Once again among the drivel such as this,
Quora at times comes up a gem when English people stop baiting US people while pretending to be from the US, and I will steal from a post for this post.
Well, I can't find the post now but to stay on my thought wave, here are some hard English words to pronounce, especially for those without English as a first language. No, I found I had copied the post as an Open Office Document. Sometimes I get it right.
And I came across this too, which amused me. A chronic infinitive splitter I probably am.
Writers should learn to not split infinitives.
These are hard words for native English speakers to pronounce, ignoring speakers of foreign languages where 'rural' would be a nightmare for Japanese and 'marshmallow' very difficult for Germans.
Word one is tests, and while it is a short word, it takes a long time to say it.
Sixths is another. Your tongue really has to do tricks. I've seen videos of tongues doing marvellous tricks, but we won't go there. I saw mention of 'unbreathed fricative to a breathed sibilant' mentioned as a reason, but I've no idea what that means.
Try saying this, “A rural lawyer in Worcestershire discussed the strengths of the sixth squirrel’s tests.” I can say that well enough.
No one loves a fairy over forty, as the song goes, least of all an older lisping gay man. However if you try to pronounce the word 'isthmus' phonetically, you are going to sound like a lisping fairy. I've never had to use the word but it seems you just pronounce it as 'ismus'.
We native speakers of English keep learning our language until the day we die and no ever perfects their use of English. It's complicated and changes, frequently and often. I don't know other languages but I reckon English is quite a fun language.
PS A good tip EC.
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Elephant's Child commented on "Wednesday Words"
ReplyDelete58 mins ago
It is indeed a difficult language but fun. Mostly. I can see it being a nightmare to learn though.
EC, it must really be so hard to learn.
DeleteIsthmus is like Wednesday. The added syllable is sort of there. I love language and words.
ReplyDeleteCaro, I've not thought about that. We pronounce the word as Wensday or Wensdy. So we leave out the D and slightly sound the middle E.
DeleteI had no idea what a split infinitive was until I watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory when Amy purposely said a sentence with one and Sheldon explained her mistake, so now I know. As for Isthmus you might just as well say "land bridge" since an isthmus is just a neck of land connecting two larger areas.
ReplyDeleteRiver, I need to watch that clip. I will look on YouTube. I would hate to watch more of the show than I have to. Land bridge works for me and will be better understood. Tasmania has one leading to Port Arthur.
Deleteyou don't like silly comedy?
DeleteWe do have an interesting language and it beats me how others from other countries who are learning our Australian English manage to learn it at all Andrew.
ReplyDeleteAll English I think Margaret, although some Asian people who learn American English and even British English can struggle to understand spoken Australian but that is all about accents and slang.
DeleteI think I'm going bonkers. I commented on this post yesterday but . . . but . . . I've got blog posts appearing in my reading list from 12 years ago - a stream of them from someone who probably no longer blogs. Why?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, split infinitives may not be grammatically correct, but unsplit
infinitives often make for awkward reading and listening.
JB, my apologies. That was my fault about comments. The post was published with the wrong date last night my time.
DeleteMy understanding of split infinitives is not good. Maybe as River suggests in her comment above, I need to watch The Big Bang Theory, but I am sure there is something online to explain the matter.
I think it is Season ten, episode 24.
DeleteI like "the British soldiers shoulders" and "the Leith police dismisseth us". And "that is the kind of English up with which I will not put".
ReplyDeleteTasker, the Leith police phrase really makes the speaker sound like a fairy over forty. Your last sentence....I don't know, but just seems very broken.
DeleteLanguage fascinates me. :)
ReplyDeleteMe too Darla.
DeleteFortunately, "sixths" is not a word that we have to use very often! How frequently does anyone measure something down to sixths?
ReplyDeleteQuite true Steve and with metric measurements, even less.
DeleteOne word, Steve: PIE! (Unless the person cutting it is stingy, then it turns to eighths - lol)
DeleteGood one Jenny. Vulgar fractions live on in spite of us being metricated.
DeleteWell this was a fun post! I cannot think of any words that are difficult for me to pronounce, but my husband, for whatever reason cannot say 'allergy' to save his soul.
ReplyDeleteDebby, that's a strange one to not be able to pronounce. There are so many more much harder words.
DeleteEnglish is difficult but has all kinds of fun words doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteAs always, good post;)
Yes, it can be fun Sandra and not as rigid as we sometimes think.
DeleteMy grandma used to say that the difference between American English and English English is that the Americans have a hot potato in their mouths. And then there are all the dialects the worst American is spoken in Texas. I once had a colleague who wanted to give me numbers over the phone. I almost didn't understand anything! Forty Four was Foeee four etc. I think whatever you speak the most important is that we understand each other !
ReplyDeleteInteresting Gattina. I guess you are mostly used to English English. For Australians usually American English is easy to understand, including Texan. Yes, we do need to understand each other when speaking English, and hell may freeze over.
DeleteI had no idea the t in isthmus wasn't pronounced. We have a suburb in Perth called "Cockburn" but it's pronounced "Coburn". I learned English as a teenager, and found the grammar very easy, compared to the grammar of Latin languages, but there are a lot of words that are pronounced quite differently from their written version, or words that are written differently and pronounced the same way, so it can be confusing to new learners. The Portuguese language has changed with the times and a lot of words are now written differently omitting the letters that weren't pronounced (like the above example of the suburb, it would now have no ck). But as I learned those words with the extra letters, I still tend to write them the old way :)
ReplyDeleteSami, that pronunciation of Cockburn is quite common. The dropping of written letters in Portuguese is interesting. I'm not sure that happens much in English, and perhaps it should.
DeleteInteresting posts, along with the tongue twisters provided! I wouldn't have known how to pronounce isthmus except we have one between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick so we learned about it an an early age in (shudder) geography class. Not my favourite class. I preferred English :)
ReplyDeleteAh Jenny. Yes you would know that. Land bridge as earlier suggested is more obvious and easier to say.
Delete