English is very funny language!!!

[ankur rathi]

Do is pronounce as du, To is tu then why not Go is gu???

[Pavel Kubal]

look is [luk], doom is [dum]...why isn't blood [blud] ?

[fred rosenberger]

somehow, i doubt english is the only language that does things like this. i've heard that part of the reason, though, is that English derived itself from many other languages. a word from Latin here, a word from German there, perhaps a little something else thrown in...

i always got confused on why you have 1 box, but two boxes, but mor than one Ox are Oxen...

[Frank Silbermann]

Partly because it's derived from many languages. Partly because its spelling arose by the usage of authors, who spoke with many different regional accents and dialects. Partly because pronunciation of words changed after standard spellings had long been accepted.

Other languages, such as Dutch, simply change their official spellings every seventy-five years or so to reflect changes in pronunciation.

[R K Singh]

Originally posted by fred rosenberger:
somehow, i doubt english is the only language that does things like this. i've heard that part of the reason, though, is that English derived itself from many other languages. a word from Latin here, a word from German there, perhaps a little something else thrown in...

i always got confused on why you have 1 box, but two boxes, but mor than one Ox are Oxen...

I think Map would be better person to answer but what I know is that English is phonetic language and whereas Hindi or Indian languages are flat languages.

I mean, in Hindi you pronounce all alphabets together for the word.
But in English you pronounce the word (not each alphabets)

There are rules why but is but and put is not pat.

What I remember is that 'u'(basically vowels) sounds depends on characters around it.

[Mark Spritzler]

Originally posted by Pavel Kubal:
look is [luk], doom is [dum]...why isn't blood [blud] ?

hehehe. It looks like you have

[luk] = luck
[dum] = dumb
[blud] = blood

Mark

[Joanne Neal]

What about 'ough'. It is pronounced in 14 different ways in the following sentence.

Rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman John Gough strode through the streets of Loughborough; after falling into a slough on Coughlin road near the lough (dry due to drought), he coughed and hiccoughed, then checked his horse's houghs and washed up in a trough.

[Joanne Neal]

Just in case you weren't sure

Rough-coated(2), dough-faced(4), thoughtful(1) ploughman(6) John Gough(13) strode through(3) the streets of Loughborough(2+8); after falling into a slough(2) on Coughlin(14) road near the lough(12) (dry due to drought)(7), he coughed(5) and hiccoughed(9), then checked his horse's houghs(11)and washed up in a trough(10).

1. awe: thought, bought, fought, brought, ought, sought, nought, wrought
2. uff: enough, rough, tough, slough, Clough, chough
3. ooh: through, slough
4. oh: though, although, dough, doughnut, broughm, Ough, furlough, Greenough, thorough
5. off: cough, trough
6. ow: bough, plough, sough
7. ou: drought, doughty, Stoughton
8. uh: Scarborough, borough, thorough (alt), thoroughbred, Macdonough, Poughkeepsie
9. up: hiccoughed
10. oth: trough (alt)
11. ock: lough, hough
12. oc[h] (aspirated): lough
13. ahf: Gough
14. og: Coughlin (also #5)

[Stan James]

I had a friend who used "ghoti" like many folks use foo ...

gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in motion

pronounced ...

[marc weber]

Old saying: "If the plural of mouse is mice, then the plural of spouse must be spice."

[Peter van de Riet]

Originally posted by Stan James:
I had a friend who used "ghoti" like many folks use foo ...

gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in motion

pronounced ...

or:

gh as is though
o as in people
t as in castle
i as in leisure

these makes the fish silent...
[ July 18, 2006: Message edited by: Peter van de Riet ]

[Chetan Parekh]

Originally posted by rathi ji:
Do is pronounce as du, To is tu then why not Go is gu???

Hey Rathiji, have you see Chupke Chupke? This dialog is there in it.
[ July 18, 2006: Message edited by: Chetan Parekh ]

[Angela Poynton]

Originally posted by Pavel Kubal:
look is [luk], doom is [dum]...why isn't blood [blud] ?

In some areas of England people do pronounce look as look and book as book rather than buk. My mother does it, she's from Liverpool.
For her the words Hair, her, and Heir all have the same pronounciation [her].

To my knowledge though bood s prounced blud isn't it? I've never heard and elongated oo sound in it?

[Dave Lenton]

The letter "t" is also a very strangely pronounced letter in some accents. Often in British English accents it is avoided completely - some people pronounce "Peter" as "Pee'ah". Even stranger is the American accent, where it becomes "Peedder".

To those who learnt English as a second language, is there a particular accent which is easiest to learn from? I'd guess that something widely heard like "BBC English" or an average American accent may be easy because they are often in films/tv/radio etc. Something strange like a Brummy, Scouse or Geordie accent, on the other hand, is hard enough for native English speakers to understand. Sometimes when listening to American films I struggle to understand what they are talking about if they have a southern accent. I could have done with subtitles recently when watching Brokeback Mountain!

[Angela Poynton]

You just reminded me of my first visit to New York.
I thought, "I must have a genuine New York Bagel" so I went to a bagel store and asked for my bagel, the lady behind the counter asked
"Do ya want budder with that?" in a very thick Brooklyn accent.
I didn't understand so replied "Pardon?"
"Do ya want budder on your bagel?"
"I'm sorry I don't understand"
"You're English aren't you? I'm speaking English, do ya want budder?"
At this point I was getting very embarrassed but I honestly could make out what she was trying to say. In my head I was going through all the words I know we have different terms for in England and nothing was coming up. At which point the girl just lifted up the bowl of butter and her knife and showed me.

"Ahhh you meant Butter!" I exclaimed "Yes please". She looked at me as if I was stupid,
"Yeah, that's what I said, Budder!".

Two nations divided by a common language eh!

[Yosi Hendarsjah]

Originally posted by Dave Lenton:
The letter "t" is also a very strangely pronounced letter in some accents. Often in British English accents it is avoided completely - some people pronounce "Peter" as "Pee'ah".

Like Ian Wright from the Globe Trekker tv show.
I wonder why he still has the accent eventhough he's already travelled to almost anywhere in this planet.

[Jim Yingst]

[Dave]: The letter "t" is also a very strangely pronounced letter in some accents. Often in British English accents it is avoided completely - some people pronounce "Peter" as "Pee'ah". Even stranger is the American accent, where it becomes "Peedder".

I guess this is just a matter of perspective. To me it seems stranger to omit the sound completely than to morph the phoneme from unvoiced to voiced - especially between vowels where voicing is more natural, IMO. Then again, Brooklyn probably takes that to an extreme.

[Dave Lenton]

Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
I guess this is just a matter of perspective. To me it seems stranger to omit the sound completely than to morph the phoneme from unvoiced to voiced - especially between vowels where voicing is more natural, IMO. Then again, Brooklyn probably takes that to an extreme.

I agree, it is pretty much just perspective. The fact that you said "more natural" sums it up - if you're used to hearing it one way, it just sounds more normal then hearing it another way. To me it seems more natural to shorten a word then to pronounce it wrong, but then "wrong" is entirely a point of view.

This is probably because the English seem to have a tendency to shorten words, and to speak them with clipped short vowels, but Americans tend to lengthen the vowels or add extra ones in. I can see that this could make a shorter word more natural to happen in England then in the US.

Actually I don't particularly like the missing "t" in words (I'm showing my Home Counties upbringing here), its just that it sounds less strange then changing it into a "d".

[Michael Matola]

morph the phoneme from unvoiced to voiced

Can I tweak the terminology you're using?

The phoneme itself doesn't really change. (Although we could surely have endless debates about what to call things along the way from the phonological level to the phonetic level.) Phonemes have positional variants called allophones. So you could speak of this as a phoneme having unvoiced and voiced allophones. Or you could say the (unvoiced) phoneme here is surfacing as a voiced phone.

Anyhow, flapping in (American) English involves not just a change in voice, but also a change in manner of articulation.

For more than you ever wanted to know:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping

less strange then changing it into a "d".

"T" doesn't change into a "d."

Both "t" and "d" can change into the same something else. They go from voiceless alveolar stop or voiced alveolar stop, respectively, to a voiced alveolar tap. (In ASCII IPA, I think the symbol is [D]. The wikipedia pages shows the real IPA transcription.)
[ July 20, 2006: Message edited by: Michael Matola ]

[Frank Silbermann]

Originally posted by Angela Poynton:
You just reminded me of my first visit to New York.
I thought, "I must have a genuine New York Bagel" so I went to a bagel store and asked for my bagel, the lady behind the counter asked
"Do ya want budder with that?" in a very thick Brooklyn accent.
I didn't understand so replied "Pardon?"
"Do ya want budder on your bagel?"
"I'm sorry I don't understand"
"You're English aren't you? I'm speaking English, do ya want budder?"
At this point I was getting very embarrassed but I honestly could make out what she was trying to say. In my head I was going through all the words I know we have different terms for in England and nothing was coming up. At which point the girl just lifted up the bowl of butter and her knife and showed me.

"Ahhh you meant Butter!" I exclaimed "Yes please". She looked at me as if I was stupid,
"Yeah, that's what I said, Budder!".

It is my experience that New Yorkers (including Brooklyn) will also omit the trailing 'R' in "butter", pronouncing it "buddah". In Great Britain it seems that only the Irish and maybe the Welsh pronounce the trailing 'R' properly (though the Irish often seem to overdo it).

The letter 'R' causes trouble in many countries even when it doesn't come at the end of the word. Columnist Dave Barry pointed out that to speak most European languages one must learn to misprounce the 'R'. For example, with the French accent, "France" sounds more like "fwonse".

[Rich Poock]

On my first trip to London I came across a program on television one evening in which the actors were Scottish and they were speaking English. But the odd thing about it was there were English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. I didn't have any trouble understanding the actors, but I guess someone might

[Stan James]

gh as is though
o as in people
t as in castle
i as in leisure

these makes the fish silent...

Thanks, that was good. I sat next to a guy who had to read a string of seemingly random letters to someone over the phone every day. He never said "A as in Able" but always had a theme. One day it was "K as in Knight, P as in Pneumonia ..."

[Joel McNary]

I believe that the difference is that go somehow managed to escape the Great Vowel Shift. Likwise, "Steak" and "break" also managed to preserve the older, pre-vowel shift sounds, where other English (even Anglo-saxon) words moved from the "a" sounds to the "e" sound (witness the words "beak" and "weak");

What I find interesting is the modern past tense of the word "go" ("went"). Of course, that is a irregular past tense that arose because the original past tense of "go" fell into disuse (whatever it was...) and was instead replaced with the past tense of "wend." Of course, these days we don't tend to use the present tense of "wend" very often, but we preserve the past tense as the past tense of "go."

As far as standard spelling goes, various attempts at English spelling reform have been undertaken; the one that contribitues the most to the nightmare that is English spelling is the Chancery spellings. These scholars decided to reflect the spelling of the classical languages in English, not the spelling from the language English borrowed word from. For example, the word "debt" has a silent "b." At no point in English was the "b" ever pronounced -- we borrowed the word from the French "dette." However, these scholars decided that since "dette" came from the Latin "debitare," then English should have the "b." Same thing with doubt -- from the French "doute" but the Latin "dubitare."

However, some English words actually have silent letters that were pronounced. "Knight" and "Knee" would have originally been pronounced "K'nicht" and "K'nay," respectively (so the "ka-nigget" pronouncation from Monty Python isn't actually that far off...).

And, of course, you have changes for political reasons. Noah Webster was an advocate of moderate spelling reform so as to distingush American English from British English -- it is Webster who gave American English "honor" and "color" instead of "honour" and "colour." (As an aside, as a child I had a Speak 'n Spell that I was convinced didn't know how to spell "honor" -- as I child, I put the "u" in there, even though I am an American and don't put the "u" in "color.") Likewise, we have "theater" instead of "theatre" and "music" instead of "musik." (I don't think that last one is a current British English spelling, but I believe that it was in Webster's time).

Webster also gave use different pronunciations -- he was a proponent of pronouncing all of the syllables. So American English has "Sec - re - ta - ree" instead of "Sec -- re -- tree" for the word "secretary."

[Joel McNary]

Actually, after a good night's sleep, I am remonded that "do" and "to" are the exceptions, and "go" is the rule. "So," "lo," "ho," "bo," "no," and "yo" (and "do," the musical note) all have the long "o" sound, not the long "oo" sound. So my great vowel shift comment makes no sense, except perhaps in the inverse.

[Angela Poynton]

Originally posted by RE Poock:
On my first trip to London I came across a program on television one evening in which the actors were Scottish and they were speaking English. But the odd thing about it was there were English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. I didn't have any trouble understanding the actors, but I guess someone might

Such as a deaf person perhaps. We have a lot of programmes that are subtitled / signed for the deaf on later at night or you can often turn on subtitles using teletext, perhaps you had done that by accident.

[Greg Charles]

Originally posted by Joanne Neal:
Just in case you weren't sure

Rough-coated(2), dough-faced(4), thoughtful(1) ploughman(6) John Gough(13) strode through(3) the streets of Loughborough(2+8); after falling into a slough(2) on Coughlin(14) road near the lough(12) (dry due to drought)(7), he coughed(5) and hiccoughed(9), then checked his horse's houghs(11)and washed up in a trough(10).

Thanks for the key! In my experience, the sounds in plough and drought are the same, and Merriam-Webster agrees with me. Maybe some other accents distinguish these two cases? If those two were folded into one, and the ones that only appear in proper names were excluded, we would get down to about ten, but it's still a strange situation.

Most alphabet-based languages I have encountered tend to be phonetic, or at least mostly so. (French, for example, has many silent letters, but the ones pronounced are consistent.) As mentioned, other languages tend to update spellings every so often, but English went through the great vowel-shift, and yet kept spellings more or less the same. Why is that?

[Frank Silbermann]

Originally posted by Greg Charles:
other languages tend to update spellings every so often, but English went through the great vowel-shift, and yet kept spellings more or less the same. Why is that?

The absence of a controlling authority?

[Greg Charles]

Originally posted by Frank Silbermann:
The absence of a controlling authority?

:roll:

My point was, why does English lack that controlling authority that most other languages seem to have.

[Frank Silbermann]

Originally posted by Greg Charles:
My point was, why does English lack that controlling authority that most other languages seem to have?

Through the middle-ages, the vernacular was unimportant as a literary language; most people who could write used Latin. During the Renaissance literacy started to spread and the vernacular languages became acceptable for literature. During this time, many countries of Europe were ruled by kings who claimed absolute power; beginning with the Magna Carta, however, the English had a concept of limited government. (Though the Magna Carta only empowered lords at the expense of the king, other tendencies such as reliance upon the long bow rather than the crossbow forced caused a degree of autonomy to devolve even to the level of the common freeman.)

In the European countries with a tradition of absolute centralized power, it seemed perfectly reasonable for the government to dictate spellings. In England, however, this would have been seen as impudent government overreaching and audacity.

Even though the English seem to be moving closer to Europe in their political attitudes, they now constitute only a small portion of the English-speaking world.

[Marcus Green]

I would suggest that English people have only been a very small proportion of English language speakers for a few hundred years.

[Ganpi Srinivasan]

havin(g) worked in NYC for 3+ yrs and speakin(g) to my colleagues who were brought up there, I have lost the (g) in gerunds!! my indian friend pointed out that I no longer say "nothing" but rather use "nothin" while speakin(g)..

[Jim Yingst]

Interesting. I periodically find people misspelling my last name as Yinst. Now I will have to pay attention to see if it's mostly New Yawkas who do this.
[ July 25, 2006: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Frank Silbermann]

Originally posted by Marcus Green:
I would suggest that English people have only been a very small proportion of English language speakers for a few hundred years.

Yes, but nowadays you don't get a majority of English speakers even if you include the residents of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and Ireland!

[R K Singh]

Originally posted by Greg Charles:

:roll:

My point was, why does English lack that controlling authority that most other languages seem to have.

I doubt any language has any controlling authority.

Govt might be considered as controlling authority but still it can not control it beyond schools.

[Rich Poock]

Originally posted by Angela Poynton:


Such as a deaf person perhaps. We have a lot of programmes that are subtitled / signed for the deaf on later at night or you can often turn on subtitles using teletext, perhaps you had done that by accident.

Of course....hmmm....for some reason that thought had not occurred to me.

I hope you folks don't kick people off the ranch for such a mental lapse.