Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 05 Dec 2020, 04:24 ---Ah, I misunderstood - you were on the "l" not the "i" (I read it as capital i and presumed a typo).
I have never heard the "l" in solder not pronounced nor had any idea that was a possibility, and so that is a complete surprise to me. British dictionaries don't mention the possibility either.
--- End quote ---
You all say 'solder' as "sol-der"?
EDIT: "Solder (/ˈsoʊldər/,[1] /ˈsɒldər/[1] or in North America /ˈsɒdər/)"
*side eyes New Jersey and Boston, MA*
alc40:
In the Renaissance some people tried to make English spelling more like Latin; there's an article about it here. Apparently sodder > solder was among those changes, and then in Britain the pronunciation also ended up shifting while in American English the older pronunciation continued.
Morituri:
I believe, without specific evidence that I remember, that the 'f' and 'ph' spellings now pronounced in the same way used to have different pronunciations.
Thing is, it's ridiculously subtle. You produce the 'f' sound with the lower lip and upper teeth, and you produce the 'ph' sound with both lips and no teeth. The problem with this is that unless I'm actually the one doing it, I cannot *hear* any difference between these sounds. One unvoiced approximant aspiration sounds pretty much the same as another to me.
*BUT* there's also the exception of 'th.' Unvoiced 'th', (as in 'thief' or 'teeth') is also an unvoiced approximant aspiration, produced between tongue and hard palate, and it sounds very different to me. And I don't know whether that's because it's *more* different from other unvoiced approximant aspirations, or because I as a speaker of modern English have learned to attend to it because the distinction is important in English.
*AND* there's the other exception of 'th'. Voiced 'th' (as in 'the' and 'there' and 'they' and 'other') is genuinely a different sound, but in English they are sort-of regarded as equivalent. Even though we pronounce lots of words containing them, every day, and even though we have 'picked up' which version of the 'th' to use in which word more or less from context, the distinction is hardly ever taught. And a good number of adult speakers of English are surprised to learn that it exists - they just never thought about it before, and when you inform them that there are different sounds, you watch their faces as they finally realize, yes, they have been hearing the difference and producing it in speech every day for most of their lives, are likely not to have messed it up since they were two years old, and have. never. even. noticed. it.
And I don't know if that ... ignorance? "Cognitive" deafness entirely unrelated to a genuine inability to hear and speak? Whatever you call it, I don't know if that's properly part of being a native speaker or has anything to do with the way we don't distinguish other unvoiced approximant aspirations? Maybe the difference is there but we don't 'code' it because it doesn't matter in language, the same way we *almost* don't code on the different 'th' noises.
LTK:
--- Quote ---Thing is, it's ridiculously subtle. You produce the 'f' sound with the lower lip and upper teeth, and you produce the 'ph' sound with both lips and no teeth. The problem with this is that unless I'm actually the one doing it, I cannot *hear* any difference between these sounds. One unvoiced approximant aspiration sounds pretty much the same as another to me.
--- End quote ---
You do? I pronounce words like 'elephant' and 'phase' just like if they had an f instead of a ph.
alc40:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 05 Dec 2020, 18:56 ---I believe, without specific evidence that I remember, that the 'f' and 'ph' spellings now pronounced in the same way used to have different pronunciations.
Thing is, it's ridiculously subtle. You produce the 'f' sound with the lower lip and upper teeth, and you produce the 'ph' sound with both lips and no teeth.
--- End quote ---
(Preliminary: In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the English "f" sound is written as /f/ and the other sound you describe is written as /ɸ/. I'll use those below.)
I'm not aware of English ever having contrasted those sounds, and I think it's quite unlikely. There are apparently a few languages in the world that do contrast them (such as Ewe) but it's very rare and generally at least one of the sounds would be modified a bit to increase their difference.
English words written with "ph" generally come from Greek. In Modern Greek the letter phi is pronounced as /f/, but it has changed over time. It's certainly possible that at some point in English history scholars might have tried to pronounce Greek loan-words with a different sound, basically treating them as foreign words before they became fully adopted into English. If they did, though, I don't know where they would have gotten the idea of using /ɸ/. As far as I can tell, the /ɸ/ might have been used in some Greek dialects during the last couple centuries BCE and the first couple centuries CE, but it became /f/ long before any English scholars were trying to pronounce Greek words.
There is a possible point of confusion since the IPA symbol for /ɸ/ does use a form of the Greek letter phi. But that's only the IPA; the Greek language itself has used the sound /f/ for over a millennium now, and in any case it never contrasted those sounds. The original letter phi was pronounced somewhat like the modern English "p", then later it turned into /ɸ/ and finally /f/.
Another complication is that in Classical Greek the letter phi contrasted with the letter pi (in a way that doesn't involve /f/ at all) but it did involve a contrast that's hard for English speakers to perceive.
As far as the voicing difference in "th", I suspect that spelling has a significant influence. People tend to be more aware of sound distinctions that require different spellings, while sounds that are written the same way may only be distinguished subconsciously. For example, many people tend to think of the "n" in the word "thank" as an "n", not realizing that they pronounce it like the "ng" in "sang".
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version