As someone who has learned the English language primarily by reading thousands of books, I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, English pronounciation sucks big time.
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone -
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don’t agree.This makes my head hurt and I love it.
The amount of lines I had to go back over was mind boggling
Along the same vein as “the chaos”
Worst lingua franca evurr
Uhh! A new variant of “The Chaos”.
I’ll take the English reformation any time now.
Blame the french and people using endonym loan words.
Like, how THE FSCK would I know that a geoduck is pronounced gooey-duck? Also geo-duck sounds like a Pokémon, so that’s gotta be right.
geoduck
Hey, at least it is a nice, short word. In German, it is an “Elephantenrüsselmuschel” (elephant trunk clam). At least there is absolutely no question how it is pronounced, so that’s that.
German pronunciation rules are awesome. If only you could get rid of some of your consonants, I’d be able to pronounce any German word.
If only you could get rid of some of your consonants, I’d be able to pronounce any German word.
You probably dislike the German variants of “ch” as much as the Germans loathe the English “th” ;-)
Out of Rohrbacherstrasse, I could pronounce Ro, ba, and strasse. German has like 5 different R sounds and I can pronounce 2 of them. And yet most of you can’t pronounce the vibrating R in my name.
And I hate English’s TH as well, both sounds of it, and especially the insistence in using it next to S. How am I supposed to pronounce “clothes” with any grace or dignity left?
No, my mother tongue isn’t Germanic, but Celtic-Latin with a lot of Banto and Tupi thrown in for mellowing.
And yet most of you can’t pronounce the vibrating R in my name.
Spanish name, by chance?
Close, but no cigar
This is 100% my girlfriend, and I take great pleasure in never correcting her, I find it charming.
Mine is full of ‘oreos’ (Oreoles), ‘emeralds’ (Admirals), ‘see-ment’ (cement), and very cute regionalisms like ‘roundy-rounds’ (roundabouts). I love it
Better than my one friend. He seems to only correct pronunciations. It’s gotten to the point that he denies idioms if he hasn’t heard of them before. I don’t actively seek him out anymore.
Thing is, I know she knows exactly what she is saying. The context is correct, she knows what the words mean, she just didn’t grow up around people who spoke that wide a vocabulary, and while working in blue collar trades, she was looked down on for all them fancy college words.
She can swear with the best pipe fitters, well, because she was a union pipe fitter.
Language is so fluid, people who get too hung up on syntax and not the substance really annoy me.
When I was in the military, one of the smartest people I knew was from the bayou of Louisiana. To me, a yank, he sounded like a complete idiot, and in fact I often couldn’t understand him when we first met. Once I was able to look past his mode of speech, and actually listen to him, I realised what an ignorant fuck I was being.
The one that I mispronounced for awhile was hyperbole. I thought it was pronounced like “hyper bowl.”
But “hyperbolic” is exactly like you expect.
Segue for me. I pronounced it seg-goo and my mom busted out laughing.
Huh… don’t think I’ve ever seen segue written down. I’d be writing Segway if I had to.
Sounds like something you ride or a place that makes so so sandwiches.
Now that I think about it… it makes sense now! A segway is a segue between two places!
I was at the store with my partner and I was like
“What’s… kwee-know-ah?”
I’m still not 100% on how that is pronounced.
My partner looks at me and says… “KEEN-WAH???” and I’m like uhhh suuuure, that one…
I’ve heard segue being spoken in so many different ways that I have no fucking clue which is the correct. Se-geh, segway, se-goo-ee
The second one you wrote is the correct way to pronounce it.
I tend to read it as Sergey without the “r”.
Mine was “banal”.
Sounds like “canal”.
Were you pronouncing it b-anal?
Of course not!
Bane-all
Wait… it’s not??
I gotta check now: Oh god dammit. I never made the connection.
Epitome and Penchant for me. Mocked mercilessly for those two.
Oh yeah, epitome for me too. It was the epi-tome.
Facade. Got laughed for saying fac-aid. How am I supposed to know a c make an s sound.
That’s because it’s not the correct spelling. It should be “façade” but English keyboards lack the correct glyph. This doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it but it at least gives you a hint that you can’t use English rules and that you should investigate it further
What? Shit
Hi per Bol e (e as in how it sounds in see)
Man, this is ridiculous. It resembles Akkadian more and more with each passing day.
Sound it out they said
I did that one
The other one I was embarrassingly called out on when I was a teen was pronouncing inevitable in eh VITE able.
It’s like the Super Bowl, only better.
Sounds like you never played Space Quest IV.
I always knew that “misled” in books (pronounced mīzulled) and the spoken “misled” (mis-led) meant the same thing, but it took me until high school to figure out that mīzulled was only in my head.
Wait til you find out about epitome.
The epicenter of tomes
Yes!! I knew I wasn’t the only one
Esoteric for me. I still have trouble with that word.
I want it to be eh-sot-uh-rik for some reason.
Same!
laughs in a language that makes sense phonetically
Laughing phonetically
Laffs.
Langwij.
Maeks
Senz.
Fonetikly.
Ai jenyuinely wish inglish woz laik thiz
Hooked on fanəks wurked four me.
Ai red þis wiþ a soudern akcent
English speakers laugh at you too.
Don’t kill me, it’s a joke.
The english language badly needs an orthography reform
Using an alphabet designed for Latin has had some dire consequences.
Using a Latin alphabet. Using Germanic pronunciation. Borrowing words from Spanish. Stealing words from French. Changing accent to avoid sounding Gaelic.
I have always loved the analogy that English isn’t a language, it’s three bilingual children stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat and arguing about bologna.
I have heard it analogized that English is a language that follows other languages into dark alleys to beat them up and steal their words.
Well, German has almost as many vowels as English and we’re doing just fine I think. On the other hand, French orthography is similarly fucked up although it’s a direct descendent of Latin and they don’t even have any weird sounds they can’t write concisely. So I think its just a matter of trying.
Not me! I only read audiobooks, so I know how to pronounce all those $5 words!
(Just don’t know what they mean or how to use them)
Bold of you to trust the performer knows how to say the words.
A decent performer will likely verify words they’re unfamiliar with. If it’s being read by the book’s author it’s anybody’s guess.
I’m looking at YOU Gibson
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard professional audiobook readers say casualty instead of causality. They might have a higher hit rate, but not 100%.
Those are just causality casualties then. I’ve had good luck with performers, but it may depend what you’re reading interest is
Pen wings.
Spanish would never pull this BS on you.
The power of phonetic languages.
I don’t speak Spanish, but do Spanish authors pull the same shit English ones do, where they give characters absolutely nonsense names with ambiguous pronunciations? Is it even possible? I will read a name of a character or place and spend the next 20 chapters reading the word twice or three times in different ways.
My biggest gripe with spanish is J having the “ha” sound. Juan is spelled “Hoo-an”, Jesus is “Heh-zus”, etc. If you can get over that, the rest is mostly phonetically sound, like portuguese
Portuguese, to me, sounds like this: msh msh oowow msh msh. I love it.
I think you’ll find even in Spanish Juan is still spelled Juan and Jesus is still spelled Jesus.
Some names would also throw me for a loop. When I first heard how they said “Hermione”, I was quite flabbergasted.
Oh man, I loved Her-mi-own-ee. She was my favorite character
Same. I think the official pronunciation was just JK trolling.
Do you pronounce Ginny like gif or gif?
It took a long time for me to realize its basically Jenny prounced a bit different.
This one floored me.
I grew up reading Warner Bros comic books my grandma had and thought Yosemite Sam was pronounced “Yosemight”. Eventually figured it out. Later my backpacking buddy and I were looking at a map of California when he told me we should check out “Yosemight” if we ever get around to visiting Yosemite
I said “miss happen” one time in front of my girlfriend. “What?”
“You know, like badly shaped, deformed.”
“Misshapen?! BAH HAH HA HAA!”
Truth…hah! I still have words I have to look up on the sly on the internet and click one of those definition services that will pronounce the word for you so I don’t sound completely wrong.
I pronounced epitome epi-tome for the longest time. Now as I read, I pop onto Google when I encounter something I’m unfamiliar with. And I’m 36, my job has me fairly familiar with the English language, but I swear some writers discover a word and they’re like “can’t wait to use this two or three times in the next couple chapters.”
It’s that and character/place names, but character names are dangerous lookups, spoiled a plot in WoT looking up how to pronounce Moraine. And the worst part is her name’s pretty obvious, but I fucking looked it up anyway. I thought Hermione was obvious as a kid, but that’s probably because I transposed the I and O, now that I think about it.
I was teasing my significant other about her epi-tome but then she caught me with indictment so we’re back on equal footing.
in-ter-MINE-able / in-TERM-in-able
Is one that jumps to mind which I still cock up to this day, I feel a little called out 😂
Posthumously was mine.
Epitome is mine.
I don’t see what’s so humorous about that
It’s post-humor. That means you will get it in 3-15 working days.
Oh that makes sense. Much salutations, my good acquittal.
Omg I love hummus
Did you pronounce it such that it would pair nicely with postpita and postolives?
Like post humorously.
I did this, and grew up in a ESL English only house,I pronounce so many words wrong with a perfect American accent.
Which American accent? We talken west coast standard, East Coast standard, Appalachian, Yooper, Inland Imperial, Bakersfield, Rocky Mountain North or South ya gotta he more specific.
As someone whose father had a doctorate in English, I grew up reading and being told off every time I mispronounced a word.
That’s just rude really. Hope you’re feeling better these days amigo.
I loved my dad, but he was always a professor, so proper English was a priority. Honestly, that particular aspect of my upbringing is not one of the upsetting or traumatic parts.
Interestingly though, I recently learned that he drilled something that was essentially incorrect into my head. He grew up in the UK and, when he was growing up, it was proper to write “an historic.” Here in the US and now usually in the UK, it is “a historic.” I’ve been using “an historic” for decades.
If you want to talk about the shitty thing about having an English professor for a father, it’s when you show him a piece of creative writing and he responds by telling you about all the mistakes you’ve made rather than what he thinks of it. Again, I loved the guy, but he was always a professor.
On the other hand, he ended up becoming a film historian and growing up with a film historian for a father is pretty amazing.
(Thanks on the health front, we’re working on it.)
