I can only speak for myself on that one, which is that if they are speaking languages I know I can try to compensate, and if they arenât I will accept not understanding them very well.
Worse for me has been when itâs all English, but itâs hard to tell apart words because I donât know how much the speaker has re-Latinized the pronunciation. In particular Iâve noticed people sometimes use the one for stressed i but still the other for stressed e, which is the worst of both worlds. The traditional Anglicizations may be idiosyncratic, but at least pinus and penis come out different.
Iâm trying to think of a language where a phoneme written âcoâ gets a soft C pronunciation, and Iâm drawing a blank. Care to give an example for a regular noun in a modern languages?
Itâs very regular in English. In Latin derivatives oe and ae are often treated as e, and so you get soft consonants in words like coelom, Coelophysis, and coenobite, as well as caecilian, Caesarean, Pangaea, and for some speakers algae. I donât know of any other languages that do it, which I trust was the point.
C pronounced as S in the âcoâ phoneme is not regular in English or any other western European language I know of (French has the âçoâ of âgarçonâ but the accent on the C is important).
Iâm afraid I didnât understand your question, then. The answer is probably none, with co typically pronounced with a hard stop in English; but Coelosaurus would be still be soft, coming from the same root as coelom and Coelophysis. Was the comparison between it and Silesaurus not what you were asking about?
I was talking about the assertion it was an âEnglishâ pronunciation when it doesnât follow any of the rules of English. English does have rules, despite their obfuscation by classicists.
Plus, divining phonetics from loan words â and any Linnean name is automatically a loan word â is always going to be dicey.
I partly agree, but surely English pronunciation counts a question of usage not rules? It definitely does have them, and much more consistently than is often supposed, at that â I liked Rosenfelderâs analysis that gets exceptions down to a distinct minority. Saying things like âitâs how an English speaker pronounces a Vâ makes perfect sense to me.
But exceptions like women, suggest vs. stagger, and rely are also still part of English. And as part of the odd history that gave us those, we also evolved our own tradition for importing Latin words to our own shifted vowels and such. We now say anemone and hyperbole with an English long e and coelom with the same initial fricative as Caesar, though unlike both Latin and our usual rules, as a matter of convention.
Itâs all part of how people typically speak English in practice. It is still changing, and as we are part of that practice, we can try to push changes in directions we think makes more sense. But both calling the conventions wrong, and not really part of English, seem strange to me.
Anyway, that is to try and clarify what Iâve been trying to say. I doubt either you or MarjaE are actually missing that perspective; I just felt I have been discussing this in a poor manner, and wanted to try to resolve it into some sort of point.
Women as in âwimminâ? Not all English speakers say it that way. With my accent itâs indistinguishable from âwomanâ. Suggest and stagger have different vowels before and after the double G â theyâre not the same phonemes at all. And is rely supposed to be in opposition to -ly adverb forms? Itâs not a suffix in rely, and thatâs why it doesnât follow the suffix rule. Ditto for apply and reply.
I do prefer language rules to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but theyâre still called rules. And even though English is famously inconsistent compared to other languages, it does have some very strict rules, most of which native speakers just glide right by because theyâre not noticeable.
I would like to see the evidence for that. AFAIK it went alumium->aluminium and then split to aluminum in the US (owing to the high price of typeset letter i.)
Aluminium was discovered after the -ium convention for metals was invented, and although Davy used Latin names for sodium and potassium they were still -ium names (Natrium and Kalium).
You mean like India, Japan and a number of African countries? There are two other EU countries that drive on the left (Ireland and Malta). One reason for the popularity of Japanese cars in the UK was that we get them as designed, without the compromises inevitable in the conversion to the âwrongâ side.
âŚand Greek. Many taxonomic names are of Greek origin and I once got a very nice apology from my near-hero Steven Gould when I pointed out he had identified a Greek name as Latin. Most of the names of the things that interest children are Greek (dinosaur, pteranodon, tyrannosaur, coelacanth occur off the top of my head.)
The wikipedia article gives pretty good references in this case. An 1808 paper by Davy where he talks about calling it alumium, an 1812 book where he calls it aluminum (along with silicum, manganesum, zincum, stannum, etc.), and then an 1813 review where someone else corrected it to aluminium to have a more classical sound.
They do say aluminium was initially preferred in the US, but Webster went with aluminum, and it became popular after. The reason doesnât seem to be well-known, and I suppose it could have been because i was expensive. But then he preferred a lot of more common words without u, and if that gets credited to etymology more than cost, what evidence is there this one technical word was otherwise?
If Webster was involved that explains a lot. Mostly he just liked things his way, and was willing to sell the dictionaries to unsuspecting pioneers to get his own way.
Yes, but most of the Greek names and elements follow the Latin standards for transliteration of Greek into Latin, so they often depend on Latin pronunciation, though they often require additional letters: ch, th, ph, etc.
P.S. And the use of ph, instead of f, dates this system to classical antiquity. You get place-names like âFoeniceâ in the Notitia Dignitatum, instead of âPhoeniciaâ or âPunica,â in late antiquity.
Thatâs because (a) having two alphabets is inconvenient but (b) because for many years the classical school system worked like this: first you learned Latin, then you were taught Greek in Latin, because Latin was the language of the educated.
I get caught out because since I was at school the spelling of sulphur has been standardised by IUPAC on the US spelling sulfur.
A half out of 5 isnât a very good score, I must say.
Davy (and other chemists) were no linguists, and it isnât surprising that clumsy words like manganesum didnât catch on. Without stress indicators, how do you know how to pronounce polysyllabic elements? One guesses they were so used to written communication in a pre-telephone period that they really didnât give any thought to logical pronunciation.
I can only speak for myself on that one, which is that if they are speaking languages I know I can try to compensate, and if they arenât I will accept not understanding them very well.