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English Pronounciation
Accordig to my Webster's New World Dictionary, A in Ago, E in agEnt, I in sanIty, O in cOmply, and U in focUs are pronunced exactly the same.
I didn't know that. No wonder my English prounciation is so f**ked up.
<<Accordig to my Webster's New World Dictionary, A in Ago, E in agEnt, I in sanIty, O in cOmply, and U in focUs are pronunced exactly the same.
I didn't know that.>> Something to remember, however, is that while those might be phonemically represented as the same sound (and dictionaries tend to mark phonemics), they can be different on a phonetic level. If you look at how I pronounce the words, it's clear I don't pronounce them all the same: <ago> [@"go_c(U)] <agent> ["e:dZI~t_}] or ["e:dZI~?] <sanity> ["s{nI4i] <comply> [k_h1m"plaI] <focus> ["fo_ck_hIs] You'll notice I have three different ways I can pronounce what is underlyingly the same sound, but the way I actually say it changes according to phonological environment. <<No wonder my English prounciation is so f**ked up.>> Well it's not that the pronunciation is, it's that English spelling is not always among the best in representing English on a phonemic level (so deducing the phonetic level is even trickier sometimes), which is usually what orthographies strive for.
Tetsuo,
Many words in English are spelled the way they were pronounced 500 years ago or more. Spelling reform has not always kept pace with changes in pronunciation. In Gaelic (Irish & Scottish), the discrepancy is even greater; these languages have brought their spelling systems up to about the 11th century. French and German have updated their spelling systems several times and it has taken government decrees to do it. Some scholars prefer to call the English writing system an "alphabetic code" rather than an "alphabet." Other languages that use alphabetic codes include Gaelic, Polish, Thai and even French a little bit.
Brennus, I was of the impression that a 20th-century reform had taken place so that Irish pronunciation is now essentially derivable from the spelling with rules of a reasonable complexity, and it's only the unreformed Scottish Gaelic that was horrible on readers ... ?
Another really bad orthography is Tibetan. It's also around a millenium old... But age isn't necessarily going to make an orthography really hard, just a bit complex. What makes English bad is that the standard pronunciation of some words comes from one dialect, whereas the spelling comes from another. That's the reason "berry" and "bury" are pronounced the same... (Of course, unstressed words wear down quicker than stressed ones, so the pronunciations of things like "we're" or "were" or "are" or "our" are often different from what the English rules would say, but they're common words so native speakers wouldn't really notice it so much...)
Felix the Cassowary,
People I've known from West Virginia pronounce words like 'bury' and 'dog' as burr-ee and doh-g because I think these were the original English pronunciations. West Virginia kind of became trapped in the 17th century linguistically speaking and while they don't exactly speak Elizabethan English there it does seem to be a living laboratory for some older English forms. Take Care! Brennus
Brennus, I'm not sure what your point is? "Bury" was indeed pronounced something like /buri/ in some dialects at one stage, and one of these contributed the spelling to the standard language ... but the one that contributed the pronunciation to the standard language pronounced it as /beri/. It all has to do with how Old English /y(:)/ was treated when it was merged with other sounds ... particularly before /r/ it did funny things, becoming /u/ in some dialects, /e/ in others, /i/ in others. So before the fir-fur-fern merger, "church" used to have different pronunciations in different parts of England too, with a /u/, and /e/, or an /i/ ... that's where the word "Kirk" comes from.
If a /buri/-pronunciation had survived in a dialect of England from south of the put-putt split isogloss, and if that dialect influenced one spoken in America, I would expect the pronunciation would probably be more like /br=.i/ sort-of-thing. I suppose that's what you mean when you say "burr-ee", but it's very hard to understand this faux-English spelling. In any case, /buri/ and certainly /br=.i/ were never the "original" pronunciation. In Old English, it was something more like /byrg/ approx. [byrG] ... then everyone turned the last sound into the vowel /i/, and the /y/ was turned into either /e/, /u/ or /i/ in different dialects. I have no idea at all what you mean when you say "doh-g", perhaps you're saying that say "dog" with a long o (RP /@U/, GAmE /oU/), as if it were spelt "doag"? Again, that wasn't the original pronunciation, it was more like /dogga/ (with a geminate /gg/). The geminate consonant stopped the /o/ from lengthening when the /a/ was dropped, so the normal evolution of that into Modern English is RP /dQg/ AusE /dOg/ etc. with a short O, and that's exactly how it's pronounced, and exactly how it's spelt. So I'm a little unsure of what your point is here.
If I'm not mistaken, Middle English "dog" was [dQg], evolving into [dQg]<[dOg] for Australians, [dQg]<[dQ:g]<[dO:g] for some British, and [dQg]<[dQ:g]<[dO:g]<[dOg](<[dQg]<[dAg]) in North America. There may be people in the South who pronounce it as if it were "doag", but that'd certainly be an American innovation.
<<[dQg]<[dQ:g]<[dO:g] for some British>>
Cancel that - I forgot that the lot-cloth split never occurred before velars in Britain.
Felix the Cassowary,
I did realize my point was that complicated - if I may say so in a William Buckleyesque sort of way.
Felix and Lazar make excellent points overall so I don't need to comment further, but I had to say a couple things....
<<People I've known from West Virginia pronounce words like 'bury' and 'dog' as burr-ee and doh-g because I think these were the original English pronunciations.>> Your pseudo-phonetic spellings make your intended pronunciations difficult to decipher, but assuming the most I can about what you intended, those were not the original English pronunciations, as Lazar and Felix have indicated accurately with X-SAMPA. <<West Virginia kind of became trapped in the 17th century linguistically speaking and while they don't exactly speak Elizabethan English there it does seem to be a living laboratory for some older English forms.>> But *every* dialect is a "living laboratory" for older forms. That's how dialects work---every dialect retains some older features while at the same time innovating in ways not seen in older forms of the language and in other current dialects. What makes dialects different is precisely *which* old forms remain and *which* new forms come about for any given dialect (in any language). To claim one dialect is a "living laboratory" of sorts is wholly linguistically inaccurate.
<<I did realize my point was that complicated - if I may say so in a William Buckleyesque sort of way.>>
No, your post in and of itself wasn't that complicated, but it was riddled with several counts of inaccuracy. Also, as I mentioned on the other thread, what kind of response is that? Felix and Lazar took time to formulate civil, well thought-out responses to your comments, and you almost dismissively reply with an irrelevant sentence or two, something you've consistently done. That's not going to cut it, whether you're interested in linguistic accuracy (which perhaps you're not, but then you shouldn't be arguing about these things which require solid linguistically based explanations) or even if you're just interested in expected civil and at least mildly intellectually stimulating dialog at its base form. Please do people a favor and properly respond (as they have with you) with relevancy.
Lazar: It's very difficult to know how a dead language was phonetically spoken, so you normally would do phonemic pronunciations, only bringing the phonetics into it if there is reasonably good evidence that they were disparate (as is the case for /byrg/ ~= [byrG] ... approximately, because the /y:/ vs /y/ opposition may've been [y:] vs [Y], the /r/ might've been pronounced [r\] etc. etc., we don't know these things though we have suspicions that both were the case ... otoh, the fricative pronunciation of /g/ in this context is relevant and reasonably well established.)
So, there's some quite good evidence that the Middle English pronunciation of a short o was closer than [Q], and it is conventionally written as /O/, therefore. Of course, if you go as far back as Old English with only one short o sound and one long o sound, you only need to denote it as /o/ (and without any evidence of its phonetic quality, that's what's done). So the evolution from OE to modern dialects is more like OE /dogga/ > ME /dOg/ > {AusE /dOg/ ; RP /dQg/ ; GAmE /dAg/ ~ /dOg/}. I'd be reluctant to state it with any more precision than that; you'd need to have some evidence, for instance, that the Australian [dOg] represents an innovation from an earlier [dQg] which I think is lacking. (It's seems more likely that the opening of /O/ to /Q/~/A/ occurred in both RP and AmE indepedently. Cf. the development of dark /l/, which occurred in Britain about a century ago in the well-known distribution with light l, as well as independently cropping up earlier than that and without allophonic variation with a light l in NZE, AmE and other then colonial and ex-colonial dialects.) Brennus: If your point is complicated, I would appreciate it if you could explain what it is. Obviously I've missed it and I would like to know what I've missed. I also don't know what you mean by "William Buckleyesque sort of way". Wikipedia knows of three, and no doubt there are others so, if you'll pardon the dialectalism and pun, I have buckley's chance of knowing what you mean. ("Buckley's (chance)" is an Australianism meaning no chance at all.)
<<("Buckley's (chance)" is an Australianism meaning no chance at all.) >>
Do you know the origin of this expression, Felix? Is it exclusively Australian? I've certainly never heard it before. Reminds me a bit of the expression 'Hobson's choice' meaning, of course, no choice at all.
As far as I know, it is exclusively Australian. I don't think anyone knows the precise origin, but I can remember one theory—apparently during Melbourne's early days, there was a law firm I think named Buckley's and Nunn's or some such. The pun is obvious.
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