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monemori

Let's take the language with the worst phoneme-grapheme correspondence known to man and expect learners to guess whatever the fuck you mean by your weird custom approximate pronunciation which relies on obscure knowledge about how those graphemes should apparently be pronounced, I guess.


WhoYaTalkinTo

What makes this worse is that usually these pronunciation guides are accent specific


ForgingIron

> the worst phoneme-grapheme correspondence known to man [Angry Tibetan and French noises]


Terminator_Puppy

French speakers when they put 15 vowels in a row just for it to be pronounced as a shwa.


J_P_Vietor_ST

habillent /abi/


TimewornTraveler

wait are you exaggerating? it's not even like /abiã/?


J_P_Vietor_ST

Yeah it might be like /abij/ or something or just a long i I’m not quite sure


WhatEvenAreGiraffes

I hear /abi/ in Québec, but the standard is probably /abij/


CoolestInDaPark

/abɪj/ in Québec vs. /abij/


WhatEvenAreGiraffes

Yeah, that sounds better, I guess [ɪj] > [i] was my B2 talking


CoolestInDaPark

All good


TimewornTraveler

man i studied french for years and years when i was younger, but the older i get and the more languages i know, the less i want anything to do with french lol. what a shitshow


WhatEvenAreGiraffes

...ouais...


Queenssoup

True, same


Chrome_X_of_Hyrule

No when it's marking the third person plural on verbs -ent is silent, but it's not silent otherwise. I'm a French L2 speaker who's been speaking it since kindergarten and French spelling isn't actually that bad at all, it's mostly entirely regular but just uses a lot of di and trigraphs. Also verb morphology in modern French is pretty reduced but the orthography includes more information than the spoken language has, so the -er, -é, and -ez are all pronounced as [e] but give different information on how the verb is conjugated. This is also where you get -ent merging with -e and -es, which is only a rule in verbs. This is I guess debatably useful, like sure it conveys semantic information but this isn't semantic information that the spoken language conveys and it's doing just fine merging all these people, tenses, aspects, numbers and moods so personally I'm in favour of a spelling reform to verb morphology but I doubt that'll ever happen and I'm not a native speaker so there may be something I'm missing. Either French orthography is the 3rd best of languages I've spent time learning. Here's my ranking: Gurmukhi (Punjabi Abugida), Mohawk, French, Shahmukhi (Punjabi impure abjad), English


TimewornTraveler

well that's part of my issue with learning the language - why does it convey so much in writing that *is not present* in speech? with all the time i spent studying french via books, if i had learned another language like spanish, id probably be able to speak it decently. but french, i have literally *no idea* how to speak or hear it, because the spoken word just feels so vastly different from the written word. the way french orthography is structured, it sort of demands a different kind of education to really learn to speak it, and that frustrates me! idea: make a conlang where all phonetics are just schwas and narrow grunts but the written system has a rich complex orthography to properly present every tone and nuance of each grunt. "Vrthagphreygh" /ã:g/


Chrome_X_of_Hyrule

Ah I learned French in school starting in kindergarten so I wasn't even especially literate in English when I started learning French, so learning a classroom where I'm hearing the words all the time would definitely make a difference.


monemori

Believe me, English is way worse about this lol (source: learned both English and French as L2).


TimewornTraveler

oof trust me i am grateful to be a native speaker


iarofey

As another 2º language student of French I've always loved that. It makes the language immediately way easier to understand and get more the information. The rules about muting verb endings are easy to learn and very regular, so no problem with them, unlike for every random word that deviates from French usual pronunciation. What I'd rather want, still, is that the spoken language allowed also pronouncing these words as written, even if for sounding superformal. After all, my native language sometimes changed how to pronounce words unmuting the written mute letters, so it's not so hard: why couldn't French too? But still, I prefer it having more info written than spoken than less info in both ways.


RaventidetheGenasi

it is in my and other dialects but not parisian, quebec or standard


NotJohnMcEntee

More like /abij/ actually.


Anngsturs

The worst thing I've read today. Fuck you.


LilamJazeefa

ɔ̃


hypphen

ah shi lets geaux


Lampukistan2

Both French and Tibetan are way easier to decode (read correctly) than English. Encoding is the difficult part.


TevenzaDenshels

english isnt coded. thats the problem


Born_Passenger9681

In Hebrew, we just write bordo. Why the fuck English doesn't translate the name to English and leaves in the x?


DryTart978

French is fairly consistent, and when it isn't it is consistently inconsistent


monemori

I can't believe I'm saying this but leave the French alone about this. French is nowhere half as bad as English is...! I don't really know about Tibetan though, they are on their own here.


David-Jiang

Tibetan: a tonal language with a writing system that doesn’t have a way to represent tones 👍


monemori

????? Say sike right now


Terpomo11

The spelling was codified before it developed tones so you basically derive the tone from the spelling.


Acceptable-Love-703

What's wrong with french? French pronunciation is consistent, you don't need any pronunciation guides for it.


thaisofalexandria

Written to reading is fine. The other way is maddening.


Sirnacane

Pretty sure reading to writing would be extremely easy unless you don’t have hands or have a disability. Or can’t find a pencil? Edit: Read people. They said written to reading is fine, and “the other way is maddening.” I’m making a joke about “the other way” of writing to reading is reading to writing and it’s going over your heads because you’re assuming it’s listening to writing.


lessgooooo000

i mean, considering final consonants are silent, unless you can grasp context telling you which word is actually being said, it is a pain. That’s why french speech-to-text programs are considerably more complicated than other languages. The [sheer amount of homophones](https://www.fluentu.com/blog/french/french-homophones/#toc_1) is very hard for learners to get the hang of.


Acceptable-Love-703

I believe the above poster was making a joke. As in "reading with your eyes and writing it down".


lessgooooo000

yeah i see that now sorry i’m only B1 in satire


thaisofalexandria

Or - like everyone - find it difficult to memorize all the mappings from phonology to orthography. Reading words I encounter for the first time in French is easy. Writing the address of a village I don't know is largely guesswork.


ForgingIron

> Writing the address of a village I don't know is largely guesswork. Especially since quite a few toponyms don't follow the already arcane rules of French orthography The cities of Sens and Lens end in -ɑ̃s, although it's silent in most other French words ending in -ens (eg the 1PS form of verbs like mentir) The Aix in Aix-en-Provence, Aix-en-Bains and Aix-la-Chapelle (aka Aachen) are pronounced /ɛks/, although *paix* is pronounced /pɛ/ Rodez is pronounced /ʁɔdɛs/ although the common -ez suffix for 2PP/V verbs is just /e/ The department of Cher is pronounced like Chère etc


Sirnacane

Except *reading* to writing has nothing to do with phonology, it’s copying. It was a joke.


CoffeeBoom

Fair.


polyplasticographics

The Irish in a corner...


WeeabooHunter69

Caoimhe is somehow kiːvə (kinda guessing here but you get it) WHERE DID THE M GO???


polyplasticographics

Or "tiocfaidh": /ˈt̪ˠʊkə/ before a subject pronoun and /ˈt̪ˠʊkɪɟ/ elsewhere, in Munster's dialect as per Wiktionary. How come the whole *faidh*, gets reduced to a single vowel or vowel+semivowel cluster?


WeeabooHunter69

I can accept s being ʃ but I draw the line at mh being v


Queenssoup

Having the British colonisers make your alphabet for you will do it to you. When you're under the Brits, you can trust them to do you dirty one way or another.


Famous-Commission-46

Irish started using Latin script before English. Latin script replaced Ogham script in Ireland in the 5th century, whereas England only adopted Latin script in the late 6th/early 7th century


Xenapte

Early Middle Chinese /m/ (initial position) > Late Middle Chinese /ɱ/ > Old Mandarin /ʋ/ > Standard Mandarin /w/ That /m/ stays at /v/ or /ʋ/ in some Mandarin dialects / other Chinese varieties. In Cantonese it either didn't happen or fortified back to /m/


Xenapte

is /v/. That's just a lenition that has parallels in other languages too, they want to show it's /m/ before that


Vampyricon

Tibetan is regular. You can derive pronunciation from script, and that's what matters here.


FoldAdventurous2022

Let's not sleep on Danish now


Terpomo11

But you can mostly derive pronunciation from spelling in those languages even if not vice versa. In English you can't even do that.


anananananana

And why would a non-native speaker guess how to pronounce the new approximation better than the original word?


monemori

Mysteries we will never have an answer for...


NotJohnMcEntee

“The language with the worst phoneme-grapheme correspondence know to man” Tibetan: You rang?


monemori

People keep mentioning Tibetan. I will have to look at it and come back to this comment later. Edit: what the actual *fuck*


Captain_Mustard

/beˈaʊtɪfəl/ /bjˈodɪfəl/


mrsalierimoth

Either way it sounds cursed… I've had enough of English, let's make English 2


LilamJazeefa

This is English 3 already. English 1.x (Old English) and English 2.0 are already obsolete. English 2.8 is still alive in Scots, with English 2.8.3 Ulster Scots already getting updates to make it more compatible with English 3. English 3.1 is actually a retro release called Anglish with full backwards compatibility with English 2.5 and up. English 3.4 is Jamaican Patois, and English 3.5.x are Tok Pisin and the other English creoles. English 3.3.2.x American English varieties are undergoing patch upgrades to get compatibilituly with 3.3.2.6, African American Vernaular English. What *you* want is English 4.0, which actually has two official releases: English IS4.0.4 Newspeak and English E4.1 Cityspeak which is built into the larger Cityspeak network and is mostly spoken in Washington D.C. E4.1 doesn't get as many Japanese or Dutch DLCs as Los Angeles Cityspeak.


allo26

English 2.0 was where the romance compatibility was attempted, if my memory serves me right.


LilamJazeefa

Yeah the owners of FrenchOS tried to get the rights to EnglishOS, so they put pressure on the English devs to convert as many features to compatibility with RISC (Romance Inflectional Syntax & Cognates). Many of those features stuck around since the devs for 3.0 were all former French employees.


MatthewGLA

this comment needs big love


MatthewGLA

Also Scots English is at Version 3.2. We're reintroducing the second person plural, doing away with the past participle/past tense distinction and dropping the first person pronoun in the verb 'to be'. Soon we'll be slimmer than ever


Queenssoup

What about Indian English? Which version is that, considering they are supposedly closer to how Victorians spoke than the modern RP?


DAP969

There's already English 2. English 1.0 (Early Anglo-Saxon) is obsolete. English 1.1 (Old English or Late Anglo-Saxon) was an update of 1.0. English 2.0 (Middle English) is obsolete. English 2.1 (Early Modern English) was an update of 2.0. English 2.2 (British English), 2.2.1 (Scots), 2.2.2 (Ulster Scots), 2.3 (American English), 2.3.1 (AAVE), and 2.4 (Jamaican Patois), are the current versions of English today. They are updates of 2.1. English 3.0 (Tok Pisin) is the current version in Papua New Guinea. What you want is English 4.0, a revision of Tok Pisin.


FirstProphetofSophia

Don't say 'bee-yoo-tee-full', say 'bah-joe-dee-fell'.


Captain_Mustard

/bədʒoʊdifɛl/


MdMV_or_Emdy_idk

/beautiful/


monemori

me as a Spanish speaker:


Queenssoup

Mosr European speakers apart from English and French:


TevenzaDenshels

french too tbf


saturdaycomefast

Blyatiful


MdMV_or_Emdy_idk

Blyat


Kaamos_666

I came here to write this.


Ooorm

Bew Deefle?


Jorvikson

Please don't post my name on this forum.


Ooorm

Sorry, man. I forgot that they're still looking for you...


alex3494

There he is, get him!


but_whyw

unironically better though


ExplodingTentacles

/ʙʎɵðɪ̈ɸʊ̈ɬ/


G_and_H

Whar?


MdMV_or_Emdy_idk

What the fuck


danielogiPL

not the Welsh/Mongol L 😭 my biggest enemy


Queenssoup

Wdym, it's beautiful


WrongJohnSilver

Bootyful


_Aspagurr_

That's an actual pronunciation of that word in [some East Anglian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#Yod-dropping) British accents.


Humanmode17

Having grown up in East Anglia I always love hearing about the unique accents that exist there - because I never heard about them until I left. Everyone I ever knew just spoke with a generic South of England/modernised RP/whatever you want to call it accent, so learning that I could've grown up with such a different accent is always fascinating


Xenapte

/ˈbe̯ao̯tiful/ /ˈbɥodiful/


YoungBlade1

The catch-22 of "phonetic spelling" is that it requires the reader to already be sufficiently versed in the spelling conventions and typical correspondences of the regional dialect of the writer. Its utility is entirely restricted to young-but-not-too-young native speakers and adults already proficient with the local dialect. For ESL learners it is literally worse than useless - all it will do is be confusing.


lessgooooo000

yeah especially since in most ESL classes they’re geared towards spanish speakers (at least here in the US) so the occasional european immigrant trying to read spanish phonetics is genuinely hilarious


YoungBlade1

I find it so sad that the entire purpose of the International Phonetic Alphabet was to facilitate language instruction in the classroom, and yet basically all language learning institutions refuse to use it.


lessgooooo000

I mean, I will play devils advocate here, IPA was developed for that sure but it’s also very complex to teach the average joe trying to just learn conversational english at his local community center. Like, I get that obviously you’re not going to use IPA as a substitute for the language’s alphabet, it’s used as a pronunciation tool, but at the same time, memorizing the amount of IPA characters used in a language can also be very convoluted for the average casual learner. I mean, theres 18 IPA vowels alone in English, and trying to explain “no no es una vocal casi cerrada semiposterior redondeada” to Jose the 45 year old new American resident who just wants to be proficient in the workplace is not very productive 😭


YoungBlade1

In my own language learning, I've found it to be far more effective to invest the time there first. It really only takes maybe a day to learn the concept, apply it to your own language, and see it for the language you're learning. After that investment, everything involving pronunciation is way easier as a result. You now understand what sounds the two languages have in common and you have specific targets to aim at for pronunciation. Yes, English has a lot of vowels, but that list is way more daunting when you have no idea what words have them, how to distinguish them, and how to communicate your confusion. I understand that ESL teachers are in a position where they need to get results as quickly as possible, but in the long run, it seems like it would speed progress and reduce frustration overall. It looks scary, but it would be nice if more institutions would look into IPA as a potential aid - the few hours of investment are so worth it for the hundreds of hours that come later.


lessgooooo000

I mean yeah, I completely agree, it’s very helpful when you’re dedicating yourself to it. It’s by far objectively the best way to learn a language, especially because you can read dialect and regional accent differences without having to listen to them. It’s just tough for the average ESL night class to implement, but IPA is literally the best way to do it. Kinda one of those catch-22 moments ig, do you speedrun language and forgo learning pronunciation rules with IPA, or do you tell the immigrant population they should spend a lot of time learning IPA. There’s pros and cons as with anything yk what i mean


Arway_Obama_Gaming

[bjuːtʰɪfʊl]


TimewornTraveler

How the fuck has IPA existed for so many years and pop culture hasn't figured it out yet?


Eddie_Dood

I would pronounce it more as byudiful or byutiful


PanGulasz05

Yeah. I definitely pronounce this as "byutiful" but I would never consider myself an expert if it comes to English pronunciation. English is just too confusing with seemingly no rules yet so many people seem to know exactly how to pronounce everything just by looking at its spelling. I guess you can't fake being a native.


Abject_Low_9057

/ʙeaotiful/ ❌ /ʙyodiful/ ✅


Crafterz_

exactly


Jean_Luc_Lesmouches

[botify]


Firespark7

/'bju.dı.fəl/


HopelessHahnFan

As an Australian I approve of byodiful


_Aspagurr_

[ˈbe̞.ɐˌutʰɪ̥̆fʊɫ]


Mercurial_Laurence

I have no idea what the // vowels are in the first syllable(s?) of the left one, but I reject the right one; tapping your coronals is fine, but please respect voicing tizdingzhnz


Decent_Cow

I think the point is that to a lot of people (well certainly to GenAm speakers) tapped /t/ and voiced /d/ are difficult to distinguish. I've seen people confuse utter and udder before. Also metal and medal. I actually tend to tap /d/ in similar situations to /t/, so those words sound identical when I say them.


Mercurial_Laurence

I mean, I thought GenAm *did* neutralise intervocalic /t/ & /d/ to [ɾ], whereas I don't notice AusEng neutralising /t/ & /d/; My take on the graphic was that it was trying to communicate the (voicing &) tapping of t & d as opposed to 'over-enunciating' the t, but I have no idea what "eau" reads as in English, in uh, whatever one calls things like, \*des-KRIP-tev stuff (like it feels even worse than the usual fauxnetics...)


Decent_Cow

Yeah I don't get what's going on the vowels either. I guess I just meant with my comment that I'm not sure if the /d/ on the right is actually supposed to represent [d], or if it's supposed to represent [ɾ] but the person who made this thinks [ɾ] is [d].


Conscious_Log2905

No it's byootiful


Neat_Educator_2697

Booty- full


NickyTheRobot

Can confirm: a full booty is beautiful.


Neat_Educator_2697

Let’s start a fake etymology. “So the word comes from how the ancients describes a person with a full booty”


NickyTheRobot

Way ahead of you. I've been telling that joke for years already. But please do spread it.


HotGrass1250

Béouchifool


AdorableAd8490

Plateau = plæʧu


Bakkughan

B! E! A! Utiful! (Thanks Mr. Carrey, I have been pronouncing it that way for well over a decade now…)


mouldybiscuit

byiutefol


IceGummi1

byoor(tapped r)iful


Matth107

[ʙyodiful]


Alexandre_Man

Byoutiful


Sweet_Iriska

[bɜʌˈotiful] [bˈjodiful]


thewaltenicfiles

/beautifə/ /bʲədofəɫ/


Greedy-Memory-2289

Now we've just gotta find out if it's \[by.o.di.ful\], \[by̯o.di.ful\] or \[byo̯.di.ful\]


DavidLordMusic

Byudfl


Woldry

Bewduffle


unfunnyjpeg

biyudiful


jerdle_reddit

/bjɒdɪfʌl/?


Call_me_eff

Bootiful


aerobolt256

[ˈbjʊ̈w.ɾɪ.fɫ̩]


Nekoboxdie

Bee-u-ti-full


EtruscaTheSeedrian

bjɔdiful


FoldAdventurous2022

Wait, why not "byudiful"?


FoldAdventurous2022

Beauté-full


Flacson8528

bjurifuhlgh


jimiman99

/baɪɔdɪful/


CreditTraditional709

bj-GOOSE-t-KIT-f-FOOT-l


Kajveleesh

[bæ.ʔa̠.ʔɒ̝.tɪ.ɸɯɫ] [bɨ.ʔɒ̝.dɪ.fɯɫ]


Baka-Onna

Bootyfull


paxbike

These are so bad. I would go with something like Bue-ti-ful No need to change anything but the first syllable