I missed this. Let's crack on, shall we?

Quote Originally Posted by RedMage125 View Post
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.

[QUOTE]
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."

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.