The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[Hussar]

Yeah, I never understood why stuff like that happens in translation. If we're taking another language's words and translating them to English, wouldn't it make sense to just write them how they sound, instead of whatever ungodly process went into making it spelled "P H O"?

Swimming upthread a bit, but, generally speaking, any transliteration into another language is not actually using the alphabet of that other language, but, a stylized set of symbols loosely related to the second language. Thus, Romaji (transliterated Japanese), Pinyin (transliterated Chinese) and various other languages will not be pronounced the way a native English speaker would read the words.

Again, see any place name in Wales. Basically the Welsh just really wanted to win at Scrabble.

 

[prabe]

Yeah, but we also translate a ton of words from other languages to English to make sense with our standard pronunciations. I know English (and linguistics in general) are stupid and nonsensical, but I always wondered why we sometimes change the spelling to fit our pronunciations and other times don't.

Transliteration is ... difficult. There are non-English words that are in non-Latin alphabets, which use different phonemes, and those transliterations are frequently difficult to pronounce correctly, even if you mostly grok the rules. There are other non-English words that are in the Latin alphabet, and some of those are left as natively spelled while others are ... recast.

There's also that some of these loanwords entered English long enough ago that they got caught up in the Great Vowel Shift.

(No degree in the field, just fifteen-ish years dealing with recording spoken word in a context where getting the pronunciations right mattered.)

 

[payn]

For viewing pleasure today im going to kick off a new installment of, "Things I knew I didnt need".

 

[RealAlHazred]

Sorry. Maybe I used the wrong term. I don't mean "linguistics" as in studying languages, that's quite useful. I meant more "the process in which languages evolve and borrow aspects from other languages" isn't internally consistent with how that language generally works.

Do any major English dialects pronounce their words so differently that "P H O" would sound like "fuh"?

I'm pretty sure in Welsh Gaelige all those letters are silent...

 

[RealAlHazred]

"Fa" like in "ha"? I thought it was "fuh" like in "huh"!

This is another one of those like "drow", isn't it. The "R-O-W" is correctly pronounced by genteel people exactly like it is in "row;" and definitely not like in "row," you'd sound like some gutter-dwelling Luddite.

 

[Mannahnin]

I've always heard "fuh" to rhyme with "uh", rather than "fah" to rhyme with "ha".

Though TBF, I don't have a lot of Vietnamese-speaking friends, so I'm getting it at least second-hand. Unless I've heard a Vietnamese-speaker pronounce it on Youtube, maybe? Or I'm forgetting an older interaction. That's also possible.

 

[payn]

 

[RealAlHazred]

I've always heard "fuh" to rhyme with "uh", rather than "fah" to rhyme with "ha".

Though TBF, I don't have a lot of Vietnamese-speaking friends, so I'm getting it at least second-hand. Unless I've heard a Vietnamese-speaker pronounce it on Youtube, maybe? Or I'm forgetting an older interaction. That's also possible.

All I know is we have a restaurant near my part of New Jersey called "Pho King Great" which only works if it's pronounced in a very particular way.

 

[J.Quondam]

If English loan words were spelled sensibly, our spelling bees would be terribly boring.

 

[prabe]

If English loan words were spelled sensibly, our spelling bees would be terribly boring.

If English were spelled sensibly ...

(It's my understanding the issue is the Great Vowel Shift happening about the same time the printing press--and more-common literacy and standardized spellings--arrived in England. I am willing to be corrected on this.)