112
votes
Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
Several reasons:
English pronunciation isn't easy
Don't think that, just because you find it easy, most people in the world will; English pronunciation is actually quite complex by any measure. ...
- 4,950
42
votes
How did שְׁלֹמֹה (shlomo) become Solomon?
For the vowels, pay close attention to the nəquddoth (vowel dots)! Between the shin and the lamedh is a shəwa mark; sometimes this indicates an extra-short vowel, sometimes no vowel at all. But ...
- 62.1k
32
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
Because most of the benefits of such a change would be to learners, while most of the costs would fall on the existing users of the orthography.
Where there is no established writing culture (or ...
- 7,424
27
votes
Accepted
Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
I'm not familiar enough with other cultures to answer the question but I have a perspective that I haven't seen expressed in the comments or answers. The other answer also proposed a predictive system ...
- 386
23
votes
Pronunciation of P in Latin, versus Ph in Greek
I'm going to take a slightly different approach than Jk's answer, which does a good job coming at this from a Greco-Roman perspective. Instead, I'm going to focus on the Punic situation because it's a ...
- 6,232
22
votes
Accepted
Phonetic distortion when words are borrowed among languages
The term is loanword adaptation.
It happens every time someone tries to use a word from a different language when speaking another. It's because every language has a different set of sounds that can ...
- 4,860
22
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
wʌn ˈɹʷijzn̩ iz ðæɾ ɪndʌˈvɪdʒl̩z ˈdɪfɹ̩ʷ səp̚ˈstæ̃ʃəli ɪ̃ ðɛɹ prʷəˈnʌnsiɛiʃn̩ ʌ wɹ̩ʷdz. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get undergraduate students in a linguistic class to produce an accurate ...
- 80.2k
21
votes
Accepted
What is the correct term for a "lazy L"?
It's called "l-vocalization" (previous related question: Dark L vs L Vocalisation).
A range of sounds can result from it, and because of this and also because of differences in ...
- 17.4k
21
votes
Accepted
How did Greek loanwords with 'ae' come to be pronounced [i] in modern English?
Greek αι (/aj/) was regularly borrowed into Latin as ae (/aj/*).
In Latin, ae eventually monophthongized into /ɛː/; in Vulgar Latin/Proto-Romance, vowel length was lost and this eventually merged with ...
- 62.1k
19
votes
Are syllable initial consonant clusters pronounced in Ancient Greek?
There is very little doubt they were pronounced: they are still pronounced in many languages other than English where they were loaned, and crucially in modern Greek; they were also spelled with those ...
- 1,839
19
votes
Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
Here's an answer from developmental psychology:
When a baby is born they can natively pronounce phonemes of every language, but as they develop, their brains are constantly calculating and keeping ...
- 307
17
votes
What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
While it is not clear to me what should be considered as "unique" to a language, since all the languages are different, so also unique in many ways, but they also share many basic features and ...
- 2,539
16
votes
Native English speakers: worse understanding of other accents?
The first thing to consider is that this is a comedy show, and Lily Tomlin is a comedian. The second is that US speakers of English don't have a lot of exposure to UK accents, especially those most-...
- 80.2k
15
votes
Pronunciation of P in Latin, versus Ph in Greek
At some time in the history of the Greek languages, the letters Phi, Theta, and Chi represented aspirated consonants /ph/, /th/ and /kh/. The Romans felt that they were different enough from their ...
- 29.5k
14
votes
What do you call a failed attempt to use the "standard" speech?
The closest term to what you need is hypercorrection which is sometimes called hyperurbanism:
In linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application ...
- 17.6k
14
votes
What was the original pronunciation of 'ä' in German?
“Originally” is a problematic concept. The letter “ä” was not used in Old and Middle High German. The plural of gast is gesti in OHG and geste in MHG. In early New High German the letters ä, ö and ü (...
- 23.7k
14
votes
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words with IPA
The problem is, nobody is quite sure how PIE was pronounced!
When we talk about PIE phonemes like /*d/, we don't mean it was actually IPA [d]. We mean that "there seems to have been a phoneme, which ...
- 62.1k
13
votes
What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
John McWhorter recently explained some. I'll add to that here. English has a number of features that, while not absolutely unique to English, just rare in the world, are unique to English as a ...
- 4,445
13
votes
Accepted
Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?
As leoboiko mentioned, there are languages with voiceless liquids, like Icelandic.
In the IPA, they are simply transcribed with a voicelessness ring diacritic: [r̥] and [l̥].
In Icelandic, these ...
- 17.4k
13
votes
Is American Sign Language phonetic?
Do you mean can you know how to sign a word in American Sign Language by reading it in English? Well no, because the two languages are not really that similar. Sign languages are not transformations ...
- 6,096
13
votes
Accepted
How to Romanize "شایق" in order to be easiest to an English speaker?
Gh would be preferable to q in my opinion.
In Iranian Persian, q̈âf has merged with ġayn, both representing a [ɣ]~[ɢ], sound. While this sound doesn’t exist in English, the closest sound is certainly [...
- 1,162
13
votes
Native English speakers: worse understanding of other accents?
Lily Thomlin is a comedian. She's playing the supposed difficulty of understanding the accents as a joke. If you pay attention, she laughs quite appropriately to the jokes the others make. When ...
- 231
13
votes
Pronunciation of D sound in British English
American English speakers tend to reduce /d/ to a flapped [ɾ] between vowels, while British English speakers generally don't. This means an RP /d/ can sound a lot "stronger" than an American ...
- 62.1k
13
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
Designing an orthography is a difficult task, and having a phonemic orthography is only one of several goals in this task. Other goals may may include recognisability of morphemes (this is why, e.g., ...
- 29.5k
12
votes
Are syllable initial consonant clusters pronounced in Ancient Greek?
I'll assume you're a native English speaker. Since English doesn't have these clusters, it's difficult for an English speaker to hear or produce them correctly. But it is not impossible, and there is ...
- 17.4k
12
votes
Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
The linguistic phenomenon that you are speaking of is in large part due to English spelling conventions being so far off from normal phonetic values for the Latin alphabet, and secondarily is due to a ...
- 80.2k
11
votes
Accepted
from ekwos to ippo : transition from kw to p in greek
The key is, there was never a digamma in hippos in the first place! (At least, not as far back as we have evidence for: there may have been one earlier than that.)
Early Greek, like Latin, had a set ...
- 62.1k
11
votes
Phonetic distortion when words are borrowed among languages
It's not "deliberate" – it's the automatic, nigh-inevitable result of fitting a set of sounds from one language's inventory into a different inventory.
It's like changing a photo from RGB to CMYK or ...
- 2,392
11
votes
Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
No, it isn't a cross-linguistic phenomenon.
For example in German language, people are expected to use foreign pronunciations for foreign words from English and (less so) French. These languages are ...
- 29.5k
11
votes
Accepted
How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
Short answer: there is more variation than what is expected, but the data could be interpreted 'on average' to show that Romanian has more instances of a back /a/ than Italian.
The /a/ phoneme covers ...
- 6,968
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