A simple question
-
So, how would you pronounce 'Featherstonhaugh'?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
-
Probably best you give it a pass then. It's as grueling as an upper level textbook.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
-
Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
I'm guessing here, but I would conjecture that the soft pronunciation of an intervocal 'g' in words of Latin origin ('digit' cf 'rigid' and 'frigid') derives from the way classical Latin developed into and beyond the Middle Ages as a continuing spoken language and the lingua franca of Europe for business, the Church and the academic world. The 'i' following the 'g' is crucial: Latin developed into modern Italian with the practice of pronouncing a 'g' as 'hard' as in 'jug' when followed by 'a', 'o' and 'u', and soft as in 'digit' when followed by 'i' or 'e'.
-
I refer the honourable gentleman to List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations[^]. Unless there is an explanation there, I have no idea why, or how, it came to be spelled/pronounced that way. It is one of those that is well known to those that like these sorts of puzzles.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
-
Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
How do you pronouce "ghoti" Answer: fish Enough - f sound Women - short i sound Nation - sh sound Go English. On a slightly more serious note the strange spellings and pronunciations and grammar comes from English being a peasant language that has been taking other languages into dark alleys for years and mugging them for words and sentence constructs.
-
Gene, gyrate, general, geography, geriatric, gist, etc. The letter 'j' didn't exist in English until something like 300 years ago. They made 'i' do double duty, e.g., 'iust' (just). There are some things about English spelling that could be cleaned up, but the general problem is that English is phonetically complex, so a comprehensive cleanup is impossible, and this discourages minor cleanups. For example, English has 50 different sounds, while Spanish has only 30, so English overloads the alphabet.
Flustrated wrote:
There are some things about English spelling that could be cleaned up, but the general problem is that English is phonetically complex, so a comprehensive cleanup is impossible, and this discourages minor cleanups. For example, English has 50 different sounds, while Spanish has only 30, so English overloads the alphabet.
Nope. It's not impossible. It's being done already, just not formally. I've seen almost illiterate students from my English class in college (please suspend your disbelief) write an entire essay by spelling out words phonetically and with some "IM speak." Not surprisingly, the professor embarrassed him by whispering loud enough just so the entire front row of students could hear her (although probably not intentional). The academic world is just too attached to the oddities of the English language to let it change on its own. The fact that it can't change is because there are many institutions that enforce the current ways. There is an air of accomplishment to knowing something more difficult, and many people are not willing to lose that. It's the same reason why the upper class Koreans resisted changing to a phonetic representation of its language for centuries and instead stubbornly stuck to Chinese characters. The alphabet is a different story. We could incorporate some of the runic alphabet back into English (e.g., thorn), or take things from the International Phonetic Alphabet (which would also serve to help its learners learn other languages as well).
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
-
Member 3333482 wrote:
Japanese has four alphabets.
The Japanese languages doesn't utilize an alphabet. It utilizes three writing systems, of which two are phonetic syllabaries (native inventions) and one logographic (from Chinese).
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
Silly me, Hiragana and Katakana are not alphabets. What was I thinking: a fixed, standardized set of written symbols to represent sounds combined to build words. Sounds like an alphabet to me. Granted, Kanji is not an alphabet in the traditional sense that it is not phonetic. But Romanji definitely is. And for the sake of dumbing it down, we just refer to all writing systems Runes to Hieroglyphs and alphabets. The Average person does not really care about the difference between symbolic phonics and letters.
-
Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
Here, I fixed it. -Kasterborus
-
I refer the honourable gentleman to List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations[^]. Unless there is an explanation there, I have no idea why, or how, it came to be spelled/pronounced that way. It is one of those that is well known to those that like these sorts of puzzles.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
-
It'd not an English word but a borrowing so doesn't follow English rules, such as they are.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
Steve_Harris wrote:
It'd not an English word but a borrowing so doesn't follow English rules, such as they are.
This isn't limited to English. German is a very phonetic language because it was one of the last languages in Europe to be set down in written form. If you can pronounce it, you can spell it (and vice-versa). However, words originating in a different language don't follow the phonetic rule (and many don't sound like the original either, even though the Germans do try their best...).