11 AM
Again, linguistically speaking, the idea that a made-up fantasy word has a."correct pronunciation" is as hilarious as it is incorrect.

Language doesn't care how the creator wanted it pronounced. That's not how it works.

If people pronounce Drow so it rhymes with "Snow" or rhymes with "Plow," at this point both are probably right. So long as you know what they're talking about, all is well.

Getting into a tiff over which way is "correct" is kind of a holdout from a lot of... iffy and uncomfortable historical information about the English Language.
(Ain't was perfectly acceptable,.high-brow English for nearly 100 years. Then the poors started using it too much and it was removed from proper English. I wish I was joking.)

Lord Raziere
2021-02-07, 01:01 AM
Getting into a tiff over which way is "correct" is kind of a holdout from a lot of... iffy and uncomfortable historical information about the English Language.
(Ain't was perfectly acceptable,.high-brow English for nearly 100 years. Then the poors started using it too much and it was removed from proper English. I wish I was joking.)

Well.

that just ain't right. I knew this kind of thing was nonsense.

RedMage125
2021-02-07, 08:58 AM
Oh god, don't get me started on 'genie' and 'djinni' having two separate meanings in D&D. One's just a corruption of the other. Which goes mean it should logically be a soft g there.
Well, D&D appropriated the word "genie" to be the greater umbrella under which "djinni", "efreeti" and "marids" are related.

D&D appropriated lots of words. "Medusa" shoudl not be a creature type, and should not be plural, if you want to get down to it.

And I see your point about genasi, but that's the way it's pronounced in official sources.



Did you know that the Clan in Vampire the Masquerade is pronounced Brew-zhah? Even Bloodlines gets that one wrong but it's specified in the 1e core.
I did not know that. I was still new to VtM when I played Bloodlines. I've always assumed "BROO-hah" was correct.


The point I was making is that the way a word is used in the word whose initial is part of the acronym has no bearing on the actual pronunciation in that acronym, which still stands.

...Not that this has any real bearing on "Sigil" anyway, although much of the rest of the gif discussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1AL2EMvVy0) (like trying to find words like "give", "gift", "giant" or "giraffe" and then realising that they don't really support a precedent one way or the other) is more pertinent to this discussion.
And yet, "S" isn't ever really "soft" like "G" is. It's always a hard consonant sound. When you say "hard G", you really just mean "G that sounds like a G" as opposed to "G that sounds like a J". Or how a "C" is either "sounds like a K" or "sounds like an S", or "combined with another letter to make a new sound (like CH)".
Also, this:

Not to mention plenty of people say "Lay-ser" and not "Lay-zer". I've even heard it pronounced something like "Lay-shure".


Again, linguistically speaking, the idea that a made-up fantasy word has a."correct pronunciation" is as hilarious as it is incorrect.

Language doesn't care how the creator wanted it pronounced. That's not how it works.
Actually, that's exactly how that works. Especially if you are referring to it within the same wheelhouse as the creator intended it for.

If I was talking about Harry Potter lore with Harry Potter fans, and referred to Voldemort's Horcrux, pronouncing "hor-KRUZH", I would actually be objectively wrong.


If people pronounce Drow so it rhymes with "Snow" or rhymes with "Plow," at this point both are probably right. So long as you know what they're talking about, all is well.

Getting into a tiff over which way is "correct" is kind of a holdout from a lot of... iffy and uncomfortable historical information about the English Language.
(Ain't was perfectly acceptable,.high-brow English for nearly 100 years. Then the poors started using it too much and it was removed from proper English. I wish I was joking.)

That standards change and the bar of "acceptable" or "correct" changes doesn't mean that bar doesn't exist.

Unavenger
2021-02-07, 09:04 AM
And yet, "S" isn't ever really "soft" like "G" is. It's always a hard consonant sound. When you say "hard G", you really just mean "G that sounds like a G" as opposed to "G that sounds like a J". Or how a "C" is either "sounds like a K" or "sounds like an S", or "combined with another letter to make a new sound (like CH)".

The specific ways that specific letters are pronounced has literally no bearing on the fact that it is still true and will be forever true that the pronunciation of letters in individual words in an acronym hs no connection to the pronunciation of the letters in that acronym.

Mastikator
2021-02-07, 09:11 AM
Actually, Genie is probably from Latin Genius, so it is different from Arabic Jinn.
According to google it's both.
Latin (genius) -> French (génie) -> Modern english (genie) <- arabian nights entertainment (génie) <- arabic (jinní)

(source: I typed "genie etymology" into google)

Faily
2021-02-07, 10:07 AM
If they wanted it pronounced with a hard g, they should spell it differently from the real word that is pronounced with a soft g.

Why?

Hard G is pretty common in a lot of languages, my own included. Not everything in D&D follows the trends of English.

Theodoxus
2021-02-07, 10:19 AM
Full disclosure, I pronounce GIF as "Gift". But I can see a case for pronouncing it like the peanut butter Jif, if only to avoid confusion with the word "gift". Especially early on in their development/utilization.

Now a days, if you're not using jpegs (pronounced gee-pigs, obviously) you're imaging wrong

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-07, 10:21 AM
Well, D&D appropriated the word "genie" to be the greater umbrella under which "djinni", "efreeti" and "marids" are related.

D&D appropriated lots of words. "Medusa" shoudl not be a creature type, and should not be plural, if you want to get down to it.

Monster names in D&D are a complete mess, 'medusas' should be 'gorgons' as a passing similarity with Greek myth would reveal. I occasionally try to fix it for settings, in which case Djinni, Efreeti, Marid, and Dao become the four main species of Elemental Lord.


And I see your point about genasi, but that's the way it's pronounced in official sources.

Oh, I get that it's how it's pronounced officially, but like with Sigil the hard g just sounds off to me,


I did not know that. I was still new to VtM when I played Bloodlines. I've always assumed "BROO-hah" was correct.

The only place I know it's pronounced correctly is Redemption, but yeah. 'BROO-hah' comes from the word looking like the spanish word 'bruja', which is pronounced like that, and as most Brujah in Bloodlines are young it's possible that they literally have never heard the 'classical' pronunciation. Fun thing to play atound with in game, because of course a lot of Brujah legitimately do not care, and most of the Clan's scholars likely care more about clear communication than prescriptivism, so I wouldn't be shocked if it oficially changes bot in and out of universe at some point.

Kane0
2021-02-07, 02:46 PM
I purposely pronounce it wrong and revel in the chaos

ezekielraiden
2021-02-08, 11:14 AM
The ordinary word is pronounced "sijil," so I pronounce the name the same way. (Likewise "vigil," which came from the same Latin root and underwent the same sound change.)

However, I also recognize the "dah-tuh" vs. "day-tuh" thing. Sometimes, a name is a word, and sometimes it's apart from that word. If it belongs to a specific person or authority, you ask them if you're unsure, clean and simple. But since Sigil doesn't belong to anyone IRL the way that "day-tuh" belongs to a specific Soong-type positronic android in Star Trek, it's our choice as content creators, and thus messy and individual.

I would generally be confused if someone spoke "siggle" and expected me to know that it referred to the city, just as I would be confused if someone told me to be "viggle-ant" for criminal activity. I could probably figure it out from context clues or just thinking about it, but it would need that "thinking about it" moment before I figured it out.


Why?

Hard G is pretty common in a lot of languages, my own included. Not everything in D&D follows the trends of English.

Because the authors were English speakers originally writing in English. To turn the question around: why should I expect to pronounce words the way a French person would (just to make up a language; I have no idea what your native tongue is, so if it's French, I promise this isn't targeted at you) if I'm reading a work originally written in English? Why should I expect English pronunciations if I'm (say) playing a game made in Poland, Germany, or Japan? (The last there can be complicated, since many terms or names in Japanese are merely transliterated Engl, e.g. the recurring FF entity Bahamut is literally バハムート, Bahamūto, but for the sake of argument I'll say I'm only thinking about names of actual Japanese origin, not transliterated names.)

Hard G is also present in English (giggle, for example, or give, or vogue), so it's not like this is an allophonic difference issue like with liquid consonants in Japanese vs. European languages.

Jason
2021-02-08, 01:25 PM
I thought the quote was a joke. The Guvners are rules fetishists who are all about following the letter of the law to screw people over, so being pedantic about the pronunciation of "Sigil" would be par for the course with them. It's not necessarily the correct pronunciation or even one most inhabitants of Sigil would use.
There's another bit in the Planesacape books somewhere about the Guvners discovering that the are 18 distinct levels of strength in everyone in the multiverse, and trying to discover if the other attributes can be rated similarly and decide how they can use this information.

Imbalance
2021-02-08, 04:02 PM
Appalachian g: Si'il


I purposely pronounce it wrong and revel in the chaos

Or this. I have purposely pronounced Drow with as many different vowel sounds as possible in the same session. Drough, Drah, Droo, Drhoe, Drau, Drao, Dreugh, and even Jrow, for good measure. It's a hobby.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-08, 04:04 PM
All of this is missing the more important question -- does 'Flind' rhyme with sinned or blind?:smalltongue:

Segev
2021-02-08, 04:25 PM
In this thread:
The GitP forum discovers linguistics for the first time.

Ok guys, I have shocking news for you:
The idea of each word having one objectively correct pronunciation is LAUGHABLE. And in many instances, wrong.

For instance, the following word:
Crayon.
Some pronounce it "CRAY-on"
Some pronounce it "Cran"

Both are correct.

How about "Coupon?"
Some pronounce it "COOP-on"
Some pronounce it "KYOO-pon"

Again, both are correct.

How about the ever-debated "GIF?"
Welp, according to how linguists do things, (Go look at how people say it, and then describe how people actually pronounce it) the most common is hard-G "GIF", by a fairly big margin.
"JIF" is in second place
And pronouncing it "G-I-F," letter-by-letter is the rarest.

So you'll get fewer odd looks with hard G. But those top two are still both correct for now. The bottom one is weird but probably not wrong.

There is a difference between slight vowel shifts - as most of those examples are - and a complete consonant-switch that is only ambiguous because a vaguery of English spelling lets the same symbol make either sound.

Pronouncing "D&D" to sound exactly like the word "dandy" would, in fact, be incorrect, in no small part because it would create needless confusion as nobody would know to what you were referring (and might make incorrect assumptions), for example.

Lord Torath
2021-02-09, 07:53 AM
All of this is missing the more important question -- does 'Flind' rhyme with wind or bind?:smalltongue:It rhymes with wind (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0837.html), obviously!

I personally rhyme it with 'binned' as well.

Imbalance
2021-02-09, 08:16 AM
All of this is missing the more important question -- does 'Flind' rhyme with wind or bind?:smalltongue:

With as much sense as some of the other official articulations make, it probly rhymes with orange.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-09, 08:37 AM
It rhymes with wind (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0837.html), obviously!

I personally rhyme it with 'binned' as well.

Goodness, I didn't even notice that I chose an ambiguous option. Will change.

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-09, 07:17 PM
Put my vote down for soft G sound.
Sigil. Like Vigil.

Satinavian
2021-02-10, 07:45 AM
Put my vote down for soft G sound.
Sigil. Like Vigil.
Both hard g for me as it fits the classical latin roots.

Not that i have used those words/names when speaking English so far.

ezekielraiden
2021-02-10, 10:52 AM
Both hard g for me as it fits the classical latin roots.

Not that i have used those words/names when speaking English so far.

If I may ask, how do you pronounce "Caesar," "vacuum," "agenda," and/or "homicide"?

LibraryOgre
2021-02-10, 10:58 AM
I have never understood the difference between Hard and Soft G

ezekielraiden
2021-02-10, 11:13 AM
I have never understood the difference between Hard and Soft G

It's the difference between the j sound in "jam" or "jeopardy" ("soft"), and the g sound in "grab" or "glitter" ("hard").

If you're familiar with the typical English pronunciation of "geography," the first g is soft, while the second is hard. "dzhee-oh-gra-fee."

Eldan
2021-02-10, 01:35 PM
If I may ask, how do you pronounce "Caesar," "vacuum," "agenda," and/or "homicide"?

Kaiser, Vakuum, Agenda and Homizid, but then I'm a German speaker.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-10, 01:57 PM
It's the difference between the j sound in "jam" or "jeopardy" ("soft"), and the g sound in "grab" or "glitter" ("hard").

If you're familiar with the typical English pronunciation of "geography," the first g is soft, while the second is hard. "dzhee-oh-gra-fee."

What invariably throws me is I think the "jam" is a far harder sound then "grab".

Hytheter
2021-02-10, 02:22 PM
If I may ask, how do you pronounce "Caesar," "vacuum," "agenda," and/or "homicide"?

...Is there a soft way to pronounce vacuum?

Satinavian
2021-02-10, 03:26 PM
If I may ask, how do you pronounce "Caesar," "vacuum," "agenda," and/or "homicide"?
I am not an English native speaker. I pronounce all four of those words differently depending on the language used. Even if Caesar is a name and shouldn't really change but i don't know anyone using the classical pronounciation in daily conversation.

The difference might be that i kinda lack awareness of vigil and sigil as English words even when they pop up in an English text. They are a bit too obscure in English to be really part of a foreigners vocabulary. But i do recognize them as Latin words so i would pronounce them as Latin words. It is not as if there wasn't a habit to pepper English speach with some Latin to sound more sophisticated. There is also the fast that i never have head them with a soft g (because obscure) and would not get the idea to us it on my own.


...Is there a soft way to pronounce vacuum?English likes to insert some i-sound between the c and the first u to make the transition easier.

Kane0
2021-02-10, 04:05 PM
To be more specific:

Sigil like vigil
Drow like prow
Bulette like roulette
Tiefling like stifling
Genasi like... I got nothing. Jen-ah-zee

Flind like blind
Lamia like narnia
Merrow like mellow
Satyr like satire

Luccan
2021-02-10, 04:18 PM
Satyr like satire

So it rhymes with fire?

Jason
2021-02-10, 04:55 PM
You know, D&D Beyond has pronunciation sound files for every monster entry in the manual now. So there are "official" pronunciations.

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-10, 04:56 PM
To be more specific:

Sigil like vigil
Drow like prow
Bulette like roulette
Tiefling like stifling
Genasi like... I got nothing. Jen-ah-zee

Flind like blind
Lamia like narnia
Merrow like mellow
Satyr like satire

I pronounce the same with most of those, save Satyr which I pronounce "Say-Tier" and Lamia which I pronounce "Lah-Mee-ah"

dethkruzer
2021-02-10, 05:04 PM
So, funny thing, it actually changes depending on if I'm using it while speaking in English, or in my native language (Finnish). In English I pronounce it with a soft G, but then when I mention the name as part of a sentence spoken in Finnish, it comes out more often with a hard G.

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 06:02 PM
Sigil like vigil
Drow like prow
Bulette like roulette
Tiefling like stifling
Genasi like... I got nothing. Jen-ah-zee

Flind like blind
Lamia like narnia
Merrow like mellow
Satyr like satire
Sigil = sigg-ill
Tiefling = teef-ling
Genasi = Geh-na-see (not jeh)
Flind like wind (that blows)
Satyr = Sat-ear.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-10, 06:14 PM
Satyr should rhyme with greater.

Scro should rhyme with flow.

Minotaur is pronounced 'my-know-tour'.

The h in Birmingham is silent.

Millstone85
2021-02-10, 06:19 PM
So, funny thing, it actually changes depending on if I'm using it while speaking in English, or in my native language (Finnish). In English I pronounce it with a soft G, but then when I mention the name as part of a sentence spoken in Finnish, it comes out more often with a hard G.I think that I am going to do the opposite. I like the idea that, in English, the city uses a hard G while the symbol uses a soft G. But in French, the only way it would be a hard G is if it were spelled Siguil, like in guillotine (to use a stereotypical example).

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 06:22 PM
Minotaur is pronounced 'my-know-tour'.
Min-o-tar


The h in Birmingham is silent.Heretic! Burn the witch!

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-10, 08:01 PM
I pronounce Gnome as "Evil little cheating creatures"
-this post was made by the kobold association.

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 08:03 PM
I pronounce Gnome as "Evil little cheating creatures"
-this post was made by the kobold association.
Ko-bald or Ko-bowl-d?

quinron
2021-02-10, 08:44 PM
If the apocryphal story I've heard is right and "bulette" being pronounced [boo-LAY] is a gag by the TSR boys about French being pretentious, then I have to conclude that the TSR boys were not very funny. You can spell it "bulette" and pronounce it [BULL-et], or you can spell it "bullet" and pronounce it [boo-LAY], but doing both ruins the joke!


The h in Birmingham is silent.

I actually started chuckling at a podcast recently that referred to the city of "Nor-witch" in the UK. I've lived in the Midwestern US all my life; I just really like studying British regional accents.


I think that I am going to do the opposite. I like the idea that, in English, the city uses a hard G while the symbol uses a soft G. But in French, the only way it would be a hard G is if it were spelled Siguil, like in guillotine (to use a stereotypical example).

Your use of the word "guillotine" is kind of ironic - it tends to be an argument-starter with the native English-speaking neophyte etymologists I've met. When I was younger, I got in at least two arguments about whether the L's are pronounced as L or pronounced as a glide (as in "Guillaume"). Which I think is less an argument over how it's supposed to be pronounced and more over to what degree we should adopt the native pronunciation of loanwords.



As for the usual pronunciation arguments, if it's not something from a real-world language or clearly inspired by one, I typically default to Latin rules: I and E are soft vowels, so if they follow C, G, S, or CH, the consonant becomes soft; stress defaults to the penultimate syllable, and you should treat vowel combinations as single syllables. So "sigil" is [SIJ-əl], "genasi" is [jə-NAH-zi], "Arcadia" is [ar-KA-dya] (though I usually say [ar-KAY-dee-ə] because I'm a Midwesterner), etc.

"Tiefling" seems pretty clearly to come from German tief, "deep," so I pronounce if [TEEF-ling] as it would be in German. Same for "kobold," which is actually originally a German word.

Kane0
2021-02-11, 04:00 AM
save Satyr which I pronounce "Say-Tier"


Satyr = Sat-ear.


Satyr should rhyme with greater.


Like I said, intentionally wrong :P
Largely because when I’m DMing and a Satyr appears, satire is its intended function in the game.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-11, 06:39 AM
I actually started chuckling at a podcast recently that referred to the city of "Nor-witch" in the UK. I've lived in the Midwestern US all my life; I just really like studying British regional accents.

Shouldn't it be pronounced 'Norrich'? But yeah, UK accents and slang are interesting just because of how much they vary, it's the 'what do you call the most basic playground game' thing.

Oh, and UK place names, especially Frome (rhymes with 'room') Either they're from languages not spoken any more (like Old English) or have sounds missing for easier pronunciation.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-11, 09:21 AM
What invariably throws me is I think the "jam" is a far harder sound then "grab".
One really has to take the whole hard/soft thing as a 'we need a boolean adjective, and there's no specific reason to give one or the other a given name' situation (completely different example used for illustration: electrons being 'negative' and protons being 'positive' is a completely arbitrary decision). I guess you could say that a 'hard' g is hard because it involves bringing your hard teeth together to help form the sound while a 'soft' g uses just soft tissue to create, but that's completely arbitrary (and fails when you consider hard and soft Cs).
EDIT: As has been noted below, I got my hard and soft g switched in this example. Which, honestly, considering the overall point being made, is almost perfect! :smalltongue:

Ko-bald or Ko-bowl-d?
Growing up, we --a group of kids who learned most of these words exclusively from books and the occasional inquiry to adults (who would know how to pronounce words like charisma or chaotic, but probably didn't know kobold or lamassu or the like) -- always thought it was ka-bowl-d (I guess kind of like 'cobbled'). No idea why.


If the apocryphal story I've heard is right and "bulette" being pronounced [boo-LAY] is a gag by the TSR boys about French being pretentious, then I have to conclude that the TSR boys were not very funny. You can spell it "bulette" and pronounce it [BULL-et], or you can spell it "bullet" and pronounce it [boo-LAY], but doing both ruins the joke!
I've conversed with a few insiders to the early days of gaming and/or TSR, and one thing they all seem to allude to is a general 'look, no one thought that people would be over-analyzing this stuff forty years later, much less taking it seriously. A lot of this stuff is accidental, or was mildly funny at the time, or happened in the playtest gaming and we just ran with it. Who knew it would take on a life of its own.' and I think that shows. The material components for Lightning bolt are a glass rod rubbed with fur because of supposed historic static electricity experiments, and fireball requires guano and Sulphur because those were part of gunpowder creation -- why? Because Gary thought it was funny (those two to me being prime examples of 'jokes' that aren't really jokes at all, so much as just strange allusions). Gelatinous Cube was apparently originally just a giant-ified (as in 'attack of the 50-foot _____'-style) single-celled organism of no particular shape that was squeezing through a square-shaped tunnel and someone thought it would be cool/funny if it retained that shape once it got past the tunnel. None of it was supposed to survive the close scrutiny we later have applied to it any more than comic book continuity or other things the creators didn't know we'd still be thinking about years later.
Not that that makes the joke suddenly funny, I'm just saying that it is unsurprising.

Imbalance
2021-02-11, 09:29 AM
One really has to take the whole hard/soft thing as a 'we need a boolean adjective, and there's no specific reason to give one or the other a given name' situation (completely different example used for illustration: electrons being 'negative' and protons being 'positive' is a completely arbitrary decision). I guess you could say that a 'hard' g is hard because it involves bringing your hard teeth together to help form the sound while a 'soft' g uses just soft tissue to create, but that's completely arbitrary (and fails when you consider hard and soft Cs).


Growing up, we --a group of kids who learned most of these words exclusively from books and the occasional inquiry to adults (who would know how to pronounce words like charisma or chaotic, but probably didn't know kobold or lamassu or the like) -- always thought it was ka-bowl-d (I guess kind of like 'cobbled'). No idea why.


I've conversed with a few insiders to the early days of gaming and/or TSR, and one thing they all seem to allude to is a general 'look, no one thought that people would be over-analyzing this stuff forty years later, much less taking it seriously. A lot of this stuff is accidental, or was mildly funny at the time, or happened in the playtest gaming and we just ran with it. Who knew it would take on a life of its own.' and I think that shows. The material components for Lightning bolt are a glass rod rubbed with fur because of supposed historic static electricity experiments, and fireball requires guano and Sulphur because those were part of gunpowder creation -- why? Because Gary thought it was funny (those two to me being prime examples of 'jokes' that aren't really jokes at all, so much as just strange allusions). Gelatinous Cube was apparently originally just a giant-ified (as in 'attack of the 50-foot _____'-style) single-celled organism of no particular shape that was squeezing through a square-shaped tunnel and someone thought it would be cool/funny if it retained that shape once it got past the tunnel. None of it was supposed to survive the close scrutiny we later have applied to it any more than comic book continuity or other things the creators didn't know we'd still be thinking about years later.
Not that that makes the joke suddenly funny, I'm just saying that it is unsurprising.

The original humor of the jokes themselves may be gone, but the nerd-rage over such things does put a smile on my face.

Tanarii
2021-02-11, 09:41 AM
Like I said, intentionally wrong :P
Largely because when I’m DMing and a Satyr appears, satire is its intended function in the game.Given that all three of us you quoted pronounce Satyr wildly differently, I'm not sure your Sa-tire is any more wrong. :smallamused:


Growing up, we --a group of kids who learned most of these words exclusively from books and the occasional inquiry to adults (who would know how to pronounce words like charisma or chaotic, but probably didn't know kobold or lamassu or the like) -- always thought it was ka-bowl-d (I guess kind of like 'cobbled'). No idea why.
Kabbled sounds like a great option for Kobold to me. Although it's considerably different from Ka-bowled. :smallamused:

LibraryOgre
2021-02-11, 09:43 AM
Ko-bald or Ko-bowl-d?

kobbld, of course.

Imbalance
2021-02-11, 12:56 PM
COB-old

I first saw the word in allcaps in the NES game Hydlide. My buddy went with the long 'o' for both vowels, but we agreed on the placement of the 'b'.

Lord Torath
2021-02-11, 02:33 PM
One really has to take the whole hard/soft thing as a 'we need a boolean adjective, and there's no specific reason to give one or the other a given name' situation (completely different example used for illustration: electrons being 'negative' and protons being 'positive' is a completely arbitrary decision). I guess you could say that a 'hard' g is hard because it involves bringing your hard teeth together to help form the sound while a 'soft' g uses just soft tissue to create, but that's completely arbitrary (and fails when you consider hard and soft Cs). Whoops, you got that backward. Hard "g" is like grab or giggle. Soft 'g' is like giant or giraffe.

The hard 'g' sound is sharp. You make it by closing your throat. You cannot sustain a hard 'g'; it's a singular sound, like hitting a drum.
The soft 'g' can be sustained, and it's made by air flowing between your teeth and tongue. It's very similar to the 'sh' sound, with a hum thrown in.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-11, 02:52 PM
Whoops, you got that backward. Hard "g" is like grab or giggle. Soft 'g' is like giant or giraffe.

The hard 'g' sound is sharp. You make it by closing your throat. You cannot sustain a hard 'g'; it's a singular sound, like hitting a drum.
The soft 'g' can be sustained, and it's made by air flowing between your teeth and tongue. It's very similar to the 'sh' sound, with a hum thrown in.

<checks notes> Hey, you're right! In which case my analogy fails for both hard/soft Cs and Gs.
That does exemplify my main point, however, that the entire hard/soft thing is fairly arbitrary and you can only get it right by knowing the convention and following it.

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-11, 03:14 PM
Ko-bald or Ko-bowl-d?

Koh- Bowl-d.
The ko-balds are the ones that are unfortunately born without scales...

quinron
2021-02-11, 03:48 PM
Shouldn't it be pronounced 'Norrich'? But yeah, UK accents and slang are interesting just because of how much they vary, it's the 'what do you call the most basic playground game' thing.

Oh, and UK place names, especially Frome (rhymes with 'room') Either they're from languages not spoken any more (like Old English) or have sounds missing for easier pronunciation.

My go-to's to frustrate people out are always Leicester and Worcester, which both seem to be spelled with one more syllable than they're pronounced with.

I recently moved to Kansas City, and there's a suburb here called Kearney. I figured they might pronounce it either [KEER-nee] or [KAER-nee]; nope, it's pronounced like "carny."

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-11, 05:23 PM
My go-to's to frustrate people out are always Leicester and Worcester, which both seem to be spelled with one more syllable than they're pronounced with.

I recently moved to Kansas City, and there's a suburb here called Kearney. I figured they might pronounce it either [KEER-nee] or [KAER-nee]; nope, it's pronounced like "carny."

It's because the syllable was dropper for easier pronunciation, if I'm remembering correctly.

And oh, there's annoying place names all over, ust the UK seems to have a bit more due to historical reasons.

Family names are even better. Featherstonehaugh, for instance.

Tanarii
2021-02-11, 06:03 PM
Family names are even better. Featherstonehaugh, for instance.

Let me guess: Fetter-stun-hug?

Eldan
2021-02-12, 06:51 AM
Let me guess: Fetter-stun-hug?

Fan-shaw.

For bonus points: try Toolmake, Bagehot, Talliafero, Buccleugh, Cholmondeley or Wriothesley

Dolmash, Badjet, Tolliver, Beh-clue, Chum-lee.
The last one is a trick question and can be pronounced Riz-lee, Rize-lee or Rocks-lee, depending on the family.

I love the English aristocracy, sometimes. I collect these names.

Batcathat
2021-02-12, 07:01 AM
Fan-shaw.

Yup.

Together with all the "Leicester is pronounced Lester" type places this makes me think British names get frail with age so some parts of them just fall of. It's the only logical conclusion.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-12, 08:03 AM
Together with all the "Leicester is pronounced Lester" type places this makes me think British names get frail with age so some parts of them just fall of. It's the only logical conclusion.

That's... not far from the truth. Combined with changing fashions and accents, and occasional chanting pronunciation or spelling from one language to another.

It's the same reason that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland becomes the United Kingdom, or UK, and in a few hundred years might actually corrupt to be pronounced 'ook'*.

* I'm trying my hardest at least.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-12, 08:20 AM
I love the English aristocracy, sometimes. I collect these names.

:smallbiggrin:This could be read as you having had a string of interesting previous marriages. :smalltongue:

Batcathat
2021-02-12, 08:24 AM
:smallbiggrin:This could be read as you having had a string of interesting previous marriages. :smalltongue:

That would be a very... dedicated way of collecting something.

"Be honest... did you marry me for my money?"
"No, no. I married you for your cool surname."

Eldan
2021-02-12, 08:59 AM
To be fair, I would also love a cooler coat of arms than mine.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-12, 09:11 AM
That would be a very... dedicated way of collecting something.

In this scenario, the collecting would be accidental.
Read it this way: I love the English aristocracy... sometimes. I collect these names. :smallbiggrin:

ezekielraiden
2021-02-12, 10:22 AM
What invariably throws me is I think the "jam" is a far harder sound then "grab".
IIRC, "hard g" is considered "hard" because it is the voiced equivalent of "k," which is considered among the hardest consonants. "Soft g" is considered soft, by comparison, because it is the voiced version of "ch" as in "cheese" or "chalk," which doesn't articulate as hard as "k" does.


...Is there a soft way to pronounce vacuum?
It is an actual, straight-up Latin word still used in languages today; it has no "soft" pronunciation, but if we're holding things to their original Latin root, it should be pronounced "wak-oo-um," not "vak-yoom."


I am not an English native speaker. I pronounce all four of those words differently depending on the language used. Even if Caesar is a name and shouldn't really change but i don't know anyone using the classical pronounciation in daily conversation.
My point was mostly that your reasoning is rather ad-hoc and arbitrary; you adhere to the Latin origin in certain cases, and the modern contextual usage in other cases (such as pronouncing Caesar as "seizer"). If, as you noted, it's simply a matter of unfamiliarity--fine. But it came across as an applied principle, rather than a rule-of-thumb for words not previously seen in context.


English likes to insert some i-sound between the c and the first u to make the transition easier.
Yeah, I'm sure there's some term for it, though I have no idea what it would be.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-12, 10:50 AM
Together with all the "Leicester is pronounced Lester" type places this makes me think British names get frail with age so some parts of them just fall of. It's the only logical conclusion.

They were jealous of the French having letters pronounced wrong, and decided to have syllables that weren't said.

quinron
2021-02-12, 04:26 PM
Yeah, I'm sure there's some term for it, though I have no idea what it would be.

Voiced palatal glide/approximate.

I studied opera for 7 years, and the only skill I'm still using regularly is diction terminology.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-13, 08:40 AM
I missed this, and I gotta do it to 'em.



Nope. Neither is "crown" (and yes, some people say it like that).

It's "KREI-aan".

Webster's Dictionary is very specific about that.
ARE YOU SUUUUURE?
https://i.imgur.com/M7gy411.jpg

Because Merriam Webster ACTUALLY accounts for these two, plus one additional pronunciation.

Sorry, my guy, but Dictionaries are linguistically *descriptive* documents. They don't dictate what it correct. They explain how words are currently used. That is why dictionaries are updated yearly.



Other pronunciations are due to regional dialect differences. Variations of a correct way to pronounce a word.
Again, this isn't how it works, linguistically.
Any "correct" way to pronounce a word must be chosen arbitrarily from a vast range of English Dialects, with one of them declared King Dialect with no objective reasoning behind it.
This doesn't cause Linguistic Etiquette to stop existing, it just doesn't grok with linguistics.



Saying "both are correct" or "there's no correct way to pronounce a word" is like saying "there's no such thing as an accent". Hell, I'm from Michigan, and like most Michiganders, when I say the word "both", it comes out sounding kind of like there's an "L" in it ("bolth"). Does that mean it's "correct" to put an invisible L in the word? No. It's a regional dialect. And it's just how it sounds. Michiganders tend to use a lot of nasal cavity resonating in our pronunciation. Has something to do with the humidity of the region.
Accents can affect the voicings of things, and are tied to dialects.
Accounting for multiple common pronunciations of a word and having them all be acceptable is literally the exact OPPOSITE of accent erasure.

It ensures that you can't label an entire accent as "wrong English." Which is an absurd proposition.



Also wrong. One does not drive a "kyoop" De Ville. One does not overthrow a ruler in a "kyoop" (or "kyoo") d'etat. A "Blow of Mercy" is not a "kyoop" or "kyoo" de grace*. It's pronounced "Koo-pon".

ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?
https://i.imgur.com/QJhkfwH.jpg

Twice now Merriam Webster disagrees with you.

I am a former English Teacher, so I can't help but be bombastic about this. I apologize if I'm being a tad... Extra.



*On that note, the last word of that is not pronounced "grah". "Coup De Grace" is not pronounced "koo de grah". THAT would be spelled "Coup De Gras", and would mean "Blow Of Fat". "Coup De Grace" means "Blow Of Mercy" and is pronounced "koo de grahs".
This one seems mostly correct, but Webster's still notes variationa.




This one caused debate, because it is an acronym. I still maintain that pronouncing the letter that stands for a "hard G" word with a "soft G" is...bizarre, if not blatantly stupid, but I can't find any fault with saying "G-I-F" letter by letter.
Websters accepts both hard and soft g, last I checked.

But the "underlying word" argument is a bit silly. If that was the rule, "Scuba" would be pronounced "SCUH-ba" with the "a" sounding like the one in "Apple"

Which, while somewhat fun to say, would be ridiculous to employ in daily speech.


OK I'M DONE NOW
I'm sorry for being extra.

RedMage125
2021-02-14, 05:51 AM
Together with all the "Leicester is pronounced Lester" type places this makes me think British names get frail with age so some parts of them just fall of. It's the only logical conclusion.


That's... not far from the truth. Combined with changing fashions and accents, and occasional chanting pronunciation or spelling from one language to another.

It's the same reason that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland becomes the United Kingdom, or UK, and in a few hundred years might actually corrupt to be pronounced 'ook'*.

* I'm trying my hardest at least.
That's because those names are holdovers from the original peoples of the British Isles. You want some of the best evidence for this in people's names? Look at some Irish names sometimes*. There's even a really funny YouTube video "when you order coffee with an Irish name"

*For example, one of the names my wife and I are considering if/when we have a girl is "Aoife". Which is pronounced "EEE-fa".


That would be a very... dedicated way of collecting something.

"Be honest... did you marry me for my money?"
"No, no. I married you for your cool surname."
I knew a teacher that did this. Or at least it seemed like it. Her maiden name was "Urt" or something.

Married a Greek guy. Seven-syllable last name. It's been awhile, but I wanna say it was pronounced "pop-in-ah-sta-stohp-a-los"

I missed this, and I gotta do it to 'em.


ARE YOU SUUUUURE?
https://i.imgur.com/M7gy411.jpg

Because Merriam Webster ACTUALLY accounts for these two, plus one additional pronunciation.

Sorry, my guy, but Dictionaries are linguistically *descriptive* documents. They don't dictate what it correct. They explain how words are currently used. That is why dictionaries are updated yearly.


Again, this isn't how it works, linguistically.
Any "correct" way to pronounce a word must be chosen arbitrarily from a vast range of English Dialects, with one of them declared King Dialect with no objective reasoning behind it.
This doesn't cause Linguistic Etiquette to stop existing, it just doesn't grok with linguistics.


Accents can affect the voicings of things, and are tied to dialects.
Accounting for multiple common pronunciations of a word and having them all be acceptable is literally the exact OPPOSITE of accent erasure.

It ensures that you can't label an entire accent as "wrong English." Which is an absurd proposition.



ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?
https://i.imgur.com/QJhkfwH.jpg

Twice now Merriam Webster disagrees with you.

I am a former English Teacher, so I can't help but be bombastic about this. I apologize if I'm being a tad... Extra.
I don't know how you pulled something from supposedly the same source. I pulled up Webster's Dictionary and got only ONE pronunciation for both of those words. SO I don't know what to tell you.

Literally, only ONE pronunciation for both words.



This one seems mostly correct, but Webster's still notes variationa.
That's actually literally just French. "Coup De Grace" is not an English phrase, it's straight-up French. And there's one way to pronounce it. Pronouncing "koo de grah" in French would be spelled "Coup De Gras" and would mean "Blow of Fat". Same word found in Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday).

For example, take a Spanish word with the double-r. Burro. A lot of Americans have trouble rolling their "R"s. Does it mean saying "burro" without the "rolling r" is correct? No the F- it isn't.



Websters accepts both hard and soft g, last I checked.

But the "underlying word" argument is a bit silly. If that was the rule, "Scuba" would be pronounced "SCUH-ba" with the "a" sounding like the one in "Apple"

Which, while somewhat fun to say, would be ridiculous to employ in daily speech.


You don't? The "A" is a short "A" sound. "Apparatus" (as in Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) is the same "a" sound at the end of "SCUBA". It sounds slightly different because the transition to the "double p" that follows requires a slight increase in inflection, as opposed to ending a word with it. But they're both a short "a".

Also, I not that you didn't respond to this, in regards to your claims about fantasy words. You said:
"Again, linguistically speaking, the idea that a made-up fantasy word has a."correct pronunciation" is as hilarious as it is incorrect.

Language doesn't care how the creator wanted it pronounced. That's not how it works."

TO which I said: "Actually, that's exactly how that works. Especially if you are referring to it within the same wheelhouse as the creator intended it for.

If I was talking about Harry Potter lore with Harry Potter fans, and referred to Voldemort's Horcrux, pronouncing "hor-KRUZH", I would actually be objectively wrong."

Imbalance
2021-02-14, 07:54 AM
I don't know how you pulled something from supposedly the same source. I pulled up Webster's Dictionary and got only ONE pronunciation for both of those words. SO I don't know what to tell you.

Literally, only ONE pronunciation for both words.

Multiple pronunciation results are shown when I pull it up, though comparing different online dictionaries has often shown differences in certain details. More to ImNotTrevor's point, though, is that regionally based Internet searches yield regionally based results, and I suspect that Webster adjusts their results based on where you are and your most common regional pronunciation.

I've never heard scuba pronounced with a-as-in-apple at the end, nor have I ever heard apparatus pronounced without a-as-in-apple at the beginning. I have with my own ears heard at least three ways to say coupon and even more for crayon, and in no case did I not understand the speaker.

InvisibleBison
2021-02-14, 08:40 AM
TO which I said: "Actually, that's exactly how that works. Especially if you are referring to it within the same wheelhouse as the creator intended it for.

If I was talking about Harry Potter lore with Harry Potter fans, and referred to Voldemort's Horcrux, pronouncing "hor-KRUZH", I would actually be objectively wrong."

The difference between language and Harry Potter is that the latter has a creator who is in a position of authority over the subject*, while the former does not. You can't be "objectively wrong" in how you pronounce words, because there's no one who is able to set an "objectively right" pronunciation. The same for spelling, or usage, or creating new words, or any other issue.


*At least, according to some. Death of the Author says otherwise.

Edreyn
2021-02-14, 08:42 AM
I pronounce the G letter as in the word "ghost".

see-GHIL

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 11:05 AM
You don't? The "A" is a short "A" sound. "Apparatus" (as in Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) is the same "a" sound at the end of "SCUBA". It sounds slightly different because the transition to the "double p" that follows requires a slight increase in inflection, as opposed to ending a word with it. But they're both a short "a".yeah, scuba is absolutely pronounced Skoo-bah as a standard. With the "bah" the same as apple and apparatus.

Maybe the question should instead be: does everyone pronounce apple as ah-pull? Or ah-pah-rah-tus?

Edit: I realized "ah" can either be ah as in apple, or ah as in ah-nold schwarzenegger. And when I look up apple on wiktionary, the "US" pronunciation is far harder than I'm used to hearing or saying it. More like the UK one. Ditto for apparatus, the a is far to hard.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apple
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apparatus

Either way it's not "a" in scuba, apple or apparatus, which is ay instead of ah.

RedMage125
2021-02-14, 11:49 AM
Multiple pronunciation results are shown when I pull it up, though comparing different online dictionaries has often shown differences in certain details. More to ImNotTrevor's point, though, is that regionally based Internet searches yield regionally based results, and I suspect that Webster adjusts their results based on where you are and your most common regional pronunciation.
That's interesting. I'm on an aircraft carrier right now. I wonder if where the boat is getting signal from has affected which results I get.



I've never heard scuba pronounced with a-as-in-apple at the end, nor have I ever heard apparatus pronounced without a-as-in-apple at the beginning. I have with my own ears heard at least three ways to say coupon and even more for crayon, and in no case did I not understand the speaker.
So...do you not pronounce it "Skoo-bah"? How do you pronounce SCUBA?


The difference between language and Harry Potter is that the latter has a creator who is in a position of authority over the subject*, while the former does not. You can't be "objectively wrong" in how you pronounce words, because there's no one who is able to set an "objectively right" pronunciation. The same for spelling, or usage, or creating new words, or any other issue.

I quite agree. That was my point.

Perhaps you missed what I was responding to. I'mNotTrevor said, ver batim:

Again, linguistically speaking, the idea that a made-up fantasy word has a."correct pronunciation" is as hilarious as it is incorrect.

Language doesn't care how the creator wanted it pronounced. That's not how it works.


yeah, scuba is absolutely pronounced Skoo-bah as a standard. With the "bah" the same as apple and apparatus.

Maybe the question should instead be: does everyone pronounce apple as ah-pull? Or ah-pah-rah-tus?


Vindication!

Marcelinari
2021-02-14, 12:23 PM
I am firmly of the opinion that since language is primarily a tool for communication, pronunciation is correct if it is understood as the same thing by both the speaker and the listener.

That said, on the SCUBA question, it seems to me that A is always pronounced in the way that the underlying word intends, so it is an odd choice of example - especially when the U stands for Underwater, and therefore the word should be pronounced ‘scubba’ if we were taking each letter as representative of its underlying word.

I pronounce gif with a ‘Guh’.

VincentTakeda
2021-02-14, 12:52 PM
soft g for me. even if the hard g is canon I couldnt convince myself to change it. Any time I hear it with the hard G I find it jarring and uncomfortable

Imbalance
2021-02-14, 01:08 PM
SKOO-bə is quite probably the only pronunciation I have ever heard, and leastways the only way I remember having heard it in person and in media, and the only way I've ever uttered it, even after having learned it was an acronym. I may have tested saying SKUBB-ah out loud in the wake of new knowledge and promptly abandoned it in favor of the norm on the reasoning that for all the more I'll ever be inclined to use the term it should be in the way most likely to be understood. A hillbilly don't s'much go divin'.

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 01:09 PM
That said, on the SCUBA question, it seems to me that A is always pronounced in the way that the underlying word intends, so it is an odd choice of example - especially when the U stands for Underwater, and therefore the word should be pronounced ‘scubba’ if we were taking each letter as representative of its underlying word.

Good call there. In skoo-bah, the bah is like ah-pah-rah-tus, but the oo is definitely not like un-der-wah-ter.


SKOO-bə is quite probably the only pronunciation I have ever heard, and leastways the only way I remember having heard it in person and in media, and the only way I've ever uttered it, even after having learned it was an acronym. Where (roughly) are you from? Because it's not that way in the western USA. Nor for that matter on anything I can find when I google "SCUBA pronunciation". Even the top hit, which is written skoo-buh, is actually pronounced skoo-bah when you listen to it.

I'd love to get a link where I can hear it the way you normally expect it to be said. I'm really curious now. :smallamused:

Imbalance
2021-02-14, 01:30 PM
Where (roughly) are you from? Because it's not that way in the western USA. Nor for that matter on anything I can find when I google "SCUBA pronunciation". Even the top hit, which is written skoo-buh, is actually pronounced skoo-bah when you listen to it.

The lumpy part of PA. First result for me is:

scu·ba
/ˈsko͞obə/


Clicking the button, the voice says it just the way I know it. That schwa is just like in 'the' (not long e). This is exactly how I remember hearing it on Riptide, G.I. Joe, and Magnum, P.I. in my most formative years. Emphasizing 'buh' at the end sounds like a touch of hyper extended speech.

Edit to add: there is a 'learn to pronounce' button that takes me to a page with skoo•buh, and the audio definitely accentuates the buh more. There is also a pull down to select between American and British pronunciation. Both of these begin differently and end the same.

Edit #2: Webster has \ ˈskü-bə \ and that man sounds correct to me.

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 02:21 PM
Edit #2: Webster has \ ˈskü-bə \ and that man sounds correct to me.
Yes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scuba
Clearly "skoo-bah", with the same ah as in ah-pull or ah-puh-rah-tus.

TridentOfMirth
2021-02-14, 02:28 PM
I pronounce the G like a j (Sijil) but I have heard lots of people use the hard g sound.

Imbalance
2021-02-14, 02:42 PM
Yes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scuba
Clearly "skoo-bah", with the same ah as in ah-pull or ah-puh-rah-tus.

Nope. That's the exact same page, but nowhere is "skoo-bah" written, nor does the man's voice sound like the short a in apple. I'm debating if it's worth the effort to takes screen caps, because I can't grab a direct link to the four different audio files.

Edit: see if this redirects you to what I see:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scuba?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=scuba001

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-14, 02:59 PM
That's... not far from the truth. Combined with changing fashions and accents, and occasional chanting pronunciation or spelling from one language to another.

It's the same reason that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland becomes the United Kingdom, or UK, and in a few hundred years might actually corrupt to be pronounced 'ook'*.

* I'm trying my hardest at least.

Truly the Librarian was telling us this all along.

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 03:36 PM
Nope. That's the exact same page, but nowhere is "skoo-bah" written, nor does the man's voice sound like the short a in apple. I'm debating if it's worth the effort to takes screen caps, because I can't grab a direct link to the four different audio files.

Edit: see if this redirects you to what I see:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scuba?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=scuba001

Yes. Your link also has the same a sound as in apple, apparatus, and "skoo-bah"

Xuc Xac
2021-02-14, 08:05 PM
Yes. Your link also has the same a sound as in apple, apparatus, and "skoo-bah"

It absolutely does not. That dictionary describes "scuba" as /ˈskü-bə/ and "apple" as /ˈa-pəl/. If they had the same sound, they wouldn't have different pronunciation symbols: /ə/ and /a/ are not the same sound. Unless you think "apple" rhymes with "couple", the "a" in "apple" is not the same as the one in "scuba".

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 08:09 PM
It absolutely does not. That dictionary describes "scuba" as /ˈskü-bə/ and "apple" as /ˈa-pəl/. If they had the same sound, they wouldn't have different pronunciation symbols: /ə/ and /a/ are not the same sound. Unless you think "apple" rhymes with "couple", the "a" in "apple" is not the same as the one in "scuba".
I don't care about supposed symbols. I know what I'm hearing, and it sounds the same. You can test it yourself.

Say scuba with the "bə" as pronounced in the link. Then say scubapple. Then say scubapperatus. They all sound the same.

Also I highly recommend trying this when friends or family are in the same room so they wonder what the heck you are reading :smallamused:

Xuc Xac
2021-02-14, 08:57 PM
I don't care about supposed symbols. I know what I'm hearing, and it sounds the same. You can test it yourself.


You're hearing incorrectly. The sounds are clearly different. The dictionary people can hear the difference and wrote the pronunciation with different symbols to indicate that. I can hear the difference too. These are two different sounds.

You can argue about how those words should be pronounced because that's a matter of opinion. If you want to claim those recordings are making the same sound, that's factually wrong. The "a" in the recorded example of "scuba" is /ə/; the one in "apple" is /æ/. Different dialects may say those words differently, but that doesn't change the fact that the recordings you're referring to as "the same" are actually using these two different sounds. You can listen to the sounds of each Vowel symbol of the IPA on the Wikipedia page for "Vowel". Check if they all the sound the same to you.

Tanarii
2021-02-14, 09:20 PM
You can listen to the sounds of each Vowel symbol of the IPA on the Wikipedia page for "Vowel". Check if they all the sound the same to you.
I listened to the /ə/ on iPA (on Wikipedia) and it's not the sound in the linked dictionary scuba. I also listened to IPA /a/ and it's not the sound in any example of apple or apparatus I've listened to today, not even the ones I linked that I disagreed with earlier.

Those are dramatically different sounds, but they don't seem to match actual examples being given by any of us.

What's interesting is before I listened to them, I was prepared to accept I might not just be able to hear a very minor difference, since examples given thus far mostly sounded the same to me. But now I've listened to the "correct" way to say those symbols, it's clear to me they're just not being correctly used, since they don't match the sound recordings.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-14, 09:36 PM
I listened to the /ə/ on iPA (on Wikipedia) and it's not the sound in the linked dictionary scuba.

Yes, it is.


I also listened to IPA /a/ and it's not the sound in any example of apple or apparatus I've listened to today, not even the ones I linked that I disagreed with earlier.


The sound in apple and apparatus isn't /a/, it's /æ/. If you can't hear the difference, the problem is you and not the professional linguists and speech mechanics experts.



What's interesting is before I listened to them, I was prepared to accept I might not just be able to hear a very minor difference, since examples given thus far mostly sounded the same to me. But now I've listened to the "correct" way to say those symbols, it's clear to me they're just not being correctly used, since they don't match the sound recordings.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn't use the IPA symbols, so don't get that mixed up. Maybe the problem is that you're hearing the sounds and thinking "it sounds like an A", but the letter A represents a lot of sounds. Each IPA symbol only has one sound, which is why they're used to describe sounds. For example, the E in "pen" can vary between dialects, but there's only one way to pronounce /e/ in IPA.

RedMage125
2021-02-15, 03:30 AM
Also I highly recommend trying this when friends or family are in the same room so they wonder what the heck you are reading :smallamused:
This made me laugh. I'm just imagining what their responses were like.

I also listened to IPA

I prefer to drink mine. :smalltongue:

Lord Torath
2021-02-15, 08:17 AM
I've never heard SCUBA pronounced with the 'a' sounding like apple, and I live in the Mountain West. I have only ever heard SCUBA pronounced with the 'a' sounding like the 'u' in "up". That's the upside-down 'e' symbol. It's also how the 'a' sounds in "about".

ezekielraiden
2021-02-15, 09:22 AM
I've never heard SCUBA pronounced with the 'a' sounding like apple, and I live in the Mountain West. I have only ever heard SCUBA pronounced with the 'a' sounding like the 'u' in "up". That's the upside-down 'e' symbol. It's also how the 'a' sounds in "about".

100% agreed. The whole "a as in apple or apparatus" thing deeply confused me when first mentioned. I get a mental logjam if I try to say "scubapple." For it to work, "apple" would have to rhyme with "supple," which it does not in my dialect of English (nor in any dialect I'm aware of). Whereas I can certainly say "scubabout." I find the resulting portmanteau humorous, but not at all difficult to speak.

Let's see if this helps. This is the Dictionary.com audio pronunciation file (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/S02/S0232400.mp3) available to me when I look up "scuba." (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scuba) It very clearly is a "buh" sound, which is nothing like the much higher-in-the-throat "ah" sound from "apple" and "apparatus."

Tanarii
2021-02-15, 09:39 AM
100% agreed. The whole "a as in apple or apparatus" thing deeply confused me when first mentioned. I get a mental logjam if I try to say "scubapple." For it to work, "apple" would have to rhyme with "supple," which it does not in my dialect of English (nor in any dialect I'm aware of). Whereas I can certainly say "scubabout." I find the resulting portmanteau humorous, but not at all difficult to speak.Wow! Some good comparisons to make here:
'about' and 'apple' and 'apparatus' all use the same 'a' sound. None sound like 'up'. I agree that scuba sounds like about ... as well as apple and apparatus.


Let's see if this helps. This is the Dictionary.com audio pronunciation file (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/S02/S0232400.mp3) available to me when I look up "scuba." (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scuba) It very clearly is a "buh" sound, which is nothing like the much higher-in-the-throat "ah" sound from "apple" and "apparatus."Another perfect example of skoo-bah like apple and apparatus ... and about. Thank you.

ezekielraiden
2021-02-15, 10:22 AM
Wow! Some good comparisons to make here:
'about' and 'apple' and 'apparatus' all use the same 'a' sound. None sound like 'up'. I agree that scuba sounds like about ... as well as apple and apparatus.

Another perfect example of skoo-bah like apple and apparatus ... and about. Thank you.

If I may ask, what region did you grow up in? Because this is deeply baffling. I have literally never heard of any dialect or variant where "apple" rhymes with "supple," nor where "apparatus" and "upperatus" would be pronounced identically.

Edit: Also, just as a test...this is the sound file for apple (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/A06/A0612000.mp3). Does its initial sound truly sound completely identical to the final sound of "scuba" to you?
Edit 2: Heck, here's the sound file for apparatus (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/A06/A0605800.mp3) for good measure.

Tanarii
2021-02-15, 11:47 AM
If I may ask, what region did you grow up in? Because this is deeply baffling. I have literally never heard of any dialect or variant where "apple" rhymes with "supple," nor where "apparatus" and "upperatus" would be pronounced identically.I didn't say those rhyme. But about doesn't sound like supple or upperstus either. About, apple, scuba, and apparatus all use the same a, and it sounds nothing like up.

In other words, it isn't uh-bout, it's ah-bout. It isn't uh-pull, it's ah-pull. It isn't skoo-buh, it's skoo-bah.

Unless you're from Canada and say uh-boot I guess. :smallamused:



Edit: Also, just as a test...this is the sound file for apple (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/A06/A0612000.mp3). Does its initial sound truly sound completely identical to the final sound of "scuba" to you?
Edit 2: Heck, here's the sound file for apparatus (https://static.sfdict.com/audio/A06/A0605800.mp3) for good measure.No, but neither of those are how the words are said in common English usage. That's far too hard and loud an a in the ah, It's being disproportionately stressed. No one would ever never say it like that: I want an Ah-pull.

If that's how you think it should be said, it's no wonder you don't think anyone would say skoo-bAh. Because they wouldn't.

Edit:Honestly this entire debate is missing the bear in the room. Scuba to apparatus is either the same or far closer to each other than scuba to underwater.

ezekielraiden
2021-02-15, 12:19 PM
I didn't say those rhyme. But about doesn't sound like supple or upperstus either. About, apple, scuba, and apparatus all use the same a, and it sounds nothing like up.
I agree they don't sound like "up," but completely disagree that they use the same sound.


In other words, it isn't uh-bout, it's ah-bout. It isn't uh-pull, it's ah-pull. It isn't skoo-buh, it's skoo-bah.
It's definitely "uh" as far as I'm concerned, for skoo-buh. That's what I've been trying to say.


Unless you're from Canada and say uh-boot I guess. :smallamused:
Not uh-boot. Just uh-bout.


No, but neither of those are how the words are said in common English usage. That's far too hard and loud an a in the ah, It's being disproportionately stressed. No one would ever never say it like that: I want an Ah-pull.

That IS how it's said in common English usage. That is what we've been trying to tell you this whole time. It is NOT "far too hard and loud an a." It is EXACTLY how the vast majority of English speakers say "apparatus" and "apple."

Imbalance
2021-02-15, 01:43 PM
I don't know, like, how to even continue this. There is an entire company, might of heard of them, called Apple, named after the fruit. People say the name on the news and stuff. Somehow, it sounds like Ahpple? Serious question: are you trolling?

Hytheter
2021-02-15, 03:07 PM
The 'a' in apple is the same as in cat, which is clearly very different from about or scuba.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-15, 04:23 PM
I didn't say those rhyme. But about doesn't sound like supple or upperstus either. About, apple, scuba, and apparatus all use the same a, and it sounds nothing like up.

In other words, it isn't uh-bout, it's ah-bout. It isn't uh-pull, it's ah-pull. It isn't skoo-buh, it's skoo-bah.


If you think "apple" has the same "a" sound as "scuba", then "apple" rhymes with "supple".

"About" IS uh-bout. Nobody who speaks English like a native speaker says "skoo-bah". I don't know why you think those different A sounds are the same, but it reminds me of when a friend insisted that a red car was black and learned that he was colorblind. "It's as black as that stop sign!"

Tanarii
2021-02-15, 04:28 PM
After digging around online, I found out what's going on here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//æ/_raising

I'm not raising the æ sound.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-15, 05:34 PM
After digging around online, I found out what's going on here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//æ/_raising

I'm not raising the æ sound.

That still doesn't explain why you think "scuba" ends with æ when it's a schwa.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-15, 08:03 PM
I don't care about supposed symbols. I know what I'm hearing, and it sounds the same. You can test it yourself.

Say scuba with the "bə" as pronounced in the link. Then say scubapple. Then say scubapperatus. They all sound the same.

Also I highly recommend trying this when friends or family are in the same room so they wonder what the heck you are reading :smallamused:

No. Just. No.
https://voca.ro/15rsy8OdYVCq

Trying your recommendation in this link:
https://voca.ro/122iPRyM1gkZ

So... no.

Those are not the same sound. Wtf is wrong with y'alls ears?

---

Edit:

If Tanarii is british, and speaks with a british accent, that MAY cause them to sound similar...?

But even that seems a stretch. I'd have to hear british and australian pronunciations of it.

Which would be FASCINATING, honestly, but I'm very curious as to what area of the world this pronunciation is hailing from.

Necroticplague
2021-02-16, 01:00 AM
I always pronounced it as sig-ill, because that’s how it’s spelt. Why would I pronounce if sij-ill?

It now occurs to me that that’s how it works in ‘ginger’ and ‘region’, though, so perhaps some further reflection into the sanguine mess that is English is required of me.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-16, 02:41 AM
I always pronounced it as sig-ill, because that’s how it’s spelt. Why would I pronounce if sij-ill?

Because "sigil" is a real word that rhymes with "vigil".

RedMage125
2021-02-16, 04:07 AM
I have been baffled by people claiming the "a" sound in SCUBA is different than the "a" in "apple" or "apparatus".

I think the key is the distinction between the stress on the word. And short vowels are often affected by the letters that come after, as the sound leads into the next consonant. But Tanarii and I are solely focusing on the vowel sound itself.

"Apple" is "AH-pull", it's "APP-ull"

"Apparatus" is "app-uh-RAT-uss"

"SCUBA" is "SKOO-bah"

If you only listen to the sound the "a" makes, instead of folding in the stress on the word and the flow of the "a" into the "double p", then yes, indeed the end of "SCUBA" is the same sound as the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus".

I had thought that should be obvious, but it might not be.

Necroticplague
2021-02-16, 04:25 AM
I have been baffled by people claiming the "a" sound in SCUBA is different than the "a" in "apple" or "apparatus".

I think the key is the distinction between the stress on the word. And short vowels are often affected by the letters that come after, as the sound leads into the next consonant. But Tanarii and I are solely focusing on the vowel sound itself.

"Apple" is "AH-pull", it's "APP-ull"

"Apparatus" is "app-uh-RAT-uss"

"SCUBA" is "SKOO-bah"

If you only listen to the sound the "a" makes, instead of folding in the stress on the word and the flow of the "a" into the "double p", then yes, indeed the end of "SCUBA" is the same sound as the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus".

I had thought that should be obvious, but it might not be.

???
I’m really not seeing how you can believe those two are the same. To borrow in the expression this sight (https://www.google.com/amp/www.learnex.in/5-sounds-to-pronounce-the-letter-a-correctly/%3famp_markup=1) uses, scuba is an ‘uh’ sound, like Another or tuba, while apple is an ‘aa’, like rap or past.

ezekielraiden
2021-02-16, 04:50 AM
I have been baffled by people claiming the "a" sound in SCUBA is different than the "a" in "apple" or "apparatus".

I think the key is the distinction between the stress on the word. And short vowels are often affected by the letters that come after, as the sound leads into the next consonant. But Tanarii and I are solely focusing on the vowel sound itself.

"Apple" is "AH-pull", it's "APP-ull"

"Apparatus" is "app-uh-RAT-uss"

"SCUBA" is "SKOO-bah"

If you only listen to the sound the "a" makes, instead of folding in the stress on the word and the flow of the "a" into the "double p", then yes, indeed the end of "SCUBA" is the same sound as the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus".

I had thought that should be obvious, but it might not be.

The stress still doesn't make /æ/ become /ə/. That's the whole point. The /æ/ sound is the "near-open front unrounded vowel," while the /ə/ is the mid central vowel (effectively the "default" vowel of just vocalizing without any effort at articulation).

"Scuba" is pronounced / ˈsku bə /. "Apple" in most dialects of English is pronounced / ˈæp əl /. I have given sound files, which have been dismissed as incorrect despite coming straight from Dictionary.com; so here's a youtube video of an ACTUAL LIVING PERSON pronouncing "apple" the exact same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phT22oBa8TU

Xuc Xac
2021-02-16, 05:23 AM
I think the key is the distinction between the stress on the word. And short vowels are often affected by the letters that come after, as the sound leads into the next consonant. But Tanarii and I are solely focusing on the vowel sound itself.

No, you're really not. The vowel sounds are completely different. This is not a matter of opinion. They can be objectively measured. I've spent nearly 15 years studying speech mechanics and teaching people how to use a British RP accent or a General American accent. You can argue about which pronunciation is "correct" as a matter of opinion, but the actual sound in a recording is not up for debate. The frequencies of the sound are what they are and your opinion doesn't matter.




"Apple" is "AH-pull", it's "APP-ull"

"Apparatus" is "app-uh-RAT-uss"

"SCUBA" is "SKOO-bah"

If you only listen to the sound the "a" makes, instead of folding in the stress on the word and the flow of the "a" into the "double p", then yes, indeed the end of "SCUBA" is the same sound as the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus".

I had thought that should be obvious, but it might not be.

No, it absolutely is not. In music, you can say "I think those two notes sound the same", but if one is 440 hertz (A) and one is 466 (A#) then you're just wrong and it's not up for debate. I am listening to the sound of the vowel. I have 15 years experience in speech mechanics and teaching people how to emulate General American or British RP accents. I've had to transcribe spoken sounds into the International Phonetic Alphabet to record the sounds precisely (not, approximations like "ah" or "uh" that depend on your own dialect). I know the difference between a schwa and an ash.

In the recordings linked in this thread, the "a" in "scuba" is /ə/ and the "a" at the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus" is /æ/. They don't sound the same. They don't even look the same: a deaf person could watch your mouth and see the difference because your mouth is much more open for /æ/.

Let me ask you this: Do you think ALL of the "a" sounds in "apparatus" sound the same? They don't. Some people say those 3 "a" sounds in 3 different ways (/æ/, /ə/, /eɪ/) or (/æ/, /ə/, /ɑː/). Some only use two sounds, like my own preferred pronunciation of /æ pə ɹæ təs/ with the ash sound for the first and third and schwa for the second. You said "apparatus" is "app-uh-RAT-uss", so you clearly don't think all those "a" sounds are the same. I'm guessing you mean to say it sounds like the way I say those three (/æ/ /ə/ /æ/).

As far as I know, every dialect of English pronounces "scuba" as /skuːbə/ (although I wouldn't be surprised if some Australians said /skjuːbə/). I'm sure you say /skuːbə/ too. If you actually said /skuːbæ/ as you are describing, everyone around you would think you sounded strange and were probably joking.


"Apple" in most dialects of English is pronounced / ˈæp əl /.

In every dialect I'm aware of, everyone pronounces the "a" in "apple" the same way. Dialect differences show up in the second syllable, but they're really minor. Most use a "schwa +l" as you describe, but some (like mine) use a "dark l" instead. Most people can't hear the difference anyway because it all sounds like "the letter L" to the them.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-16, 06:13 PM
No, you're really not. The vowel sounds are completely different. This is not a matter of opinion. (TRUNCATED FOR SPACE)

It is really amusing to me that 2 internet randos are trying to argue against an entire academic field of study and its findings in order to not be wrong.

Even down to when someone uses actual audio recordings to demonstrate the sound differences, they have to insist that *literally every English speaker on the planet except for them must be wrong* in one case.


I am reminded of when someone tried to argue that English is a Latin-based language. And when I informed them that no scholar of English nor Linguistics had ever called English anything other than a Germanic language, and cited multiple sources, insisted my sources were wrong compared to the one thing they read, one time, but couldn't share.

I am greatly enjoying this.

Wizard_Lizard
2021-02-16, 06:22 PM
It is really amusing to me that 2 internet randos are trying to argue against an entire academic field of study and its findings in order to not be wrong.

Even down to when someone uses actual audio recordings to demonstrate the sound differences, they have to insist that *literally every English speaker on the planet except for them must be wrong* in one case.


I am reminded of when someone tried to argue that English is a Latin-based language. And when I informed them that no scholar of English nor Linguistics had ever called English anything other than a Germanic language, and cited multiple sources, insisted my sources were wrong compared to the one thing they read, one time, but couldn't share.

I am greatly enjoying this.

Well I mean with the latin thing, to argue that english does not have any latin based words is plain silly, not just coz of the romans, but also the french, who's language is definetly based on latin. Although English is just a weird amalgamation language anyhow. And with my two second research that is definetly definitively correct I found "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. ... The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin roots." SO uh. it's kinda both? A germanic language with latin words shoved in?

quinron
2021-02-16, 06:59 PM
It is really amusing to me that 2 internet randos are trying to argue against an entire academic field of study and its findings in order to not be wrong.

Even down to when someone uses actual audio recordings to demonstrate the sound differences, they have to insist that *literally every English speaker on the planet except for them must be wrong* in one case.


I am reminded of when someone tried to argue that English is a Latin-based language. And when I informed them that no scholar of English nor Linguistics had ever called English anything other than a Germanic language, and cited multiple sources, insisted my sources were wrong compared to the one thing they read, one time, but couldn't share.

I am greatly enjoying this.


Well I mean with the latin thing, to argue that english does not have any latin based words is plain silly, not just coz of the romans, but also the french, who's language is definetly based on latin. Although English is just a weird amalgamation language anyhow. And with my two second research that is definetly definitively correct I found "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. ... The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin roots." SO uh. it's kinda both? A germanic language with latin words shoved in?

Wizard_Lizard is right, as far as I can tell - Germanic grammar and structure, primarily Romantic vocabulary.

That said, I 100% agree, ImNotTrevor - this ridiculous argument has been providing me with little seratonin boosts for days.

Imbalance
2021-02-16, 07:49 PM
I consider it good practice for when I'm elderly and my children attempt to gaslight me.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-16, 08:25 PM
Well I mean with the latin thing, to argue that english does not have any latin based words is plain silly, not just coz of the romans, but also the french, who's language is definetly based on latin. Although English is just a weird amalgamation language anyhow. And with my two second research that is definetly definitively correct I found "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. ... The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin roots." SO uh. it's kinda both? A germanic language with latin words shoved in?

It has *some* latin words thrown in from aboit 400 years of French occupation of the british isles.

But saying it is in the same family as Spanish and Portuguese is just.... not correct.


Wizard_Lizard is right, as far as I can tell - Germanic grammar and structure, primarily Romantic vocabulary.

That said, I 100% agree, ImNotTrevor - this ridiculous argument has been providing me with little seratonin boosts for days.
It is not primarily romantic in vocabulary.
Basically, the french influence as conquerors and nobility meant that the fancy term for things comes from french, and the normal version from germanic.

A poor person lives in?
A House.
(From germanic "haus")

A rich person lives in?
A Mansion
(From Middle French "Maison")

A peasant ate Cow.

A nobleman ate Boef. (Eventually, beef.)

How do you eat?
Well, you'd normally "Chew" (germanic)
But if you're pretentious you "masticate" (latin)

There are a lot of old french words thrown in, but English is still a thoroughly Germanic language in the eyes of every linguist on the planet.

Their contention was NOT that there was latin influence. I asked if that's what they meant. It was not. They insisted English was a Romance Language, not a Germanic language.

In any case, this would mean this person had a better case than that "Scuba" is pronounced with the "u" from "underwater" and the "a" from "smack".

Caelestion
2021-02-16, 08:52 PM
What little it's worth, as a British person with a fairly generic "polite" accent, I say SCUBA as "sk-you-buh", with a schwa at the end and the "sk-you" as in the UK pronunciation of skew, dew and duke.

(I also say "apparatus" with three different A sounds, as in cat, schwa and case, but that's neither here nor there.)

Xuc Xac
2021-02-16, 10:10 PM
Basically, the french influence as conquerors and nobility meant that the fancy term for things comes from french, and the normal version from germanic.

A poor person lives in?
A House.
(From germanic "haus")

A rich person lives in?
A Mansion
(From Middle French "Maison")

A peasant ate Cow.

A nobleman ate Boef. (Eventually, beef.)

How do you eat?
Well, you'd normally "Chew" (germanic)
But if you're pretentious you "masticate" (latin)


In some cases, English has three registers or levels of fanciness: Germanic, French, and Latin. For example, "kingly", "royal", and "regal". Sometimes we default to Germanic as "plain" and treat the others as "fancy", but sometimes we default to the "more polite" upper registers because the Germanic is too direct. It's ok to call your boss a "manager" or "supervisor", but just calling them "overseer" is rude (in a "true, but you shouldn't say it" way).

Batcathat
2021-02-17, 02:05 AM
In some cases, English has three registers or levels of fanciness: Germanic, French, and Latin. For example, "kingly", "royal", and "regal". Sometimes we default to Germanic as "plain" and treat the others as "fancy", but sometimes we default to the "more polite" upper registers because the Germanic is too direct. It's ok to call your boss a "manager" or "supervisor", but just calling them "overseer" is rude (in a "true, but you shouldn't say it" way).

Stuff like that is pretty interesting. I remember being fascinated when a teacher told me that what language my native Swedish had borrowed from depended on what part of society the word was about. Basically, words to do with economy and trading was borrowed from Germany (thanks to the Hanseatic League and other German traders), words to do with industry was borrowed from England (thanks to the industrial revolution starting there) and, as with English, the fancy and luxurious words were borrowed from France (thanks to it being the language of royalty and nobles for a long time. Our current line of royalty being imported from France probably didn't hurt either).

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 04:43 PM
???
I’m really not seeing how you can believe those two are the same. To borrow in the expression this sight (https://www.google.com/amp/www.learnex.in/5-sounds-to-pronounce-the-letter-a-correctly/%3famp_markup=1) uses, scuba is an ‘uh’ sound, like Another or tuba, while apple is an ‘aa’, like rap or past.
Scuba, another, tuba, apple, rap and past all have the same a sound though.

Unless you're raising your a, per my link above.

Edit: actually, it sounds like you mean you're dropping the a into a uh sound, my bad. That's a different thing. Like the poster earlier that said about was uh-bout.

Unavenger
2021-02-17, 06:28 PM
Scuba, another, tuba, apple, rap and past all have the same a sound though.

Meanwhile in my accent, three of them are shwas, two are short a sounds, and one is a long a sound.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-17, 06:41 PM
Scuba, another, tuba, apple, rap and past all have the same a sound though.

Unless you're raising your a, per my link above.


"Scuba", "another", and "tuba" all use /ə/ (if you have a non-rhotic accent, "another" starts and ends with it). "Apple", "rap", and "past" use /æ/ (for most dialects). If you're "raising your a", you turn /æ/ into /æᵊ/. That changes how you say "apple", "rap", and "past", but "scuba", "tuba", and "another" are still /ə/. The /ə/ doesn't get changed because it's already the simplest vowel. The schwa /ə/ is what you turn other vowels into when you don't speak clearly, slur your words, or just drop the stress. (In fact, it's really hard to stress a /ə/ without turning it into another vowel like /ʌ/.)

Saint-Just
2021-02-17, 06:52 PM
My go-to segue to any discussion of different origins of English words is Paul Anderson's Uncleftish Beholding (https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ). It's a text written in a (not very serious) attempted (re)construction of purely Germanic version of English language. Most of the terms are in fact morpheme-to-morpheme equivalent to the non-Germainic words in the current usage (so "atom"-> a+tomos ~ un+cleave -> "uncleft"). I find it interesting that some people report significant difference in understanding the text and some say it reads almost effortlessly.

Eldan
2021-02-18, 05:15 AM
Oh, people go further than that. Uncleftish Beholding is just a start. There's an entire Anglish conlang now, including a Wiki. It has all the usual science categories one would expect, Worldken, Heavenlore, Gleecraft, Blendlore, Shapelore, Reckonlore, Lifelore... and all Eretide from the Romish Rich to the twithe World Wye. (Spoiler: Theechland lost.)

Tanarii
2021-02-18, 10:26 AM
I find it interesting that some people report significant difference in understanding the text and some say it reads almost effortlessly.
That's pretty amazing given so many unenglish words being used to make up the compound words.

Eldan
2021-02-18, 10:57 AM
You know, Weeneitherbit may be my new favourite word. (Neutrino).

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-18, 10:59 AM
That's pretty amazing given so many unenglish words being used to make up the compound words.

I haven't seen any words in the text not found in English. So I'm not sure what you're on about.

Then again, I'm not sure what you're on about in a lot of this thread.

Saint-Just
2021-02-18, 03:06 PM
I haven't seen any words in the text not found in English. So I'm not sure what you're on about.

Then again, I'm not sure what you're on about in a lot of this thread.

There are some words which are uncommon (manifold, lading) in the everyday usage in the last 50+ years; and also others which are used in ways they haven't been used for very long ("standing" for state, "tale" for amount, even "ken" for knowledge - beyond one's ken is a set phrase, you can understand it without knowing what ken is)

quinron
2021-02-18, 04:21 PM
What little it's worth, as a British person with a fairly generic "polite" accent, I say SCUBA as "sk-you-buh", with a schwa at the end and the "sk-you" as in the UK pronunciation of skew, dew and duke.

(I also say "apparatus" with three different A sounds, as in cat, schwa and case, but that's neither here nor there.)

As a Midwestern American who's fascinated by accents, I think the u-glide is probably the thing Americans miss most often when they're faking a British accent (if it's a halfway decent one; the most missed thing in bad accents is the non-rhotic endings).

That, and Americans pronounce all the French-derived words with French rules ("herb" and "garage" are the most obvious).

dps
2021-02-18, 05:28 PM
To be honest, I don't think that I've ever said "sigil" out loud, but if I did, I'd pronounce it with a hard g.

Caelestion
2021-02-18, 07:09 PM
That, and Americans pronounce all the French-derived words with French rules ("herb" and "garage" are the most obvious).

I was always a bit baffled by Americans saying "erb" rather than "herb", particularly when they often like to criticise us for not shedding all the silent letters in other words, such as oestrogen and colour. (Not that the O in "oestrogen" is silent, as it instructs you to sound the initial E as a long E (ee-), but again, that's neither here nor there.)

Vinyadan
2021-02-18, 08:00 PM
I think the right answer is "Seagull".

There's a few interesting things here. One is that sigil is a strict relative of seal. Seal comes from Old French (seel < Lat. sigillum), while sigil comes directly from Latin sigillum. German Siegel also comes from Latin. German in general tends to harden -g- (see: Genua and Papageno, which is supposed to be an Italian name). So it could have got the word from Latin back when it was still pronounced with the hard g, or as it was already pronounced with a soft j in the rest of Europe and rehardened it, because that's how people there read their Latin.

In general, many of the uncertain pronunciations I have seen in this thread are of English words loaned from French (or Spanish). So there seems to be two competing pronunciations, one according to French, the other one according to more or less local English rules. The funny part is that this same thing is playing out abroad, as knowledge of English takes over French, with people e.g. accepting both pronunciations for "stage".

Another thing is that derivation isn't enough to always make a word be pronounced in a certain way. Clear and clarify are a good example. The words are related, but have different histories, one coming from French, the other from Latin. More in general, the position of the accent or whether a syllable is open or closed and a few other things can influence pronunciation even in related words, like simultaneous and simulate, or probate and probable (in this case, the -a- actually belongs to different suffixes). In Latin this was very strong, it's why you have both captive and receptive.

About what is hard and what is soft... these are actually shorthand definitions that only make sense if you already know what the hard and soft variants are. Under normal conditions, you would talk about occlusive (gallon - the g completely stops the airflow), affricate (John - the J stops the airflow as a d succeeded by a sound (zh?) in which the airflow is allowed to get through) and fricative (shop - the sh modifies the airflow, but never stops it), with a few more attributes to determine what sound you mean.



For bonus points: try Toolmake, Bagehot, Talliafero, Buccleugh, Cholmondeley or Wriothesley


Are they all smith's names? Toolmake and Talliaferro (Iron Cutter) make me wonder. Delevingne is also an interesting name, literally "from the vineyard" with an archaic writing that has been superseded in French (la vigne).


To be fair, I would also love a cooler coat of arms than mine.

Be careful of what you wish for, or you will end up like Beatrice of York, who got three bees -- because it's bee-thrice! Which is even worse than Saturn's Tech-Nick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSW0mEufMss)!


pronouncing Caesar as "seizer"

Nomen (=name) omen...

By the way, if I started writing Wednesday as Wensday, would the pronunciation actually change?

Also, sa or za?


https://youtu.be/qkP2F7kWn7A

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-19, 12:40 AM
There are some words which are uncommon (manifold, lading) in the everyday usage in the last 50+ years; and also others which are used in ways they haven't been used for very long ("standing" for state, "tale" for amount, even "ken" for knowledge - beyond one's ken is a set phrase, you can understand it without knowing what ken is)

I need to not respond at 1 am. Ignore my initial response, I'd lost the through line.

Yeah, I picked up on that. It is still one hell of a reach to say "there is non-english wordage in here."

You can tell there was no checking before that declaration. Which explains a lot about how things have been going.

Luccan
2021-02-19, 01:33 AM
I think the right answer is "Seagull".



I was going to joke about this, but here you went and provided an actual explanation.

Eldan
2021-02-19, 03:52 AM
Be careful of what you wish for, or you will end up like Beatrice of York, who got three bees -- because it's bee-thrice! Which is even worse than Saturn's Tech-Nick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSW0mEufMss)!


Look, my family's coat of arms is a green hill on a blue sky. It's the most boring crest I've ever seen. It's literally just half blue, half green with a bit of a curve in the dividing line. I'd say I take a bad pun for a family crest, but a hill is already the literal translation of my name.

There's like 50 other families with my name and their own coat of arms and every other one of them came up with something more interesting. Even those that have the hill have at least something on top of the hill. (https://www.chgh.ch/1870-b/buache-byss/buehler?start=0)

Lord Torath
2021-02-19, 09:35 AM
Look, my family's coat of arms is a green hill on a blue sky. It's the most boring crest I've ever seen. It's literally just half blue, half green with a bit of a curve in the dividing line. I'd say I take a bad pun for a family crest, but a hill is already the literal translation of my name.Is this a good time to quote Ferris Bueller (the TV version)?

"It is a piece of tin. Don't worry about it, I don't even have my own piece of tin. I have to envy yours."

No family coat of arms (that I'm aware of) for me. :smallsmile:

quinron
2021-02-19, 06:34 PM
I was always a bit baffled by Americans saying "erb" rather than "herb", particularly when they often like to criticise us for not shedding all the silent letters in other words, such as oestrogen and colour. (Not that the O in "oestrogen" is silent, as it instructs you to sound the initial E as a long E (ee-), but again, that's neither here nor there.)

That's actually an interesting example - we pronounce "estrogen" with a short E anyway. I've noticed that vowel-shortening seems to be common from most British accents to SAE; for example, I've heard a lot of Brits pronounce "minotaur" as [MY-no-tor] instead of [MIN-o-tar], which seems to be most common pronunciation here in the States.

Caelestion
2021-02-20, 06:21 AM
Well, yes, as in King Minos (My-noss). I've never been to Crete, so I don't know how modern Greeks pronounce it, but then I wouldn't expect them to pronounce things the way their ancestors did 2500 years ago anyway.

I suspect (completely without proof) that Webster's spelling reforms are partially to blame for the different pronunciations of Classical roots across the pond. Words such as paedophile and oestrogen sound completely different in the US, but I don't know whether it was spelling following pronunciation or the reverse.

Eldan
2021-02-20, 07:13 AM
Well, yes, as in King Minos (My-noss). I've never been to Crete, so I don't know how modern Greeks pronounce it, but then I wouldn't expect them to pronounce things the way their ancestors did 2500 years ago anyway.

I suspect (completely without proof) that Webster's spelling reforms are partially to blame for the different pronunciations of Classical roots across the pond. Words such as paedophile and oestrogen sound completely different in the US, but I don't know whether it was spelling following pronunciation or the reverse.

Μίνως is pronounced like the English pronoun "me". Mee-noss. Iota is [i] in both Ancient and Modern Greek. Hence Μινώταυρος is [miːnɔ̌ːtau̯ros], or Mee-no-t-ow-ross. Ow as in "how".

Second part is interesting. I don't actually know when English lost the sounds "ae" and "oe", given that both Latin, German and French all have those sounds.

Caelestion
2021-02-20, 07:12 PM
Well, British English hasn't lost them, in as much as the Greek diphthongs ai and oi were Latinised as ae and oe, which themselves slid towards ee, just as they have done in Modern Greek (a process known as iotacism). The differences between "modern" Ecclesiastical Latin and what we think Classical Latin (e.g. that of Caesar or Cicero) sounded like are quite different.

quinron
2021-02-20, 08:06 PM
Μίνως is pronounced like the English pronoun "me". Mee-noss. Iota is [i] in both Ancient and Modern Greek. Hence Μινώταυρος is [miːnɔ̌ːtau̯ros], or Mee-no-t-ow-ross. Ow as in "how".

The "au" to [ɔ] phenomenon interests me because it's common to both British and American accents - neither is likely to, for example, pronounce the end of "minotaur" as [taʊr]. I'm 90% certain it comes from French, because "au" in pretty much every other Romantic and Germanic language is [aʊ], which makes it very funny to me seeing how British dialects have otherwise really rejected French influence.

Caelestion
2021-02-20, 08:27 PM
If you go to Crete in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, you can hear the voice actors stumble over at least three different pronunciation of the famous Minotaur, whether that's British (my-no-tor), American (min-o-tar) or what I assumed was a Modern Greek effort. I don't recall hearing an approximation of the Classical Greek mee-no-towr (as in a version of Eldan's pronunciation), though.

Vinyadan
2021-02-21, 05:34 AM
The "au" to [ɔ] phenomenon interests me because it's common to both British and American accents - neither is likely to, for example, pronounce the end of "minotaur" as [taʊr]. I'm 90% certain it comes from French, because "au" in pretty much every other Romantic and Germanic language is [aʊ], which makes it very funny to me seeing how British dialects have otherwise really rejected French influence.

I think that this is an interesting case, because some Latin speakers had already started to pronounce au as o back in the days of Cicero (a man called Claudius changed his name to Clodius because that's how the plebs pronounced it). Then you find later documents by grammarians explaining recurrent errors, like writing oricla instead of auris (=ear). Nowadays, you have ear = Fr. oreille, It. orecchia/o, Sp. Oreja, Port. Orelha, Rum. Ureche, all from oricla, all without au. However, in many of these languages the process is over, so nowadays you have many words where au hasn't been processed into o, be it because they were introduced later or they were cultured words whose pronunciation was particularly guarded.

Tanarii
2021-02-21, 12:16 PM
Looking those Latin words up, it looks like they're supposed to be pronounced as follows?
Clah-oo-dee-uhs
Ah-oo-ris

Beleriphon
2021-02-21, 04:47 PM
The one I see often is mispronouncing 'daemon' as 'demon'. Which is not without precedent, see encyclopaedia, so I'll switch to demon if corrected, but it's notably widespread (the word is technically 'day-mun' with a short u, at least in my accent).

If we're going old school daemon in Latin should be dymon (the ae is a diphthong and has the same sound as the y in sky).


Full disclosure, I pronounce GIF as "Gift". But I can see a case for pronouncing it like the peanut butter Jif, if only to avoid confusion with the word "gift". Especially early on in their development/utilization.

Now a days, if you're not using jpegs (pronounced gee-pigs, obviously) you're imaging wrong

I prefer pings personally. ;)

ezekielraiden
2021-02-21, 04:58 PM
If we're going old school daemon in Latin should be dymon (the ae is a diphthong and has the same sound as the y in sky).

Indeed. And the original pronunciation is preserved in, for example, eudaimonia. (The term "daimon" could refer to one's "guardian spirit," and thus became metaphorically or euphemistically used as a term for one's "fate" or "destiny," and thus the word was used for "the state of having a good life; flourishing, excellence; contented happiness.")

Beleriphon
2021-02-21, 05:22 PM
As a thought, some of the weird pronunciation we see in here coup de grace being pronounced coo day grah is a phenomenon known as hyperforeignism. It it happens a lot when we apply a language rule that doesn't apply but it looks like should because you don't speak the language that is being mistaken. For example habanero being pronounced with a ñ like jalepeño because it looks like it's Spanish (more specifically Mexican Spanish).

Caelestion
2021-02-22, 06:52 AM
Looking those Latin words up, it looks like they're supposed to be pronounced as follows?
Clah-oo-dee-uhs
Ah-oo-ris

In Classical Latin, the au diphthong is pronounced as in town or cloud.

Tanarii
2021-02-22, 10:15 AM
In Classical Latin, the au diphthong is pronounced as in town or cloud.I checked a few more links and some do indeed say that. The ones I was looking at when I posted last time said it's two sounds, ah-oo. Different search terms for the win lol

Klow-dee-uhs certainly makes more sense.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-22, 05:40 PM
I checked a few more links and some do indeed say that. The ones I was looking at when I posted last time said it's two sounds, ah-oo.

It is two sounds. That's the literal meaning of "diphthong". It's only one syllable though.

"Claudius" sounded like "cloudy juice" without the J.

RedMage125
2021-02-23, 08:10 AM
I am greatly enjoying this.
I'm enjoying your towering condescension. Especially because you've been so caught up in overwhelming smugness that you're contradicting yourself, issuing mutually exclusive statements, and still acting like everyone who disagrees with you must be mentally defunct.


It is really amusing to me that 2 internet randos are trying to argue against an entire academic field of study and its findings in order to not be wrong.

Even down to when someone uses actual audio recordings to demonstrate the sound differences, they have to insist that *literally every English speaker on the planet except for them must be wrong* in one case.
Case in point. You support Xuc Xac and his statements, supporting the audio recordings as "only correct way", and yet, earlier...

Accents can affect the voicings of things, and are tied to dialects.
Accounting for multiple common pronunciations of a word and having them all be acceptable is literally the exact OPPOSITE of accent erasure.

It ensures that you can't label an entire accent as "wrong English." Which is an absurd proposition.
I quite assure you, that the way a lot of Midwesterners pronounce "SCUBA", the "a" at the end sounds just like the "a" at the beginning of "apple" (at least with our pronunciation of "apple", anyway).

So, labeling accents as "wrong English" is an absurd proposition...and yet Tanarii and I are "objectively wrong" in how we pronounce things. These are mutually exclusive statements.

Like Tanarii said, you are advocating SCUBA as "SKOO-buh", and we (and the people where we come from) do not drop it into an "uh" sound. It sounds more like "SKOO-bah". Which is, in fact, the same as the beginning of "Ahpp-ull". So, if that's just our Midwestern accent...then by your own admission, it is not wrong English, and all your condescension is misplaced.

OTOH, if there is only one right way to pronounce it, then all your condescension is hypocrisy, because it was you who said labeling accents as "wrong English" is absurd.


I haven't seen any words in the text not found in English. So I'm not sure what you're on about.

Then again, I'm not sure what you're on about in a lot of this thread.



You can tell there was no checking before that declaration. Which explains a lot about how things have been going.
Wow, we sure are lucky to have the only right-thinking person on this thread. Us idiots don't know how good we have it! Thank you for being the only person who is capable of making intelligent conversation.
*rolls eyes*

So, which is it? Is your condescending tone misplaced because our accent isn't wrong? Or is your condescending tone misplaced because it was you who made the assertion that even saying our accent could be wrong was "an absurd proposition"?

And I've yet to get a response to when you said:

Again, linguistically speaking, the idea that a made-up fantasy word has a."correct pronunciation" is as hilarious as it is incorrect.

Language doesn't care how the creator wanted it pronounced. That's not how it works.
To which I said,
"Actually, that's exactly how that works. Especially if you are referring to it within the same wheelhouse as the creator intended it for.

If I was talking about Harry Potter lore with Harry Potter fans, and referred to Voldemort's Horcrux, pronouncing "hor-KRUZH", I would actually be objectively wrong."




I am reminded of when someone tried to argue that English is a Latin-based language. And when I informed them that no scholar of English nor Linguistics had ever called English anything other than a Germanic language, and cited multiple sources, insisted my sources were wrong compared to the one thing they read, one time, but couldn't share.
On this, we quite agree. I have heard any number of people say English is "based off Latin". As I am fluent in one Romance Language (Castilian Spanish), and took French in Middle School, I hate hearing this. Romance languages are wildly different.


It has *some* latin words thrown in from aboit 400 years of French occupation of the british isles.

But saying it is in the same family as Spanish and Portuguese is just.... not correct.
Quite right. My degree is in History and Theatre, not English. But etymology is something of a hobby of mine.

Incidentally, modern English as we speak it today can mostly be traced to Elizabethan period. Shakespeare alone has created a lot more words than a lot of people give credit for. Just for example, using "elbow" as a verb...Shakespeare. College Theatre Professor had books full of examples of words Shakespeare basically invented wholesale, as well as which play they came from. "Eyeball" is another one. One of the reasons I shake my head when people claim they "can't understand Shakespeare"...except for a few jokes that don't age well time, they're written in Modern English.
Of course, I also maintain that Shakespeare isn't "literature", either. It's Theatre. It's meant to be performed on a stage, not read.



It is not primarily romantic in vocabulary.
Basically, the french influence as conquerors and nobility meant that the fancy term for things comes from french, and the normal version from germanic.
*snip*
There are a lot of old french words thrown in, but English is still a thoroughly Germanic language in the eyes of every linguist on the planet.


I think he was referring to how many individual words in our lexicon come from French (and, by extension, Latin). While our sentence structure, arrangement of adjectives and adverbs, and verb conjugation is Germanic (and thus our language is a Germanic one), an enormous amount of individual words come from French.

Tanarii
2021-02-23, 10:32 AM
It is two sounds. That's the literal meaning of "diphthong". It's only one syllable though.
Yes, but links (top hits for the search term I used first) came up saying it was ah-oo "two syllables".

It did seem really weird to me too, and that's even with all the other things we've disagreed on. :smallamused:

ezekielraiden
2021-02-23, 01:10 PM
Yes, but links (top hits for the search term I used first) came up saying it was ah-oo "two syllables".

It did seem really weird to me too, and that's even with all the other things we've disagreed on. :smallamused:

Some dipthongs do in fact originate this way, where a syllable ending in a vowel merges with one starting with a vowel, e.g. [CV][VC][CV] => [CWC][CV], with the handy symbolism of the W as two conjoined Vs. The reasons why one word generates a dipthong and another fails to can be quite idiosyncratic.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-23, 01:15 PM
I quite assure you, that the way a lot of Midwesterners pronounce "SCUBA", the "a" at the end sounds just like the "a" at the beginning of "apple" (at least with our pronunciation of "apple", anyway).

Cool. Prove it. You'll have to provide a recording of someone who talks like that, because I lived in the Midwest (and traveled all over it for work) for decades and never heard an accent like that.

It's possible that there's some small pocket of people somewhere who say /skuː bæ/ instead of /skuː bə/ or /skjuː bə/ like everyone else, but I think it's more likely that you just can't hear the difference in those sounds. It's also possible that you're over-emphasizing the sound and pronouncing it differently when you test it than you do in normal use when you're not paying attention to it (like saying "thee" instead of "the" when you stress it).

Tanarii
2021-02-23, 02:55 PM
It's also possible that you're over-emphasizing the sound and pronouncing it differently when you test it than you do in normal use when you're not paying attention to it (like saying "thee" instead of "the" when you stress it).Oh come on now, everyone knows "the" is pronounced "da". Like apple and scuba.

Just to be double clear, this is in fact a joke :smallamused:

Kapow
2021-02-23, 03:49 PM
As a non-native speaker I have to say weird english pronunciation is weird...
As an example I always pronounced tier like tie, not like tear. It is especially weird because Tier (pronounced like tear) means animal in german.
(The Chaos, poem about english pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité:
https://pages.hep.wisc.edu/~jnb/charivarius.html)
I'm seldom sure how to pronounce stuff right, so I just go with my gut-feeling and most of the time people understand what I want to say. That is the only really important part.

Oh and hard G in sigil AND Sigil because I didn't even think of a soft G....

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 12:19 AM
I missed this. Let's crack on, shall we?


I'm enjoying your towering condescension. Especially because you've been so caught up in overwhelming smugness that you're contradicting yourself, issuing mutually exclusive statements, and still acting like everyone who disagrees with you must be mentally defunct.
My current theory is that you can't tell the difference between those two sounds.

Do you think "Up" and "Apple" have the same starting sound?

If not, then I can't explain your position at all.



Case in point. You support Xuc Xac and his statements, supporting the audio recordings as "only correct way", and yet, earlier...
OOF. Wrong.

I never called it correct. I don't use prescriptive terms to describe language. What I DID say was that no, the vast majority of people DO NOT pronounce those words that way. Your response was to insist that everyone else in the thread disagreeing with you was just objectively wrong about what sounds they were hearing.

Meanwhile, linguists developed the IPA to better *describe* the sounds people pronounce words with. The recognized IPA renderings of the words Scuba and Apple show two different sounds being made by the same letter. This is not a prescribed "this is the correct pronunciation" documentation. It is "we listened to a bunch of English speakers pronounce this word, and here is how the majority pronounce it."

At some point, someone saying patently ridiculous things without any genuine backup is just going to be a source of humor.



I quite assure you, that the way a lot of Midwesterners pronounce "SCUBA", the "a" at the end sounds just like the "a" at the beginning of "apple" (at least with our pronunciation of "apple", anyway).[QUOTE]
Please provide a recording of a midwesterner pronouncing scuba in the following way:
https://voca.ro/16DcP8szFNB7

Or pronouncing Apple in the following way:
https://voca.ro/11GojO8zIvEj

Because I work with several minnesotans, and never have they ever requested an Apple such that the first syllable rhymed with "Up."

[QUOTE]
So, labeling accents as "wrong English" is an absurd proposition...and yet Tanarii and I are "objectively wrong" in how we pronounce things. These are mutually exclusive statements.

I sincerely, sincerely hope you really do pronounce Scuba like how I do in the recording. Please, for the love of pete, find a wiki article about scuba diving and record it via Vocaroo.



Like Tanarii said, you are advocating SCUBA as "SKOO-buh", and we (and the people where we come from) do not drop it into an "uh" sound. It sounds more like "SKOO-bah". Which is, in fact, the same as the beginning of "Ahpp-ull". So, if that's just our Midwestern accent...then by your own admission, it is not wrong English, and all your condescension is misplaced.
Lemme give another recording, because this is a SOUND question, and using non-IPA writing doesn't help.

https://voca.ro/1hCV41RvW6Ma



OTOH, if there is only one right way to pronounce it, then all your condescension is hypocrisy, because it was you who said labeling accents as "wrong English" is absurd.
I never labelled anything as wrong english. Far from current understanding of how the vast majority of English speakers speak? Sure.




Wow, we sure are lucky to have the only right-thinking person on this thread. Us idiots don't know how good we have it! Thank you for being the only person who is capable of making intelligent conversation.
*rolls eyes*

Xuc Xac is in here too, my man. Give the guy who *literally studies speech* some credit.



So, which is it? Is your condescending tone misplaced because our accent isn't wrong? Or is your condescending tone misplaced because it was you who made the assertion that even saying our accent could be wrong was "an absurd proposition"?
Neither, because I never claimed your accent is wrong.
In fact, this is the FIRST TIME the "it's my accent" defense has popped up. Before this, you guys told another poster that HE must be speaking a strange dialect because he pronounced it in the most common way.



And I've yet to get a response to when you said:

To which I said,
"Actually, that's exactly how that works. Especially if you are referring to it within the same wheelhouse as the creator intended it for.

If I was talking about Harry Potter lore with Harry Potter fans, and referred to Voldemort's Horcrux, pronouncing "hor-KRUZH", I would actually be objectively wrong."

Lemme address this, then.

Language is a game of The Majority Wins.

The way MOST people pronounce things is going to communicate accurately to the largest number of people. Saying "hor-KRUZH" isn't wrong because JK Rowling said it is. It's wrong because that's not how people pronounce it.

Now, it can be said that people pronounce it that way because Rowling said so, and that's fine. It can happen that way. But that has tangential relation to how language functions.

The creator of the GIF didn't let everyone know how it is pronounced until years later. So hard-g GIF sticks around and is the majority pronunciation (and is gaining market share, as it were, year by year.)

The intention of the creator does not determine which pronunciations are accepted and communicative. They can influence that process, but they do not COMMAND it.

If Rowling had said that "Horcrux" should be pronounced like "Hoorcroox" and nobody paid any attention and just pronounced it how it looked, well guess what? It's now pronounced how it looks!

At least, that is the Descriptive lens. Nobody COMMANDS language. But you can describe what it does.

That's why I never mentioned your accent. Hell, YOU didn't mention your accent until JUST NOW, as a lame attempt to paint me into a corner I'm not even standing in.

I took issue not with your personal accent, but your insistence that *the entire linguistic field* was just WRONG about the different sounds in Scuba and Apple as spoken by the majority of English speakers, with no mention of you having a particular accent *at all.* Hell, you even wrote off the IPA, one of the most important tools in understanding the sounds used by ALL human languages.

So please, spare me the histrionics. If YOUR accent really does have the same sound in both words, PLEASE send us some audio because that's very interesting to me, linguistically.

I wanna hear all about your Opples.

Caelestion
2021-02-24, 04:58 AM
An upple a day keeps the doctuh uhway, you know? :smallsmile:

RedMage125
2021-02-24, 06:56 AM
I missed this. Let's crack on, shall we?


My current theory is that you can't tell the difference between those two sounds.

Do you think "Up" and "Apple" have the same starting sound?

If not, then I can't explain your position at all.
No, I pronounce "SCUBA" as "SKOO-bah" and not "SKOO-buh". I've been very clear on that.



OOF. Wrong.

I never called it correct. I don't use prescriptive terms to describe language. What I DID say was that no, the vast majority of people DO NOT pronounce those words that way.
You quoted him saying that, and just entirely agreed with it, while also adding a bunch of snide and condescending remarks. So that is how you were perceived. Take some responsibility for how you come across.


Your response was to insist that everyone else in the thread disagreeing with you was just objectively wrong about what sounds they were hearing.
I actually never once told anyone "you're hearing it wrong". I also can't follow any of the links anyone has been posting. I'm on an aircraft carrier right now, and my internet is limited. Amazed this site comes up, really.

But no, I only expressed amazement that others pronounce it differently, and hypothesized that it was the focus on the way the "a" transitions into the "double p" as why they were insisting that "apple" and "apparatus" are different from the end of "SCUBA". But apparently, it's because you all say "SKOO-buh", and I say "SKOO-bah".


Meanwhile, linguists developed the IPA to better *describe* the sounds people pronounce words with. The recognized IPA renderings of the words Scuba and Apple show two different sounds being made by the same letter. This is not a prescribed "this is the correct pronunciation" documentation. It is "we listened to a bunch of English speakers pronounce this word, and here is how the majority pronounce it."

At some point, someone saying patently ridiculous things without any genuine backup is just going to be a source of humor.
And someone saying contradicting things while acting superior and condescending is amusing to me.


Because I work with several minnesotans, and never have they ever requested an Apple such that the first syllable rhymed with "Up."
I'm from Michigan, not Minnesota. As I understand it, we tend to sound a lot more nasal to others. Supposedly has something to do with how humid it is in Michigan. Most of my accent has faded from 14 years in the military, but there's still a few words where it holds true.

To my friend from Virginia, I apparently still sound like I say "bolth" when I say "both".



I never labelled anything as wrong english. Far from current understanding of how the vast majority of English speakers speak? Sure.

You have, several times now, stated that the "a" at the end of SCUBA is different from the "a" at the beginning of "apple", and that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. And you keep citing the IPA as the authority that prescribes such.



Xuc Xac is in here too, my man. Give the guy who *literally studies speech* some credit.
You do know blue text indicates sarcasm, right?



Neither, because I never claimed your accent is wrong.
In fact, this is the FIRST TIME the "it's my accent" defense has popped up. Before this, you guys told another poster that HE must be speaking a strange dialect because he pronounced it in the most common way.


That's why I never mentioned your accent. Hell, YOU didn't mention your accent until JUST NOW, as a lame attempt to paint me into a corner I'm not even standing in.

You know what else I find amusing?

In addition to being all arrogant and condescending while saying contradicting things, you've also taken to saying blatantly untrue things, while still being condescending.

You're right, this is very amusing.

Post #19, the post of mine you responded to when you first brought up SCUBA, I discuss my accent.

And when I responded, I expressed amazement that you don't pronounce it like I do. It's not a word that comes up a lot in conversation. But I definitely say "SKOO-bah" and not "SKOO-buh".

Another poster mentioned that it rhymed with "tuba". Which is funny, because I agree. I also say "TOO-bah" and not "TOO-buh".


Lemme address this, then.

Language is a game of The Majority Wins.

The way MOST people pronounce things is going to communicate accurately to the largest number of people. Saying "hor-KRUZH" isn't wrong because JK Rowling said it is. It's wrong because that's not how people pronounce it.

Now, it can be said that people pronounce it that way because Rowling said so, and that's fine. It can happen that way. But that has tangential relation to how language functions.
By that logic, "irregardless" is a word, then, because a bunch of people say it. Even though, if it was a word, it would mean the exact opposite of how they use it, since they use it as a synonym for "regardless", and the prefix "ir-" denotes negation.




I took issue not with your personal accent, but your insistence that *the entire linguistic field* was just WRONG about the different sounds in Scuba and Apple as spoken by the majority of English speakers, with no mention of you having a particular accent *at all.* Hell, you even wrote off the IPA, one of the most important tools in understanding the sounds used by ALL human languages.
And now you're putting words in my mouth.

The only, time I have mentioned the IPA was to make a beer joke.

Try again.


So please, spare me the histrionics. If YOUR accent really does have the same sound in both words, PLEASE send us some audio because that's very interesting to me, linguistically.

I wanna hear all about your Opples.

Again, I can't do something like that because I can't connect any non-authorized device into a government computer to upload in the first place, nor can I even visit sites like the ones you've been linking.

And I never said I pronounce "opples", either.

I can describe it. The second syllable of "SKOO-bah" sounds like Ebenezer Scrooge. "Bah...humbug". That make more sense?

And feel free to tone down the overwhelming condescension any time now.

Caelestion
2021-02-24, 08:19 AM
Another poster mentioned that it rhymed with "tuba". Which is funny, because I agree. I also say "TOO-bah" and not "TOO-buh".

Well, it does, but then I say both with a u-glide (sk-you) and a schwa at the end.

Imbalance
2021-02-24, 08:49 AM
Yinz oll jes' sand gewfy t'me.

Tanarii
2021-02-24, 09:00 AM
No, I pronounce "SCUBA" as "SKOO-bah" and not "SKOO-buh". I've been very clear on that.
Same. And I definitely do not have a Midwest accent.

Speaking of 'a' words, there's a word with a different 'a'. Accent does not start with the same 'a' as apple or apparatus.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 10:46 AM
No, I pronounce "SCUBA" as "SKOO-bah" and not "SKOO-buh". I've been very clear on that.
Does the "A" in apple rhyme with the O in Opera?
(The singing play, not the lady who had a talk show)

Does the "A" in Apple rhyme with the one in "Cat?"



You quoted him saying that, and just entirely agreed with it, while also adding a bunch of snide and condescending remarks. So that is how you were perceived. Take some responsibility for how you come across.
*sigh*
I wasn't aware that agreeing with a post means that I have fully adopted all statements within as things I myself have said.



I actually never once told anyone "you're hearing it wrong". I also can't follow any of the links anyone has been posting. I'm on an aircraft carrier right now, and my internet is limited. Amazed this site comes up, really.
So in a discussion where sound is pretty critical and people have attempted to use sound to clarify what's going on (as I did, in the recordings) you're a bit crippled, eh?




But no, I only expressed amazement that others pronounce it differently, and hypothesized that it was the focus on the way the "a" transitions into the "double p" as why they were insisting that "apple" and "apparatus" are different from the end of "SCUBA". But apparently, it's because you all say "SKOO-buh", and I say "SKOO-bah".


"If you only listen to the sound the "a" makes, instead of folding in the stress on the word and the flow of the "a" into the "double p", then yes, indeed the end of "SCUBA" is the same sound as the beginning of "apple" and "apparatus".

I had thought that should be obvious, but it might not be."

I mean, you DID assert that the sounds are the same aside from stress and that this should be obvious. (They aren't, and it isn't)




And someone saying contradicting things while acting superior and condescending is amusing to me.
You've claimed contradictions and haven't shown any yet.



I'm from Michigan, not Minnesota. As I understand it, we tend to sound a lot more nasal to others. Supposedly has something to do with how humid it is in Michigan. Most of my accent has faded from 14 years in the military, but there's still a few words where it holds true.
From what I've dug up, the michigan accent uses the short-a (as found in the word "cat") as well as the schwa (as found in the word "up")

Make the sound of the "A" from "cat", and then the sound of the "u" from "up." Are those the same sound?

Those are the two sounds in contention within Scuba and Apple.





You have, several times now, stated that the "a" at the end of SCUBA is different from the "a" at the beginning of "apple", and that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. And you keep citing the IPA as the authority that prescribes such.
that's incorrect on both counts. It's one thing to call me condescending (It is a fault of mine) and another to insist I'm doing things I'm not doing.

The IPA is descriptive. It is being used here for clarity because it is describing two different sounds in the most common pronunciations of both of those words.

There are resources to hear what sound each IPA symbol represents, as well. (Though, again, you admittedly have no access to any such resources)

The IPA is about SOUNDS not PRONUNCIATION. Words are sets of sounds in a particular order that have been assigned meaning by human brains. The IPA has a symbol for every sound found in human language. (Which includes a large number not found in English, because it wasn't made to tell English speakers what to do)

When we reference the IPA, we're saying "hey, someone has documented every sound in human language. Here are the sounds identified to be occuring in Scuba and Apple in the VAST majority of pronunciations."

That you indicate it's a stress thing tells me you can hear a difference in the SOUND, but might be fixated on the LETTER.



You do know blue text indicates sarcasm, right?


The best way to respond to sarcasm is sincerity.



You know what else I find amusing?

In addition to being all arrogant and condescending while saying contradicting things, you've also taken to saying blatantly untrue things, while still being condescending.

You're right, this is very amusing.

Post #19, the post of mine you responded to when you first brought up SCUBA, I discuss my accent.
Yes. And then you never bring it up again as a reason you might hear or pronounce things differently. You just assert that your accent is How It Is, hence the response of "no, that's highly unusual."



And when I responded, I expressed amazement that you don't pronounce it like I do. It's not a word that comes up a lot in conversation. But I definitely say "SKOO-bah" and not "SKOO-buh".
This is where the IPA comes in handy. Does "ah" mean a sound like the "a" in "Cat?" Or does it mean a sound like the "a" in "awful?" (Which is the same sound as the "o" in "opera" or "Golf" or "octopus")



Another poster mentioned that it rhymed with "tuba". Which is funny, because I agree. I also say "TOO-bah" and not "TOO-buh".
AGAIN, this is where the IPA is useful as a tool to describe and identify sounds.



By that logic, "irregardless" is a word, then, because a bunch of people say it. Even though, if it was a word, it would mean the exact opposite of how they use it, since they use it as a synonym for "regardless", and the prefix "ir-" denotes negation.

Given that word meanings change and there are words with "false prefixes" where it just happened to have a sound similar to a prefix at the front, which then spawned an un-prefixed version of the word which hadn't existed before....
Prefixes aren't a hard-and-fast linguistic constant.

Also, given that a word is, according to Merriam Webster:
" a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning..."
The question becomes:
Is "irregardless" a set of speech sounds?
Yes.
Do you understand what people mean when they say it? (Irregardless of you being purposefully obtuse about it)
I sure do.

Given what words are... it passes the two criteria to be a word.



And now you're putting words in my mouth.

The only, time I have mentioned the IPA was to make a beer joke.

Try again.

You are right. That was Tanarii. My B.



Again, I can't do something like that because I can't connect any non-authorized device into a government computer to upload in the first place, nor can I even visit sites like the ones you've been linking.

And I never said I pronounce "opples", either.

I can describe it. The second syllable of "SKOO-bah" sounds like Ebenezer Scrooge. "Bah...humbug". That make more sense?
The "O" in Opples is intended to use the same sound as the "ah" in "bah humbug." As would the O in Octopus. The same as the sound you make when the doctor says "say aaah."
(Yes, english has sounds that cross over between letters.)



And feel free to tone down the overwhelming condescension any time now.
But that would be terribly off-brand!
Nothing is more important than my brand.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 10:58 AM
Same. And I definitely do not have a Midwest accent.

Speaking of 'a' words, there's a word with a different 'a'. Accent does not start with the same 'a' as apple or apparatus.

*in your accent

Which, please, share how you pronounce those words. Smart phones can use Vocaroo just fine.

Use Vocaroo to say each of these:

Scuba
Apple
Opera
Accent
Apparatus
Octopus
Application
Honest
Cat
Calm


--

And that's actually a good question:
Do "Cat" and "Cot" sound the same?

Because the "ah" sound you're referencing exists in the words cot, bottle, launch, top, pop, drop, slop, honest, slaw, raw, and the surname of one Tim McGraw.

Hell, do these on Vocaroo, too.

Caelestion
2021-02-24, 12:07 PM
Or does it mean a sound like the "a" in "awful?" (Which is the same sound as the "o" in "opera" or "Golf" or "octopus")

You think that offal and awful sound the same?

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-24, 01:58 PM
You think that offal and awful sound the same?

For me:

Offal is "oh-full", awful is "awe-full".

Golf is "Gawlf".

Opera is "ah-perr-uh" (ah-purr-uh?).

Octopus is "ahk-toe-puss", or "ahk-tuh-puss" if I'm very tired.

Octavian would be "ahk-tave-ian".


Don't ask me to use IPA, the vowel system in that thing is a wretched mess missing half the vowel sounds I actually use (evidently they're "between sounds" / diphthongs, so use double-symbols... which seems very arbitrary given some of the sounds that they do give distinct symbols to... and every audio guide to IPA makes all the vowels sound like a stereotypical French guy from a Money Python sketch choking on a mouth full of marbles while trying to pronounce the sounds).

Lord Torath
2021-02-24, 02:01 PM
You think that offal and awful sound the same?I pronounce them with the same leading vowel sound. The short "o" sound from pop and off. I confess I have not looked up the pronouciation of offal, so I just looked at the word and guessed/sounded it out.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-24, 04:06 PM
Don't ask me to use IPA, the vowel system in that thing is a wretched mess missing half the vowel sounds I actually use (evidently they're "between sounds" / diphthongs, so use double-symbols... which seems very arbitrary given some of the sounds that they do give distinct symbols to...

The IPA has one symbol for each sound that a human mouth can produce. The jaw, tongue, and lips have a limited range of motion and can only be combined in a large but finite number of combinations. Some of which can be made simultaneously because they happen in different parts of the mouth and some which can't because they overlap. The "T" sound /t/ is made with the tip of your tongue. The "SH" sound /ʃ/ is made with the sides of your tongue. The "CH" sound /tʃ/ is not an "in-between" sound: it's just what happens when you say /t/ and /ʃ/ at the same time. The "T" and "D" sounds /t/ and /d/ are both made in the same way inside your mouth (the difference is in your throat). Because they both occur in the same spot in your mouth, you can't do them simultaneously. That's why the "-ed" verb ending in English sounds like "T" after unvoiced consonants (because it's hard to switch to a voiced /d/ in the middle of a consonant cluster) and "D" after voiced consonants or vowels, but turns into a separate syllable like "ID" /Id/ after a T or D sound. The "-ed" sounds like "t" in "pushed", "d" in "showed", but it sounds like "id" in "ended".

Diphthongs (and triphthongs in some languages) are multiple vowels pronounced one after the other. A vowel is one sound made by the mouth in one position. The variations in vowels are determined by how open your jaws are, how far forward your tongue is, and how high your tongue is, and how rounded your lips are. If your lips, tongue, or jaw move during the "vowel" then it's not one vowel. Watch your mouth in the mirror while you say "ah" (like when the doctor says "open up and say ah"). Your mouth will be open and your jaw doesn't open wider or close because it's one vowel /a/. Then say "eye". Your mouth will be open the same way as "ah" but then it will close to make the second part of the diphthong, which is why the IPA indicates that diphthong as /aI/. You start by saying /a/ then close your jaw to the position that makes the /I/ sound. It's even more obvious when you say "boy" because you not only close your jaw but your lips go from a rounded to an unrounded position.

Saying that diphthongs are one vowel because you don't have a consonant break between the separate mouth positions is like saying a slide guitarist only plays one note when moving around the fretboard. A person who doesn't understand music might call that one continuous sound a "note" but musicians (and physicists who deal in frequencies) know that it's a glide across multiple notes.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-24, 04:12 PM
The IPA has one symbol for each sound that a human mouth can produce. The jaw, tongue, and lips have a limited range of motion and can only be combined in a large but finite number of combinations. Some of which can be made simultaneously because they happen in different parts of the mouth and some which can't because they overlap. The "T" sound /t/ is made with the tip of your tongue. The "SH" sound /ʃ/ is made with the sides of your tongue. The "CH" sound /tʃ/ is not an "in-between" sound: it's just what happens when you say /t/ and /ʃ/ at the same time. The "T" and "D" sounds /t/ and /d/ are both made in the same way inside your mouth (the difference is in your throat). Because they both occur in the same spot in your mouth, you can't do them simultaneously. That's why the "-ed" verb ending in English sounds like "T" after unvoiced consonants (because it's hard to switch to a voiced /d/ in the middle of a consonant cluster) and "D" after voiced consonants or vowels, but turns into a separate syllable like "ID" /Id/ after a T or D sound. The "-ed" sounds like "t" in "pushed", "d" in "showed", but it sounds like "id" in "ended".

Diphthongs (and triphthongs in some languages) are multiple vowels pronounced one after the other. A vowel is one sound made by the mouth in one position. The variations in vowels are determined by how open your jaws are, how far forward your tongue is, and how high your tongue is, and how rounded your lips are. If your lips, tongue, or jaw move during the "vowel" then it's not one vowel. Watch your mouth in the mirror while you say "ah" (like when the doctor says "open up and say ah"). Your mouth will be open and your jaw doesn't open wider or close because it's one vowel /a/. Then say "eye". Your mouth will be open the same way as "ah" but then it will close to make the second part of the diphthong, which is why the IPA indicates that diphthong as /aI/. You start by saying /a/ then close your jaw to the position that makes the /I/ sound. It's even more obvious when you say "boy" because you not only close your jaw but your lips go from a rounded to an unrounded position.

Saying that diphthongs are one vowel because you don't have a consonant break between the separate mouth positions is like saying a slide guitarist only plays one note when moving around the fretboard. A person who doesn't understand music might call that one continuous sound a "note" but musicians (and physicists who deal in frequencies) know that it's a glide across multiple notes.

What is the IPA symbol for the vowel sound of a "long I" as in "sight" or "try"?

Because I can't find it in the table of sounds that all blur together into a French guy making rude noises. And when I pronounce "long I", it's a single sound, not two sounds in sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/

I can hear other people use a "T" sounds for "ed" at the end of some words, but for whatever reason I only make a clear "T" sound there when I'm very tired.

Imbalance
2021-02-24, 04:16 PM
Ooh! Ooh! What's the IPA for the sound I make when I hum and whistle at the same time? Or the one where you simultaneously gurgle, trill your tongue, and blabber your lips until your teeth rattle?

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 04:37 PM
You think that offal and awful sound the same?

That is one of the accepted pronunciations, yeah:

/ˈôfəl,ˈäfəl/

It's the second of those two, and as it happens it's the default pronunciation that Google uses here in the US.


For me:

Offal is "oh-full", awful is "awe-full".

Golf is "Gawlf".

Opera is "ah-perr-uh" (ah-purr-uh?).

Octopus is "ahk-toe-puss", or "ahk-tuh-puss" if I'm very tired.

Octavian would be "ahk-tave-ian".


Don't ask me to use IPA, the vowel system in that thing is a wretched mess missing half the vowel sounds I actually use (evidently they're "between sounds" / diphthongs, so use double-symbols... which seems very arbitrary given some of the sounds that they do give distinct symbols to... and every audio guide to IPA makes all the vowels sound like a stereotypical French guy from a Money Python sketch choking on a mouth full of marbles while trying to pronounce the sounds.

That's now 2 people objecting to one of the most useful linguistic tools in existence based on, as Xuc Xac explained, not understanding what it is for or how it works.

It's basically like walking up to a microscope, looking through the lens, and calling it worthless because you can't see anything. (Meanwhile you didn't add a slide and didn't turn on the light.)


---

On the IPA and weird mouth sounds:

Burps are not in the IPA. They aren't a speech sound. They aren't used to make words as part of legitimate communication. (Schoolyard antics aside, there is no language that requires speakers to be able to burp on command.)

The IPA is used to identify Phonemes. The building blocks that make up words. If you want to make a language consisting of strange sounds, be my guest.

I spent time amongst a group called the Nivakle while I was in Paraguay, and the Nivakle word for "yes" is just a sharp, audible inhale. It took me a while to normalize to myself that people weren't surprised, they just agreed with me. But that sound, if I recall correctly, is in the IPA, even though it is a rare sound, linguistically.

And the sputtering lips sound I am 100% certain is in the IPA due to a conlang video that discussed that sound and had its IPA symbol included.


In short:
Jeezum jones, there's a lot of armchair linguists trying to disprove or dismiss a major portion of linguistic science for... no apparent reason.

Tanarii
2021-02-24, 05:26 PM
Got one for you guys to try.

Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 05:32 PM
Got one for you guys to try.

Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

Scuba is the same between the two instances of "Scuba."

"Fan" has the A from Apple and Cat, but not from Scuba.

https://voca.ro/11eQZnRvW1qC

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-24, 05:50 PM
Got one for you guys to try.

Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

The A at the end of SCUBA stays the same in both sentences for me.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-24, 07:04 PM
What is the IPA symbol for the vowel sound of a "long I" as in "sight" or "try"?

Because I can't find it in the table of sounds that all blur together into a French guy making rude noises. And when I pronounce "long I", it's a single sound, not two sounds in sequence.

It's /aɪ̯/ (or /ɑɪ̯/ if you have an Australian accent). It's two vowels in one syllable. That little curve under the second vowel means it's not a separate syllable (there's also a diacritic mark to represent when a sound is a separate syllable when you might expect it not to be). Your mouth starts open for the /a/ and then closes near the end to /I/. If you don't close your mouth, you'll just stretch the /a/ to /aː/. That pair of triangles that looks like a colon means the vowel is longer (meaning "you spend more time saying it", not like what English teachers usually call a "long vowel", which is really just a different vowel altogether). Pronouncing /aɪ̯/ as /aː/ is what a "Southern drawl" sounds like (or "sounds lahk"). Being in Michigan, you probably don't have a Southern drawl but you may be doing what's called "Canadian rising" which would change the /aɪ̯/ to /ɐɪ̯/. It's still two vowels but they are closer together so the movement between them is less obvious.


Ooh! Ooh! What's the IPA for the sound I make when I hum and whistle at the same time? Or the one where you simultaneously gurgle, trill your tongue, and blabber your lips until your teeth rattle?

The "hum" sounds that English speakers use are the nasals /m ɱ n ɳ ɲ ŋ/ depending on where you put your tongue. I don't have the whistle symbols in my keyboard (they aren't part of the IPA, but they are in the IPA extensions used for describing speech deformities like lisps and cleft palates). Whistles can be represented by an arrow-shaped diacritic mark under another symbol that describes the point of articulation and extra symbols to indicate pitch and tone. There are a lot of tongue trill symbols depending on where in your mouth it happens. "Blabbering your lips" is the bilabial trill /B/. You'll have to be a lot more specific for "gurgle" because that could be about 20 different post-velar consonants.

There are some "whistled languages", but they aren't really languages in themselves. They are more like codes for transmitting another language, like Braille or Morse code aren't separate languages. For example, Silbo Gomero is a whistled language in the Canary Islands that is mostly just Spanish with high or low pitched whistles in place of the normal spoken sounds. There aren't as many whistle sounds as there are Spanish phonemes, so you need to know Spanish first to "fill in the blanks" and understand the Silbo whistles from context. You couldn't learn Silbo without knowing Spanish first.

Caelestion
2021-02-24, 07:49 PM
Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

It's a schwa either way for me, though sometimes the u-glide disappears. Then again, whilst you Americans are apparently busy collapsing A and O together, we Brits like to turn unstressed vowels into schwas as much as possible. :smallsmile:

Imbalance
2021-02-24, 08:09 PM
I wanted to be a silbador as a kid, but gave it up long before my two years of high school Spanish. The other weird noises I made only got me detention.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-24, 08:21 PM
It's /aɪ̯/ (or /ɑɪ̯/ if you have an Australian accent). It's two vowels in one syllable. That little curve under the second vowel means it's not a separate syllable (there's also a diacritic mark to represent when a sound is a separate syllable when you might expect it not to be). Your mouth starts open for the /a/ and then closes near the end to /I/. If you don't close your mouth, you'll just stretch the /a/ to /aː/. That pair of triangles that looks like a colon means the vowel is longer (meaning "you spend more time saying it", not like what English teachers usually call a "long vowel", which is really just a different vowel altogether). Pronouncing /aɪ̯/ as /aː/ is what a "Southern drawl" sounds like (or "sounds lahk"). Being in Michigan, you probably don't have a Southern drawl but you may be doing what's called "Canadian rising" which would change the /aɪ̯/ to /ɐɪ̯/. It's still two vowels but they are closer together so the movement between them is less obvious.


Odd... I don't have to close my mouth to make or sustain the sound I'm talking about, and the closest it comes to "two sounds" is a minuscule pop of breath if I don't lead into it from another letter... if I say "sigh" and just kinda hold the sound there's no starting /a/ and no need to close the mouth... or I could stretch the middle of "fright" out for however long doing the same thing.

I went through this last fall when trying to work on a conlang (with help from someone who was offering as a way to practice for their linguistics degree)... spent three days trying to find the symbols for "long I", etc, before we figured out I meant sounds that don't have single symbols even though I don't hear any hint of "two sounds".

And like I said, all the IPA vowel charts sound like 75% variations on the same sort of grunting pained sound.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-24, 10:38 PM
Odd... I don't have to close my mouth to make or sustain the sound I'm talking about, and the closest it comes to "two sounds" is a minuscule pop of breath if I don't lead into it from another letter... if I say "sigh" and just kinda hold the sound there's no starting /a/ and no need to close the mouth... or I could stretch the middle of "fright" out for however long doing the same thing.

I went through this last fall when trying to work on a conlang (with help from someone who was offering as a way to practice for their linguistics degree)... spent three days trying to find the symbols for "long I", etc, before we figured out I meant sounds that don't have single symbols enough though I don't hear any hint of "two sounds".

And like I said, all the IPA vowel charts sound like 75% variations on the same sort of grunting pained sound.

Any chance you can record your self saying:

I ride bikes on the side lines?

Then someone with some audio editing software could compare the initial start of the sound to the end of the sound, to see if eliminating the bit in the middle helps clarify the difference between where it starts and where it ends.

And IPA sound banks are meant to produce a single vowel sound, so I'm not sure what you're expecting them to sound like. Some have the speaker lead into it with a consonant (so less "ah" and more "bah") but that can be confusing if you just want to know what sound is represented by each symbol.

Tanarii
2021-02-24, 11:00 PM
Odd... I don't have to close my mouth to make or sustain the sound I'm talking about, and the closest it comes to "two sounds" is a minuscule pop of breath if I don't lead into it from another letter... if I say "sigh" and just kinda hold the sound there's no starting /a/ and no need to close the mouth... or I could stretch the middle of "fright" out for however long doing the same thing.
Is this the same sound as the word "eye"? Because definitely no mouth closing there, just a tongue position change near the back of the throat as the vowel changes from one noise to the other in the process.

At least, that's the same sound that I'd use for try, fright, sight, etc. Although going by this thread that apparently doesn't mean much.

ezekielraiden
2021-02-24, 11:12 PM
Got one for you guys to try.

Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

The pronunciation does not change, and remains the "a" of "about."

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-24, 11:15 PM
Is this the same sound as the word "eye"? Because definitely no mouth closing there, just a tongue position change near the back of the throat as the vowel changes from one noise to the other in the process.

At least, that's the same sound that I'd use for try, fright, sight, etc. Although going by this thread that apparently doesn't mean much.

Evidently I'm cutting off or silent on the starting bit of the "proper" pronunciation. /s

The closest I'm getting to that first part everyone is talking about is a little nearly-silent "pop" or "puff" of breath as the tongue moves into position for the actual "I" sound, or if the "I" follows another letter in a word there's a tongue position shift from that letter to the "I" itself. (I don't know how else to describe it... there's a silent movement of air during the part where I'm being told there "should" be another sound leading into the sustained "I" sound.)

And yeah, it's try, fright, sight, sigh, eye, kite...

Vinyadan
2021-02-25, 01:20 AM
What is the IPA symbol for the vowel sound of a "long I" as in "sight" or "try"?

Because I can't find it in the table of sounds that all blur together into a French guy making rude noises. And when I pronounce "long I", it's a single sound, not two sounds in sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/

I can hear other people use a "T" sounds for "ed" at the end of some words, but for whatever reason I only make a clear "T" sound there when I'm very tired.

UK /traɪ/ US /trɑɪ/ you can check all of these on the Cambridge Dictionary, although it only lists these two pronunciations, presumably going for the ones with the most prestige/most widespread in the two countries.

In practice, it's a diphthong.

About the t sound, it's not unusual for the last d in a word to turn into a t. It's happened in German, and something very similar happened in French (v to f, bovis to boef = beef). In English, you have graphic variants like burnt/burned, learnt/learned, and some other case I currently don't remember (although in English the n has some odd effects on d, so that could also be to blame).

Hytheter
2021-02-25, 04:11 AM
I gotta say I'm all for the full-on linguistics discussion this has become.


although in English the n has some odd effects on d

Would you mind elaborating on that?

ezekielraiden
2021-02-25, 06:07 AM
in English the n has some odd effects on d, so that could also be to blame

Would you mind elaborating on that?

Listen, man, sometimes a linguist and a consonant get a little...frisky, alright? :smallcool:

Imbalance
2021-02-25, 07:09 AM
Handy reference for long i vowel sounds:

https://youtu.be/aOkiG53ituQ

RedMage125
2021-02-25, 07:30 AM
Got one for you guys to try.

Say the following and see if you think the a in scuba remains the same or changes:
I'm not a fan of scuba.
Do you guys want to go scuba diving?

Huh. It does sound a little different on the second one. I feel like the "a" at the end of scuba kind of drops.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-25, 09:01 AM
Evidently I'm cutting off or silent on the starting bit of the "proper" pronunciation. /s

The closest I'm getting to that first part everyone is talking about is a little nearly-silent "pop" or "puff" of breath as the tongue moves into position for the actual "I" sound, or if the "I" follows another letter in a word there's a tongue position shift from that letter to the "I" itself.

And yeah, it's try, fright, sight, sigh, eye, kite...

I literally found a 9 minute explanation for you on how the long I works in American English.
https://youtu.be/8uD-GuuSgyk
EDIT: and now I included it.

Basically, if what you're claiming about yourself is true (namely, that you only make one sound) then that means you pronounce words as the following:

Spy and Spa are pronounced the same. OR, Spy sounds like Pea with an S on the front.

Find sounds like Fond, or Fiend.

Because the only way to make the "long-I" sound is with a dipthong, since that's what the sound IS.

It can be admittedly hard to hear the shift, and think of it as one sound. But it is, in fact, two sounds.

The issue is that in order to verify this claim of yours, we have to hear your voice. Otherwise you're claiming to be the first human being to pronounce a sonically pure form of the long-I sound, with the citation of "trust me, bro."

In which case we'll just assume you do the dipthong like the rest of humanity and just can't hear the change, since that is the WAY more likely thing to happen.

(And for what it's worth, the long I sound doesn't require any puffs of air so I dunno wtf that's meant to mean.)

Edit:
I JUST EMBARRASSED MYSELF FOR THIS EXPERIMENT SO PLEASE DO THIS.

Stick two fingers into your mouth and hold down your tongue so it cannot move upwards. Keep it below your teeth. (Please be careful not to make yourself gag.)

Now, try to pronounce the word "guy" without feeling your tongue push up on your fingers.

NEXT,

Say "ah." Hold it, as if singing. One long "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah"
Without doing ANYTHING ELSE, move the back of your tongue up and down. (While it won't sound as clear, you can touch the tip of your tongue to the back of your bottom front teeth and DO NOT LET IT SEPARATE FROM THEM as you move the rest of your tongue up and down.)
Marvel as you begin saying "aye aye aye aye"

If your tongue has to move to make the sound, it's a diphthong.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 09:20 AM
I gotta say I'm all for the full-on linguistics discussion this has become.


Sadly, it's devolving to the stage where the self-proclaimed "experts" accuse people of lying to squelch disagreement.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-25, 12:12 PM
Sadly, it's devolving to the stage where the self-proclaimed "experts" accuse people of lying to squelch disagreement.

We have asked nicely for evidence, since you're making a claim that is, linguistically speaking, extraordinary.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.


While I know you have some asinine beef with me personally that has lasted for like 3 years for no reason, that doesn't change that I have offered up:
A 9 minute video directly related to the exact dipthong you are questioning (which you dismiss without acknowledgement)
An experiment to test if there is a movement in the tongue when pronouncing the sound
Multiple actual recordings of my own voice. (For other issues, but I can do this one, too if you like.)

Meanwhile, from you, we have "Nah, bro, I pronounce this diphthong as one pure sound, in defiance of AN ENTIRE FIELD OF SCIENCE THAT IS CENTURIES OLD, as well as in defiance of the physical mechanics of speech. But don't ask me to prove it otherwise you're being a jerk and accusing me of lying. Just trust me, bro."

Come on, now.

I don't need to be an expert. I can point you to an entire field of experts who have spent more collective time studying this sound than you've been alive. If I have to choose between rando making a claim with the source being: "trust me, bro" and a scientific field with thousands of hours spent analyzing the thing he's making a wild claim about...

I'm gonna go with the latter.

(It is also noteworthy that "They claim expertise to try and squelch disagreement" is LITERALLY a Flat Earth talking point. Like... I have heard them use this defense. Please, dude. PLEASE do better than literal flat-earth tier logic)

Xuc Xac
2021-02-25, 02:31 PM
Sadly, it's devolving to the stage where the self-proclaimed "experts" accuse people of lying to squelch disagreement.

You're literally claiming to defy the laws of physics. The English "long i" is a diphthong, which is two vowel sounds by definition. Each vowel has its own mouth position. You physically cannot make a "long i" without moving your jaw. If you think you are, then you're actually saying something else. Your understanding of vowels is the "lies to children" version for little kids who are learning to read. The "long a", "long i", and "long o" that you learned in first grade are all diphthongs (along with the vowels in "cowboy").

It's like a musician told you "the C major chord is played by hitting C, E, and G at the same time" and you responded with "Not the way I play it! I play C major in one long note." That's not how it works. If you're playing Cmaj, it's at least 3 notes. If you're really playing one note, it's not Cmaj.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 02:41 PM
You're literally claiming to defy the laws of physics. The English "long i" is a diphthong, which is two vowel sounds by definition. Each vowel has its own mouth position. You physically cannot make a "long i" without moving your jaw. If you think you are, then you're actually saying something else.


What I know is that I can set my mouth in a fixed position (tongue, jaw, lips) and make the sustained I sound that's in the words listed earlier. It's easy. Say "sigh" or similar, and extend the vowel, hold everything in place, and stop... then start again. Stop and start as many times as needed. Put your finger between your teeth to maintain a fixed jaw position if that helps -- and put the tip of your tongue on the finger, too. To my ear, that isolates a "long I" sound without any other sounds, leading or trailing.

My cat is looking at me like I grew a second head because I've been sitting here making noises off and on since this "discussion" started yesterday.




Your understanding of vowels is the "lies to children" version for little kids who are learning to read.


Is that really how you think you will persuade someone?

Xuc Xac
2021-02-25, 03:02 PM
Is that really how you think you will persuade someone?

It's literally true. You're claiming to make a sound in a way that is physically impossible. You're either saying the diphthong and don't realize it because you've been taught that it's one sound or you're saying a monophthong that you've misidentified. We won't know until you provide a recording of what you're doing because you lack the vocabulary to describe it. You don't know how to use the IPA and using approximations like "it sounds like 'ah'" depends on the reader sharing your own accent.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 03:08 PM
It's literally true. You're claiming to make a sound in a way that is physically impossible. You're either saying the diphthong and don't realize it because you've been taught that it's one sound or you're saying a monophthong that you've misidentified. We won't know until you provide a recording of what you're doing because you lack the vocabulary to describe it. You don't know how to use the IPA and using approximations like "it sounds like 'ah'" depends on the reader sharing your own accent.


What sustained sound is someone making if they say "sigh" or "bye" and just stretch the vowel out for several seconds? It's not any of the other vowels as far as I can tell, and doesn't appear on any of the IPA vowel sample charts I've found.

If it can be sustained, why can't it be made in isolation?

If it can be made in isolation, how is it accurately represented by a symbol that implies TWO sounds?

(I'll try recording it again later today if my throat feels better, right now anything I say is too full of scratch and sniffle to be useful.)

Imbalance
2021-02-25, 03:13 PM
My cat is looking at me like I grew a second head because I've been sitting here making noises off and on since this "discussion" started yesterday.

You attempted the gurgle/trill/babble trifecta, didn't you? Made your nose itch, didn't it?

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-25, 03:15 PM
You're literally claiming to defy the laws of physics. The English "long i" is a diphthong, which is two vowel sounds by definition. Each vowel has its own mouth position. You physically cannot make a "long i" without moving your jaw. If you think you are, then you're actually saying something else. Your understanding of vowels is the "lies to children" version for little kids who are learning to read. The "long a", "long i", and "long o" that you learned in first grade are all diphthongs (along with the vowels in "cowboy").

It's like a musician told you "the C major chord is played by hitting C, E, and G at the same time" and you responded with "Not the way I play it! I play C major in one long note." That's not how it works. If you're playing Cmaj, it's at least 3 notes. If you're really playing one note, it's not Cmaj.

{Scrubbed}

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 03:22 PM
Just keep in mind which side of this "discussion" has sunk to the level of spewing personal attacks.

Imbalance
2021-02-25, 03:30 PM
Did nobody listen to the GN'R song? Lots of sustained long i's in that. Mr. Rose is dipthonging his heart out on that track.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-25, 03:30 PM
What sustained sound is someone making if they say "sigh" or "bye" and just stretch the vowel out for several seconds? It's not any of the other vowels as far as I can tell, and doesn't appear on any of the IPA vowel sample charts I've found.


Does it sound like this? (http://www.logotv.com/video-clips/m5cr43/rupauls-drag-race-alaska-plays-hieee-and-byeee)

Vinyadan
2021-02-25, 03:34 PM
@Max Killjoy, the way you describe holding your mouth and tongue reminds me mostly of an /ae/. If you can put your finger between your teeth it's likely not an /i/sound, and that doesn't sound like the tongue position for an /a/, either.

To be honest, there are some pretty strong accents out there, like I believe people in Philadelphia saying sex instead of socks, and people in Scotland saying sex instead of six. Durkon says mah instead of my, could it be something like that?

@Hytheter, as I understand it, n weakens the following d in English. So you have variants of and where the d isn't pronounced, and I believe it had something to do with how forms in -ing came to be; if I recall correctly, there were two forms, one ending with -ng which was a name from the verb (an action, like "the scouring of the Shire") and one with -nd which was an adjective from the verb (a quality, like "he's ravishing"). But then both g and d pretty much became unrecognizable when pronounced, so the two forms collapsed into one. There are very few forms left with the old -nd, one of them being friend (loving), another one fiend (hating).

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 03:35 PM
Does it sound like this? (http://www.logotv.com/video-clips/m5cr43/rupauls-drag-race-alaska-plays-hieee-and-byeee)

It's not "long E" -- that's distinct.

In that clip, when she's not just making a random noise, several times she hits what I'd ID as a "long I" for an split instant in the middle of the word, right before the (nasal) "long E" that she sustains.




@Max Killjoy, the way you describe holding your mouth and tongue reminds me mostly of an /ae/. If you can put your finger between your teeth it's likely not an /i/sound, and that doesn't sound like the tongue position for an /a/, either.

To be honest, there are some pretty strong accents out there, like I believe people in Philadelphia saying sex instead of socks, and people in Scotland saying sex instead of six. Durkon says mah instead of my, could it be something like that?


The accent / dialect that sounds most natural to me would be "modern TV news anchor", / that thing called "General American". (The Midwestern Cities Vowel Shift is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.)

Xuc Xac
2021-02-25, 04:04 PM
It's not "long E" -- that's distinct.

In that clip, when she's not just making a random noise, several times she hits what I'd ID as a "long I" for an split instant in the middle of the word, right before the (nasal) "long E" that she sustains.


She's saying "long i" and exaggerating it from the diphthong /aɪ/ to the triphthong /aɪi/ and sustaining the final /i/.

/a/ is a front open vowel.
/ɪ/ is front near-close.
/i/ is front close. When closing from /a/ to /ɪ/, it's easy to just go a little further to /i/.

I don't know what sound you're making, but if you're sustaining it without moving anything, then it's not a "long i".

Tanarii
2021-02-25, 04:54 PM
@Max Killjoy, the way you describe holding your mouth and tongue reminds me mostly of an /ae/. If you can put your finger between your teeth it's likely not an /i/sound, and that doesn't sound like the tongue position for an /a/, either.An "eye" sound can be made with the mouth fully open.


Did nobody listen to the GN'R song? Lots of sustained long i's in that. Mr. Rose is dipthonging his heart out on that track.With screaming to boot. :smallamused:

Vinyadan
2021-02-25, 06:28 PM
An "eye" sound can be made with the mouth fully open.


Fully open with lowered tongue normally means /a/, but I would expect the mouth to get less open as you get to the other sounds (unless you change that just by raising your tongue, which doesn't really sound like eye to me, but is part of how you articulate /e/ and /i/, which however also require you to reduce how open the mouth is and pull its corners like when you smile).

I mean, it really depends on what fully open means -- "definitely not closed" vs "as open as possible" .

Caelestion
2021-02-25, 07:44 PM
When I try to say the letter I, my mouth has to partially close to complete the sound. The only possible way I can think of that you can say it without closing your mouth is if ice and ass sound the same (or very similar) to you.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-25, 08:08 PM
When I try to say the letter I, my mouth has to partially close to complete the sound. The only possible way I can think of that you can say it without closing your mouth is if ice and ass sound the same (or very similar) to you.

Other than "oh" and "oooo", the only thing pulling my mouth closed at all on any vowel I use is the need to position the tongue. Other than those two sounds, my lips don't do a lot of the work on vowels.

Not that I go around with my mouth wide open making vowel noises most of the time...

(And those two words you noted are different sounds.)

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-25, 11:32 PM
When I took singing lessons way back when, to do |ai| on a long note, it was generally best practice to hold the |a| and then shift into the |i| at the very end.

Basically, if you take a bunch of singers and have them sing the word "law" and the word "lie," record it, and cut off the last bit where the dipthong is finished, you'd be unable to reliably distinguish between which word is which based on the sound.

https://youtu.be/12-pQoDO8As

In this song, at 3:02, he holds the |a| sound for a while and moves into the |i| right at the end, and it is very audible.


Some singers do opt to make the split halfway in or if the note changes during the dipthong, but generally, when a singer is holding a long I, they are holding an "ah" sound and then sliding into the "ee" sound at the end.

If you need more, some vocaroo.
https://voca.ro/18jkl9zKkrKc

In what is hopefully useful, in this recording I go from Ah and Ee as distinct sounds, to doing them back to back, to |ai|, making as smooth of a transition into the dipthong as I can and then back again. I couldn't do it in one breath, but if ya can't hear it at this point i dunno what else to do.


Gonna once again point out only one side has been bringing any form of evidence or backing, and the other has said "nah bro" and nothing else.

I shouldn't have gotten frustrated over a dumb internet argument, but at some point it's a bit disingenuous to get high and mighty when there's been a clear and obvious different in effort put in to support points, and that evidence has been dismissed with a longer form of "nah."

Should I be less of a tool about pointing that out? Arguably yes. Does it mean it's not worth pointing out? No.

If we're out here providing evidence and looking up videos and doing our damndest to explain how this stuff works, is it really all that shocking when we get frustrated that the response to this evidence is "its not tho. Citation: trust me?"

Is it asking a ridiculous amount to say "that claim flies in the face of linguistic and acoustic understanding, can you please provide backup for it before we believe it?"

---

Add-on

From the literal 9 minute video I posted on this dipthong, about 1 minute in, it explains that in American english accents, the biggest difference between |a| and |i| is the position of the back of the tongue. (It rises to make the latter sound.)

Hence why I gave the experiment to literally hold the tongue down and try to pronounce the long I without the back of the tongue moving up. (I have done this. For several minutes at a time. I physically cannot make the sound without lifting my tongue.)

Another experiment is to say "ah" and lift the back of your tongue. And marvel as it becomes a long ee, and doing it quickly makes the long I sound.

You can also say "eye" into a mirror while watching your tongue to see if it moves. (It will.) (You may need to hold your mouth unusually open to get a clear view)

Again, I am willing to record myself performing these experiments to the benefit of those here who are curious, and I have provided other materials as well.

My frustration aside, let's not pretend I'm being unreasonable.

Tanarii
2021-02-26, 12:07 AM
I mean, it really depends on what fully open means -- "definitely not closed" vs "as open as possible" .As open as possible.

Aye, eee, and eye can all be said with the mouth as open as possible. Oh and you (and ooo) require closing it at least somewhat.

I do note that trying to say them with a mouth wide open requires raising the tongue more though. They can also be said through closed teeth with drawn drawn back lips.

I'm glad I don't have pets to look at me like I'm crazy. :smallamused:

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-26, 12:23 AM
As open as possible.

Aye, eee, and eye can all be said with the mouth as open as possible. Oh and you (and ooo) require closing it at least somewhat.

I do note that trying to say them with a mouth wide open requires raising the tongue more though. They can also be said through closed teeth with drawn drawn back lips.

I'm glad I don't have pets to look at me like I'm crazy. :smallamused:

If your tongue is in a different position at the end of the word "I" than at the start, you've demonstrated that it is a blend of two sounds made with two different mouth shapes.

We can make sounds by changing the shapes of our lips, jaw, tongue, and soft palate, and by having lips and tongue interact with our teeth, and then voicing or not voicing the sound (vocal chords active or not) Each sound is made with a particular combination of these movements. The dipthing we're talking about requires a shift over time of your tongue's position, hence it being a glide between the sounds made when the tongue is low, and when the tongue is raised.

That's literally it.

Vinyadan
2021-02-26, 02:50 AM
As open as possible.

Aye, eee, and eye can all be said with the mouth as open as possible. Oh and you (and ooo) require closing it at least somewhat.

I do note that trying to say them with a mouth wide open requires raising the tongue more though. They can also be said through closed teeth with drawn drawn back lips.

I'm glad I don't have pets to look at me like I'm crazy. :smallamused:

Open vertically (the jaws) or horizontally (the corners of the mouth) ? /i/ is definitely very open horizontally, but it's almost closed vertically, as in, the teeth are quite close together.

/o/ and /u/ are indeed said with the mouth less open than /a/, both horizontally and vertically.

Is it possible that you shift your jaw forward when saying eye? Some sounds have alternative articulations that sound more or less the same, I have seen n pronounced with the tongue between the teeth for example.

Tanarii
2021-02-26, 10:21 AM
Open vertically (the jaws) or horizontally (the corners of the mouth) ? /i/ is definitely very open horizontally, but it's almost closed vertically, as in, the teeth are quite close together.

/o/ and /u/ are indeed said with the mouth less open than /a/, both horizontally and vertically.

Is it possible that you shift your jaw forward when saying eye? Some sounds have alternative articulations that sound more or less the same, I have seen n pronounced with the tongue between the teeth for example.
Teeth wide open. Or teeth together.

A, e, and i vowels, as in the sound made for their names in the alphabet English, does not require any jaw movement or corners of the mouth movement, just tongue movement, and can be recognizably made with jaw as open as possible or teeth together.

Tested multiple times and confirmed. :smallamused:

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-26, 11:14 AM
Teeth wide open. Or teeth together.

A, e, and i vowels, as in the sound made for their names in the alphabet English, does not require any jaw movement or corners of the mouth movement, just tongue movement, and can be recognizably made with jaw as open as possible or teeth together.

Tested multiple times and confirmed. :smallamused:

Same here, not sure where this involvement of the lips and teeth thing is coming from for most vowels.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-26, 12:34 PM
Teeth wide open. Or teeth together.

A, e, and i vowels, as in the sound made for their names in the alphabet English, does not require any jaw movement or corners of the mouth movement, just tongue movement, and can be recognizably made with jaw as open as possible or teeth together.

Tested multiple times and confirmed. :smallamused:


Same here, not sure where this involvement of the lips and teeth thing is coming from for most vowels.

1. If your tongue is in a different position at the end of the "I" vowel than at the start, then congrats, you've confirmed for yourself that it is a dipthong, and we can be done here.

2. Different accents can achieve the same general sound in a few different ways, for some sounds. For an American accent (As Has Been Shared Already, and Ignored) the primary way of making the |i| sound is by raising the back of the tongue.

So again, this is stuff I, at least, have already shared. None of this is unwalked territory that hasn't been presented to you.

You just ignored it, and pretended it didn't get shared.

:|

Meanwhile, I'm the unreasonable one for getting frustrated. This forum, sometimes, I swear...

Vinyadan
2021-02-26, 01:02 PM
It's simply how articulation works. The matter aren't the teeth themselves, it's how open the jaws are. There are three main factors in articulating a vowel, how open your mouth is, the shape of your lips, and where your tongue interacts with the airflow. In a simplified diagram:


jaw less open, tongue up



back of tongue, u i forward tongue,
rounded lips o e tense lips
a



jaw more open, tongue down

You can probably check this in the mirror by saying the sounds in father (a), call (o), loot (u), met (e), see (i).

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-26, 01:38 PM
It's simply how articulation works. The matter aren't the teeth themselves, it's how open the jaws are. There are three main factors in articulating a vowel, how open your mouth is, the shape of your lips, and where your tongue interacts with the airflow. In a simplified diagram:


jaw less open, tongue up



back of tongue, u i forward tongue,
rounded lips o e tense lips
a



jaw more open, tongue down

You can probably check this in the mirror by saying the sounds in father (a), call (o), loot (u), met (e), see (i).


Evidently some of us are "doing it wrong", then.

Oh well.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-26, 02:54 PM
Evidently some of us are "doing it wrong", then.

Oh well.

>for the record:

A 9 minute video which explains that the primary difference in American English is that |a| is done with the tongue down, and |i| is done with the tongue raised, has been posted, and I'm calling out again that this is being ignored to continue the narrative that no one has brought this up before, even though it has been.

{scrubbed}

---

One of the reasons why the jaw tends to move up and down in normal speech is because that serves the same function of elevating the tongue within the mouth, without moving the tongue independently, allowing the tongue to be free to move into sounds that will be soon to follow.

Hence, linguists paying close attention to people speaking normally will describe that movement for producing the |ai| sound. It's DESCRIPTIVE.

If you want to be technical, the sound is primarily produced by tongue position, though since the tongue is more or less attached to your bottom jaw, your jaw movememt has an effect on your tongue position, because of how objects-being-connected works. For instance, hold the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Try to keep it there as you open your jaw as much as you can. I can't keep it there for the entire range of motion of my jaw. I don't have a particularly long tongue, so some might be able to, for sure, but there will be a noticeable need to stretch the tongue upwards to maintain that contact. Because the tongue is, as I said, more or less attached to the bottom jaw.

So is it shocking that it would be a common, observable human practice to use the motion of the jaw to raise and lower the tongue rather than raise and lower the tongue on its own?

Since we've got both of you agreeing that |a| and |i| require two different tongue positions, and the way that long I can be held in music has been demonstrated using actual music with timestamps, can we now be done with attempting to debunk hundreds of years of linguistic science based on personal incredulity and a personal dislike of some presentations of the IPA? Please?

Caelestion
2021-02-26, 05:28 PM
You can probably check this in the mirror by saying the sounds in father (a), call (o), loot (u), met (e), see (i).

Call isn't an o sound, as much as it is or instead. Likewise, I don't know why you're representing see as an i sound.

Vinyadan
2021-02-26, 05:36 PM
Call isn't an o sound, as much as it is or instead. Likewise, I don't know why you're representing see as an i sound.
It's a simplified version of the IPA. See is /si:/ in IPA, /i:/ meaning that it's a long /i/ sound. I don't try to use the other method (ah and so on) because I'm not used to it and I would surely screw up. Call is /kɔːl/, which is, indeed, the same vowel as /ɔːr/ = or.

About the IPA, this version with sound strikes me as pretty good: IPA English Vowel Sounds Examples - Practice & Record (speechactive.com) (https://www.speechactive.com/english-vowels-ipa-international-phonetic-alphabet/) there are some vowels in the upper part of the page and more if you scroll down.

Tanarii
2021-02-26, 05:44 PM
You can probably check this in the mirror by saying the sounds in father (a), call (o), loot (u), met (e), see (i).


Call isn't an o sound, as much as it is or instead. Likewise, I don't know why you're representing see as an i sound.
The words I'd choose would probably be:

Alias is the A (or as the Fonz says aaayyye)
Eel is the E
Ivory for I
Ogre for the O
Usurp for the U (or just: you)


By the way, speaking of the Fonz and pronunciation, check out this at 1:56 :)
https://youtu.be/zO_sP6ioQYU?t=117

Xuc Xac
2021-02-26, 05:55 PM
See is /si:/ in IPA, /i:/ meaning that it's a long /i/ sound.

To clarify, "/iː/ is a long /i/" means that /iː/ is the same sound as /i/ but with a greater duration. The mark that looks like a colon with triangular dots indicates that the duration is extended. The /i/ sound is what English speakers call a "long e".

(The symbol for an English "long e" is /i/ because English uses the Latin alphabet to represent vowels in a different way than most other languages that use it because the few literate English speakers didn't change their spelling after the Great Vowel Shift and we've been paying for it ever since.)

Saint-Just
2021-02-26, 06:34 PM
What sustained sound is someone making if they say "sigh" or "bye" and just stretch the vowel out for several seconds? It's not any of the other vowels as far as I can tell, and doesn't appear on any of the IPA vowel sample charts I've found.

If it can be sustained, why can't it be made in isolation?

If it can be made in isolation, how is it accurately represented by a symbol that implies TWO sounds?

(I'll try recording it again later today if my throat feels better, right now anything I say is too full of scratch and sniffle to be useful.)


It's usually whatever initial sound you are using for the diphthong (mostly /a/ or /ɑ/ though maybe there are some other options).

Try extending (really extending, for a couple of seconds at least) "sigh" or "bye". Then do the same with "bra", "spa" or "shah". Record, isolate only the middle, and compare.

Technically you can try extending /ɪ̯/ but then you get the same result from "sigh", and "may" and I think the sounds are supposed to be different, unless there is a dialect with a "pry-pray" merger.

ImNotTrevor
2021-02-26, 10:49 PM
The words I'd choose would probably be:

Alias is the A (or as the Fonz says aaayyye)
Eel is the E
Ivory for I
Ogre for the O
Usurp for the U (or just: you)


By the way, speaking of the Fonz and pronunciation, check out this at 1:56 :)
https://youtu.be/zO_sP6ioQYU?t=117


Alias starts with a dipthong, too.

/ei/, specifically.

English puts a lot of dipthongs into single letters.