English, the Language.

[Goliath]

My native language, Finnish, can string together words and word parts to make an infinite number of new words.. such as epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän.

Now that is an impressive-looking word. What does it mean?

And doesn't Finnish have some ridiculous number of declensions as well? I sem to remember a character reciting them in Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17.

 

[Sky]

My native language, Finnish, can string together words and word parts to make an infinite number of new words.. such as epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän.

Now that is an impressive-looking word. What does it mean?

And doesn't Finnish have some ridiculous number of declensions as well? I sem to remember a character reciting them in Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17.

It's kind of hard to translate.. Something like "Perhaps even with his/her quality of not having been made unorganized.."

(We have no gender-specific pronouns, hence the his/her)

Let me count the declensions.... 15. I think.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Funny how it all works. As we've seen in this thread, it must be a bloody nightmare for foreigners trying to pick up the lingo.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Still, for all its crazy stuff, I have a unbounded love for the English language, especially in the RP standard. The way it sounds is simply... wonderful. It's like speaking with a mouth full of dried beans, but in a good way. And even if my accents is pretty thick and my pronunciation abysmal, I still love to speak it.

As for homophones, I have resigned myself to pronounce them slightly differently. Intellectually, I know they should be pronounced the same, but that's just the way my brain is wired: more that 30 years speaking Italian as a first language does that to a guy. So when I am actually speaking, my brain takes over and pronounce them differently, even so slightly. As long as I can make myself understandable, I guess I can live with that.

 

[Skywalker]

And wiat tlil you get aorund to the fcat taht you don't even hvae to sepll wrods croreclty so lnog as the frist and lsat ltteer is in the rghit palce.

Is it wrnog taht I dind't hvae any porlbem undretsnading tihs?

 

[Canadave]

The funniest sounding differences between dialects is asking someone American to pronounce Buoy or Quay. To English ears, it sounds like a child reading the words for the first time. Our pronunciations of the words are greeted with equal incomprehension on most of your shores too (buoy more so than quay, admittedly). I don't know why these particular words diverged so much. You'd think sailing-related terms would tend to be similar!

I think quay is probably the meanest homophone out there. I mean who would guess that it's pronounced the same as key if they didn't know?

 

[scotpens]

I think quay is probably the meanest homophone out there. I mean who would guess that it's pronounced the same as key if they didn't know?

Or that “choir” is pronounced like the second syllable of “esquire”?

This website provides speech samples of many regional British accents. Quite interesting.

 

[RoJoHen]

"Queue" is a goofy word, too. Its spelling seems...redundant.

 

[iBender]

I think quay is probably the meanest homophone out there. I mean who would guess that it's pronounced the same as key if they didn't know?

Or that “choir” is pronounced like the second syllable of “esquire”?

This website provides speech samples of many regional British accents. Quite interesting.

That South London Female audio sample is quite good, too bad their aren't any South London Male audio samples.

I might phone it in .

 

[scotpens]

“Queue” is a goofy word, too. Its spelling seems...redundant.

We Americans don’t use that word much. We don’t queue up; we stand in line. Unless we’re from New York, where we stand on line.

 

[Miss Chicken]

OTOH, for speakers of most UK dialects and for New Englanders and Southerners in the US, flaw and floor are homophones. For me, they sound completely different.

We had a similar discussion to this a few months ago.

To me, and other Australians, the following word are homophones

Ball and bawl
Saw and sore
Paw, pore and poor

etc etc

Some Americans were trying to explain how they pronounced them and I just couldn't understand how these words could sound different.

 

[SG-17]

OTOH, for speakers of most UK dialects and for New Englanders and Southerners in the US, flaw and floor are homophones. For me, they sound completely different.

We had a similar discussion to this a few months ago.

To me, and other Australians, the following word are homophones

Ball and bawl
Saw and sore
Paw, pore and poor

etc etc

Some Americans were trying to explain how they pronounced them and I just couldn't understand how these words could sound different.

Ball and bawl are homophones in American English (at least in the North) as are pore and poor. However Paw sounds like p-Awe and Saw sounds like s-Awe.

 

[Gepard]

Saw and sore
Paw, pore and poor


Some Americans were trying to explain how they pronounced them and I just couldn't understand how these words could sound different.

Because there's an open vowel sound at the end of "saw" and "paw":

s-aaa

p-aaa

(Well, the "W" at the end results in slightly different pronunciation from a string of "a"s, but that's close enough for an example.)

Whereas "poor/pore" and "sore" have a distinct "rrrrr" sound in them.

p-orr

s-orr

British and Australian accents tend to insert "r" sounds where there aren't any written down, whereas American accents tend to distinguish between words that are and aren't spelled with an "r."

 

[Gov Kodos]

Some dialects around New England make often/orphan homophones. And around my part of NE pore/poor/core are homophones but have no -r sound at the end. But they aren't homophones with paw/saw/law.

 

[Canadave]

Ball and bawl
Saw and sore
Paw, pore and poor

Ball and bawl are definitely homophones. The others I all pronounce differently, though. Saw\Paw both have "ah" sound in them, while pore\sore have "or" sounds in them. Poor, on the other hand, has more of an "ooo" sound before the r.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Actually, when I speak, there is a subtle distinction between Ball and Bawl. I use a Dark L (tongue in the back of my mouth instead of front). But I'm not sure if that's directly an accent thing. You tend to pick up words with different accents if you've learned them after starting school compared to before and it's possible I didn't learn Bawl until after. I also feel I subtly pronounce the W.

Then again, for me, Sure and Shore are homonyms. So are Our and Are (but not Hour). I know people who pronounce Mary and Marry the same, while others pronounce Merry and Murray the same.

 

[Trilliam]

Those homophones...they get spoken the same? Oh... I´ve always read those words you wrote down quite different from each other. PRINciple but princiPAL for example. Thats wrong? Damn. Besides being beautiful English can also be annoying.

Homophones are words that have different meanings and different spellings, but sound exactly the same. English has hundreds, maybe thousands of them. And yes, they can be quite irritating to someone trying to learn the language. Almost as irritating as the crazy, screwed-up spelling.

Umm, if you're pronouncing "affect" and "effect" the same way, you're pronouncing one of them the wrong way.

 

[SG-17]

Then again, for me, Sure and Shore are homonyms. So are Our and Are (but not Hour). I know people who pronounce Mary and Marry the same, while others pronounce Merry and Murray the same.

I find myself pronouncing Sure differently at different times. Sometimes I pronounce it as a homophone to Shore, others I pronounce it like this.

I, and everyone I know pronounces Mary, Marry, and Merry the same (though there may be a slight difference with Merry).

 

[Trilliam]

One of my favourite homophone pairs has to be bridal/bridle, for inadvertantly revealing so much about marriage...

Well, those sound similar but not the same. The first is "bri- dal" -long "i" short "a", the second is "bride-l" - in this neck of the woods anyway.

 

[Trilliam]

Our and Are

Really? Hour & Our, yes but "are"?

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Then again, for me, Sure and Shore are homonyms. So are Our and Are (but not Hour). I know people who pronounce Mary and Marry the same, while others pronounce Merry and Murray the same.

I find myself pronouncing Sure differently at different times. Sometimes I pronounce it as a homophone to Shore, others I pronounce it like this.

I, and everyone I know pronounces Mary, Marry, and Merry the same (though there may be a slight difference with Merry).

Woops, I wasn't really paying attention there, I meant Mary, Merry, and Murray. Marry and Mary are pronounced the same almost everywhere. It's Merry that sounds different. Anyway, just my rambling about the Philly accent, don't take me too seriously.