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My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.
In spoken English, “I read books.” doesn’t have ambiguous tense.
Unless they have a father with a PhD in English who acts like an English teacher with them their whole childhood.
I loved my dad, but boy did it suck when I showed him some piece of creative writing I wrote and he got out the red pen.
One of my buddies is in his fifties. He’s been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces “chasm” with the ch of “chicken” no matter how much we correct him. I’ve known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.
Thanks to Hugo’s House of Horrors, a childhood of peh-nuh-lope for Penelope
Names from other languages I think are especially obvious for the self taught or avid reader. Euler, Goethe, Camus, etc
chaos, debris, plumber. I hate the english language.
It is even more funny if the reading isn’t in your native language. I can write in English at a C1-C2 level but I am at the B level when speaking as I have no clue how to pronounce most of my regular vocabulary that I use when writing.
They didn’t teach pronunciation when you learned to read English? That’s one of the very first parts of instruction when teaching it to native speakers. That’s also how instruction went when I learned Spanish. Granted, those are both Latin based languages, so I have no idea how it would work for something like Chinese to English.
Probably depends on how much formal education you had and how much is from reading books and stuff on the Internet. The Problem with English pronunciation is, that it’s completely arbitrary, depending from which language the word is originally. I don’t know about Spanish but in French you can usually derive a words pronunciation from it’s spelling and vice versa.
Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not ‘un-animous’, it’s ‘you-nanimous’. Makes total sense.
Don’t even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce ‘ough’.With words starting with “un” you can figure out pronunciation by removing the “un” and see if the rest of the word is it’s own word which means the opposite. “animous” is not a word so you would use the long “u” sound in “unanimous”. Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Most radiology teachers want to be unionized.
Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
Thanks. I am a native English speaker. I just hate how inconsistent it is so I try to think up as many rules as I can to apply some kind of logic to it.
That’s very uncommon for native speakers, so good job! You’re probably a good person for language learners to be around :)
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don’t know unanimous, chances are I don’t know if animous exists either.Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no ‘derstand’.
Yeah, have you met French?
Mais oui.
Once you understand the rules, I find French pronunciation generally more reliable than English.The French heavily curate their language too, which probably contributes to it’s reliability and overall clarity. There are official words with official pronunciations, gendering, etc. No willy-nilly adding words from colloquialisms or slang like in English.
The problem of English is not so much colloquialisms or slang.
It’s a history of being conquered over and over and mixing the various languages together, throwing in a major vowel shift and then some scholars decided to further change the spelling of some words, just because.Let me just say, I’m not necessarily blaming anyone for the mess that is English.
I merely point out that there is often no clearly recognizable correlation between spelling and pronunciation, which can easily trip up non-native speakers (ant often natives too).
Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce “preface”. It’s obviously pre-face and it’s before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
I thought ‘segue’ was pronounced ‘seg’ and ‘Segway’ was ‘Segway’. I blame the mall cop transportation.
I’d blame the guy who thought pronouncing “vague” as /veɪɡ/ (or better who decided to write /veɪɡ/ as vague.).
Vague is french, segue is italian, hence different pronunciation, the french equivalent would probably be suite.
Got called out once for pronouncing epitome as Epi-tome.
That one stung more than Camus as Cah-mus instead of Cah-moo. At least thats just the French fucking with us.
And they’re gonna fuck with you even further…
Albert Camus [alˈbɛːʁ kaˈmy]
I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled “hyper bowl” for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn’t until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I’m sure dozens more that I’m not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced “high-per-buh-lee”.
