Dear English Language

September 29, 2021 7:32 AM

You need to pick a frickin' lane with the sounds you're making (SLYT)
posted by curious nu (45 comments total)

Basically, a video snippet of The Chaos " This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. "
posted by lalochezia at 7:35 AM on September 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

I came here to post "The Chaos" as well . . . seems I'm too foughing late.
posted by exlotuseater at 8:01 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Who will decide which is the correct pronunciation, from all the beautiful accents spoken around the world? Should only scholars be able to read historical documents?
posted by acantha at 8:07 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

99pi just posted an episode on this subject today that is an interview with Arika Okrent, who has just published Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language.
posted by msbrauer at 8:09 AM on September 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

What I enjoyed was it's a silly catchy song with amusing and often original mispronunciations
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:22 AM on September 29, 2021 [11 favorites]

Makes me wonder where English stands with regard to other languages. I've dabbled in a few, and am learning Japanese, but haven't gotten far enough into any that I've discovered this sort of horror. Syllable emphasis in Japanese feels pretty wonky, but maybe it is in English too?
posted by Jack Karaoke at 8:26 AM on September 29, 2021

"Semi-detached hice" is RP.

I mean: if anyone who actually spoke RP lived in a semi...
posted by pompomtom at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Dr. Seuss' pithy take on the subject
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:39 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

(oh, nah, would need to be "hices", I suppose...)
posted by pompomtom at 8:39 AM on September 29, 2021

After considerable study I can tell you that Chinese doesn't sound at all like it's written.
posted by mono blanco at 8:40 AM on September 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

How is "Godwin" pronounced, anyway?
posted by gwint at 8:59 AM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Jack Karaoke: " and am learning Japanese, but haven't gotten far enough into any that I've discovered this sort of horror. "

It's different in Japanese. A lot of what the guy in the video is complaining about is the mismatch between pronunciation and orthography, which we have for a few reasons (as detailed in Arika Okrent's video). Japan underwent orthographic reform in 1945 that brought kana spelling in line with pronunciation (except for は and を particles). If you look at a text from the early 1900s, you need to do a lot of substitutions to make sense of it, but they are more consistent than the mishmash of spelling-to-pronunciation transformations we have in English.

Japanese certainly has irregular verbs, 来る being the most irregular, I think. It sidesteps the strong-noun/weak-noun plural differences and other irregular plurals by lacking plurals entirely. And it has some really idiosyncratic proper nouns. A friend worked with someone whose last name was written 四月一日 but was pronounced わたぬき.
posted by adamrice at 9:15 AM on September 29, 2021 [13 favorites]

Humans mess up languages just by using them. Look at Esperanto: it has been lightly used by handfuls of idealists for about a century, and already this has introduced irregularities into its perfectly rational design. English didn't stand a chance.
posted by acb at 9:19 AM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

gwint: "How is "Godwin" pronounced, anyway?"

Good one!
posted by chavenet at 9:31 AM on September 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

Japanese also has a limited set of syllables in use. It’s way easier to do one to one letter to syllable when your syllable count is 100, versus English where the distinct syllable count is estimated to be almost 16,000.

Also I take it he hasn’t got to the Kanji writing yet which is unlike Hiragana and Katakana is as incomprehensible to someone learning the language as an adult as English spelling is.
posted by jmauro at 9:35 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

when stuff like this comes up, i always link of scalzi's cat ghlaghghee.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 9:39 AM on September 29, 2021 [14 favorites]

Makes me wonder where English stands with regard to other languages. I've dabbled in a few, and am learning Japanese, but haven't gotten far enough into any that I've discovered this sort of horror. Syllable emphasis in Japanese feels pretty wonky, but maybe it is in English too?

It’s an order of magnitude worse than almost any other language thanks to the Normans and the Gutenberg press. Unlike most other languages, it went through a long period where how to write it was forgotten as the Normans forbade it in favor of Norman French. So the initial pronunciation based spelling that mapped into Latin letters standardized across the Anglo-Saxon world was just forgotten and then had to be recreated in the early 1400s, so it missed the standardization phase that most languages went through and when the printing press which came on the scene in the mid-1400s just locked the mishmash and chaos in amber. It also didn’t help that the first printers didn’t speak English at all, but Flemish, so they had no idea on what was being written and honestly didn’t care as long as it sold.
posted by jmauro at 9:46 AM on September 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

→ Esperanto: … irregularities into its perfectly rational design

Complete, or consistent: pick one.
posted by scruss at 9:48 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I blame the Normans.
posted by octothorpe at 9:48 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Myddle Englyshe, Motherfucker- dost thou speake yt?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:49 AM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Also I take it he hasn’t got to the Kanji writing yet which is unlike Hiragana and Katakana is as incomprehensible to someone learning the language as an adult as English spelling is.

Well, unless you're Chinese.

But then you still don't know how to pronounce it and we're right back here again.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:28 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Archibald Hugh Henderson-Cleland is certainly the source I’d trust for this vital information. If a Cambridge grad can’t tell me, who can?
posted by Ideefixe at 11:47 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've always been rather partial to "ghoti" (gh as in "enough", o as in "women", ti as in "initial")
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I dunno about all you zombies but we've taken back control over here. Soon there will be a British Competence (one of those things that is named for what it's not) to mess with a usable system.

Let alone Gödel Inconsistency or Russell Paradox for the patterns and rules you try to provision.
posted by k3ninho at 1:03 PM on September 29, 2021

Gallagher made similar observations, but wasn't talented enough to put it to this level of funkiness.
posted by bryanzera at 1:04 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Myddle Englyshe, Motherfucker- dost thou speake yt?

Ðe þorn is properly used in "þe olde". "Ye olde" is a mistake propagated through history.
posted by explosion at 3:00 PM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

This was fun as frick.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:08 PM on September 29, 2021

Yeah, the "hard parts" vary widely by language. My wife is learning English (native language Japanese) while I do the opposite (although she is 10x better than me at her second language). Pronunciation is easy in Japanese (from hiragana/katakana), and extremely difficult in English (made even more complicated by English having sounds not found in Japanese). Reading is one of the easier parts for her in English, but extremely difficult for me in Japanese due to kanji (which even native speakers learn by daily repetition over 10+ years). Whereas I find listening/speaking much easier than she does.
posted by thefoxgod at 3:23 PM on September 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

When it comes to English pronunciation, no discussion is complete without a reference to The Chaos.
posted by zardoz at 5:11 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

And it has some really idiosyncratic proper nouns. A friend worked with someone whose last name was written 四月一日 but was pronounced わたぬき.

You might already know this, but I tucked this trivia away when it appeared on Qさま!! or some other quiz show years ago.

The kanji for the name here literally mean April 1st and originally referred to the first day of the fourth month (卯月/Uzuki) under the old lunisolar/"Chinese" calendar (equivalent to May 12th in the Gregorian calendar this year), but the reading わたぬき (watanuki) is a homonym for 綿抜き, literally "removing cotton", referring to switching from lined garments to unlined, or more generally, from one's winter clothing to one's spring/summer clothing, which would be done at this time of year.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 7:28 PM on September 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Aire Tyre is a task, not a rock band.
posted by clavdivs at 7:49 PM on September 29, 2021

My friend’s parents are from Northern Ireland and I always thought they pronounced “house” like “hice.”

All I know is I’m going to be saying “pro-noo-un-kay” a lot from now on.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:58 AM on September 30, 2021

When my son was smaller, we used to play a game while driving where you see a word on a billboard or a building and pronounce it as incorrectly as possible (like the incorrect pronunciations in the video). The other person then had to guess what the original word was. Really fun and a challenging for both players, one trying to pronounce “exit” as confusingly as possible (“ee-zite”), and the other trying to figure it out with no context except that it was a word recently seen somewhere.
posted by LEGO Damashii at 1:04 AM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’ll be happy if we can just stop naming American roads and suburbs using “Towne”. I pronounce that TOWN-EE. I’m guessing it’s a “looks British maybe so it could be fancy!” scenario, which is just wrong in so many ways. Near me there’s a Towne Village Drive. About an hour from here there’s a retirement community called Olde Towne Village. Sigh …
posted by freecellwizard at 3:55 AM on September 30, 2021

"Semi-detached hice" is RP.

I mean: if anyone who actually spoke RP lived in a semi...

My bf's mom makes me smile when she pronounces White House in a very posh RP as "weight heiss."
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 7:50 AM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

My friend’s parents are from Northern Ireland and I always thought they pronounced “house” like “hice.”

I'd not even thought of that (and my step-dad's from Armagh, and sounds similar). So now we're all confirming the vid's idea that the English language is big and weird and awkward (possibly because so many use it). Some of that is from stealing words from other languages, and some is from adapting to colonial (or even post-colonial) conditions.


Once you invade half the world, I suspect an Academie Anglais may be irrelevant.
posted by pompomtom at 8:57 AM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

The issue is not that the pronunciation is strange; it is the orthography. There's nothing weird about saying through, cough, tough, etc. Those are fine. People would just prefer different spelling, especially when they are learning either spelling or are introduced to new words from a book.

The core of the language is its spoken use, and native speakers don't learn most of their spoken vocabulary from books. ESL are disproportionately impacted. I wonder if English orthography is weird enough to support a standardized "romanization" for foreign language learners, analagous to pinyin or Wade-Giles? Probably not. But it would make more obvious where the weirdness is.

The article from this recent previously was quite good at explaining the historical reason for this, instead of just complaining about it. A lot has to do with the timing of the printing press relative to the evolution of English.
posted by mark k at 9:01 AM on September 30, 2021

msbrauer: "99pi just posted an episode on this subject today that is an interview with Arika Okrent, who has just published Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language."

I listened to it (thanks msbrauer), and the gist is that English spelling became weirded because:

a) after the Norman invasion it wasn't considered an official language, and wasn't used for education, literature, government or law, so there wasn't an 'official' version of its spelling.
b) even when it became the official language, its speakers had an inferiority complex about it, so tried to make it more like French and Latin, mostly, borrowing supposed spellings that did not necessarily match the sounds people made or the words they used or how English works. This continues today with stuff like 'octopi' or the even more over-correcting 'octopodes'.
c) the printing press arrived at a time that there was a major vowel shift underway changing how people pronounced things.
d) the people manning the first printing presses were Dutch who did not know or really care about how English had been spelled up to then, so they made up some spellings that seemed more natural to them, like 'ghost', for example, and also add or remove letters because it made it easier to line things up.
posted by signal at 9:25 AM on September 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

I blame the Normans.

As you should! One consequence of the Norman conquest is there are lots of words with dual French and Anglo-Saxon variations, with the ruling Normans words classier than the commoners Anglo-Saxon, like "beef" and "cow" or "pigeon" and "dove." There's a distinction between the food and the animals that make up the food.

"Cow" and "beef" both descend from the same Proto-Indo-European root word, "*gʷōus."
(And good luck pronouncing that.)

I’m guessing it’s a “looks British maybe so it could be fancy!” scenario, which is just wrong in so many ways.

Major peeve for me. First of all, we had a revolution, people. Second, Noah Webster "believed fervently in the developing cultural independence of the United States, a chief part of which was to be a distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation, and style." "He lived during the American Revolution and sought American independence, in part by Americanizing and standardizing the spellings of various words (defying Anglocreep)—choosing s over c in words like defense, switching the re to er in words like center and theater."

In the US, British spellings are downright un-American. Webster also proposed:

The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.

posted by kirkaracha at 11:39 AM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's been pointed out upthread that conforming the spelling to the pronunciation is futile since pronunciation is so varied

I was recently travelling in Europe and noted a couple of things relevant to this thread. It's ironic that while the UK is disengaging with Europe, in Europe, where English is rarely spoken natively, it's how Europeans speak to each other. This lead to some curious experiences. I was overhearing a Belgian (who speaks flawless idiomatic English) speaking with a Croatian whose English was rudimentary... and while they understood each other perfectly well, I could only understand fragments. A friend living in Germany later explained that a dialect of English is evolving in Europe for just this purpose, though I now forget what he called it. In a different experience a couple of travellers from, perhaps, the East Midlands were trying to secure restaurant reservations and while I could barely understand a word they said, the restaurant manager spoke as if he were from New England.

Anyway, pronunciation is pretty chaotic too.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:07 PM on September 30, 2021

conforming the spelling to the pronunciation is futile since pronunciation is so varied

I will defer to someone with actual linguistic training, or even a good ear, but if I correctly understand a point Korey Stamper (formerly at Merriam Webster) made, regional variations tend to be somewhat consistent in how the sounds shift. So while not everyone may pronounce park and car the same way, they all agree the ar sound in them is the same.

She brought this up in response to a question as to why dictionaries use their phonetic system ("\a\ as in mat, map" type of thing) rather than IPA.
posted by mark k at 1:20 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm fine with words being spelled all crazy and sounding differently than when they are spelled, but my kid's 3rd grade teacher keeps putting like 10 of the same vowel sound and then two outliers on the weekly spelling tests. That's just cruel. It's like she has to study The Chaos weekly.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:37 PM on September 30, 2021

I've always thought learning English was a pain in the ass, and my experience with our bright nine-year-old confirms it.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:04 PM on September 30, 2021

My friend’s parents are from Northern Ireland and I always thought they pronounced “house” like “hice.”

“Hice” was the standard pronunciation prior to the Great Vowel Shift. The Shift didn’t take hold everywhere, with Scottish and the Scot-Irish famously being the last holdouts. So some older pronunciations still exist along side newer ones.
posted by jmauro at 3:18 AM on October 2, 2021

>I’m going to be saying “pro-noo-un-kay” a lot from now on.

proh-noh-[tiny pause]-uhn-chee, thankyouplease.
posted by k3ninho at 8:17 AM on October 2, 2021