this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not 'un-animous', it's 'you-nanimous'. Makes total sense.
Don't even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce 'ough'.
English is tough, but it can be understood through thorough thought, though.
I'm learning Swedish slowly, and I was raised in the US south, so I am constantly corrected on pronunciation lol.
Have you learned the Swedish word "gift" yet?
Skank right? Or rather "skänk" with the sharp exhale emphasis on the sk- pronounced as wh- (similar to "who"). Hard to describe phonetically. But still lol.
My favorite is the Swedish word for fast or quick
Gift is poison, toxin or married
Skänk is a small table or with an a (skänka) it's gifting
Edit: I just realized Skänk can be used as a verb in old fashioned speech, as in "skänk mig en gåva" which would translate to "gift me a gift"
Yep still learning. Constantly being humbled lol. I wish I could immerse myself completely in the language and culture to really hammer it in, for however long it takes.
Swedish can be rough, but immersion is the best teacher!
This might be too basic for you, but it's based on learning the language as an older teen or adult.
https://urplay.se/program/199769-amira-ar-har-med-stodord-folj-doften
You might need a VPN, don't know if UR (national educational radio) is available outside of sweden
With words starting with "un" you can figure out pronunciation by removing the "un" and see if the rest of the word is it's own word which means the opposite. "animous" is not a word so you would use the long "u" sound in "unanimous". Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Through that logic I'd always figured unanimous stems from "without animosity" and the word animous just got lost to time, which would make un-animous the more sensible pronunciation. But it seems that while they do share a common etymology, it's not "un" as in negation, but rather "un" from "unus" meaning one, with both sharing "animus" meaning mind.
I also found out that animous used to exist as a synonym for animus at one point.
The moral of the story; the only thing more 'absurd' (read: perfectly explainable, we're just silly creatures) in linguistics than pronunciations...is etymology.
Foiled again by swipe typing
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don't know unanimous, chances are I don't know if animous exists either.
Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no 'derstand'.
One could argue "understand" is more clearly two words stuck together than others mentioned.
Not that the two words combine meaningfully to create the new word!
Most radiology teachers want to be unionized.
Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
Thanks. I am a native English speaker. I just hate how inconsistent it is so I try to think up as many rules as I can to apply some kind of logic to it.
That’s very uncommon for native speakers, so good job! You’re probably a good person for language learners to be around :)
At least you can make an educated guess. I'm learning Chinese and if you don't know a word there, you're SOL. You can't know what it means or even guess how to pronounce it.
Yeah fuck English. Can we all just use Esperanto instead. Like not even kidding, I love the idea of Esperanto since it avoids situations like the one you described.
Yeah, have you met French?
Mais oui.
Once you understand the rules, I find French pronunciation generally more reliable than English.
The French heavily curate their language too, which probably contributes to it's reliability and overall clarity. There are official words with official pronunciations, gendering, etc. No willy-nilly adding words from colloquialisms or slang like in English.
The problem of English is not so much colloquialisms or slang.
It's a history of being conquered over and over and mixing the various languages together, throwing in a major vowel shift and then some scholars decided to further change the spelling of some words, just because.
Let me just say, I'm not necessarily blaming anyone for the mess that is English.
I merely point out that there is often no clearly recognizable correlation between spelling and pronunciation, which can easily trip up non-native speakers (ant often natives too).
Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce "preface". It's obviously pre-face and it's before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
Except book editors I guess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOd3lwluQIw