Stuff That Really 'Grinds My Gears...'

Anger
537

It’s how most English-speakers pronounce most Vs.

Scientific jargon often comes from Latin, or from Greek transliterated into Latin, and judging from Latin loanwords transliterated into other ancient languages, that’s not how most Latin-speakers pronounced any Us/Vs in the ancient world.

It’s a problem because some terms, such as Linnean names, are supposed to be the same across languages; of course there will always be accent differences, but there could be similar consonants and similar vowels.

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538

lithium, beryllium [boron is a non-metal]
sodium, magnesium, aluminium, [silicon is a nonmetal]

Notice something?
One country has to be out of step with everybody else. Ridiculous “customary units.” Ignoring element naming conventions. Throwing tantrums over the overdue reclassification of Pluto. CDMA. NTSC (Never twice same color). Using capital M as a symbol for thousands. 60Hz power. US letter. 3 ring binders. Inability to pronounce Derby or schedule. Imposing cannabis ban on rest of world then sneakily starting to dismantle it at home. Florida. Texas.

On the plus side: harmonising the spelling of color, labor and so on to Latin rather than French. Kodachrome. The P-51 Mustang (to a British specification).

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539

Sorry, I deleted that post by accident, and it doesn’t seem to come back now? I will flag it, I guess, in hopes it can be fixed.

Seeing how this is a venting thread, it may be unfair to treat this as a formal position, in which I case I’ll apologize; but as I usually trust you a lot on language, seeing you dismiss what I’d consider ordinary and even traditional pronunciations is a surprise. I don’t think it would make things better.

Things like Linnean names are supposed to be written the same across languages, but I’ve never heard the idea they should be pronounced the same. I have seen that for place names, and it seems to me very hard to apply well. English orthography is already a confused mess for people to learn. It doesn’t become easier by prescribing different values in different classes of words.

Here too it can even be hard to say what counts as a scientific name. Ok, velociraptor makes sense. But what about scientific names also used as vernacular names, like bacteria, rhinoceros, anemone, geranium, not to mention close derivatives like bovine or giraffe? If supernova isn’t English, are names like Venus and Jupiter? Anatomical terms like femur, penis, and vagina, or more general scientific terms like radius, vector, fetus?

And while most Romance languages don’t have it quite so bad, it seems to me English speakers would not be alone in having trouble with such a scheme, seeing as how some languages don’t even have Latin’s h, l, and r sounds. If it’s easier for them to adapt the pronunciations to how their other words work, I would really hesitate to object.

All in all, then, while I can understand being frustrated our pronunciations are so needlessly divergent, saying educators are speaking wrong and should change strikes me as a very harsh prescriptivism, one that promotes an abstract principle and the expense of how English is actually used.

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540

Yet we still have molybdenum and platinum – and if you count other languages, the symbols for iron, gold, mercury, and lead go with Latin ferrum, aurum, hydrargyrum, and plumbum. It might be silly to be out of step with everyone now, seeing how both forms are used in English, but aluminum was the older name and aluminium an example of hypercorrection. (And kind of a clumsy one, since they could have made it alumium, as was originally considered.)

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541

Well, if you have a paleontological conference, do you want one person talking about Silesaurs, and another thinking of Coelosaurs, since the latter pronounces the words the same way?

And if you want an international conference pronunciation, what would be a better choice than classical pronunciation? Maybe Church Latin pronunciation would have comparable reach, but Traditional English pronunciation would not.

And if you have an international conference pronunciation, allowing for accent differences, why not use t more widely, so people get in the habit?

Obviously it’s more complicated when species are named after people or places which don’t follow the classical Latin standard.

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542

@chenille made just about all the points I wanted to make.

But . . . . driving on the left??? :grin:

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543

I don’t recall having a problem at international biomedical conferences I’ve been to, but maybe that’s just my (lack of) memory.

I do object to US physicians pronouncing “centimeter” as “sontimeter,” first syllable like French, second syllable like English. It sounds ridiculous.

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544

If it’s how an English speaker pronounces a V, then it’s an English V (although from what I remember from History of Language class I don’t think I’d agree with the original phonetic transcriptions). As opposed to a Dutch or German or Spanish V.

Having grown up with parents who neither spoke English as a first language nor had a first language in common with each other, I’ve always found the diversity rather fun – and an opportunity to learn about the speaker.

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545

And you won’t, because it’s never been expected.

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546

:slight_smile: 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 aren’t I will accept not understanding them very well.

Worse for me has been when it’s all English, but it’s hard to tell apart words because I don’t know how much the speaker has re-Latinized the pronunciation. In particular I’ve 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.

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547

I’m trying to think of a language where a phoneme written “co” gets a soft C pronunciation, and I’m drawing a blank. Care to give an example for a regular noun in a modern languages?

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548

I don’t know if it is regular, but it is a widespread English pronunciation of coelo-.

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549

It’s 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 don’t know of any other languages that do it, which I trust was the point.

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550

C pronounced as S in the “co” phoneme is not regular in English or any other western European language I know of (French has the “ço” of “garçon” but the accent on the C is important).

The rest of your examples don’t use “co”.

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551

Which is itself not English, so like “police” and other loan words doesn’t follow the rules.

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552

I’m afraid I didn’t 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?

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553

Also, Nicaragua and jaguar don’t rhyme.

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554

I was talking about the assertion it was an “English” pronunciation when it doesn’t follow any of the rules of English. English does have rules, despite their obfuscation by classicists.

Plus, divining phonetics from loan words – and any Linnean name is automatically a loan word – is always going to be dicey.

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555

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 – I liked Rosenfelder’s analysis that gets exceptions down to a distinct minority. Saying things like “it’s how an English speaker pronounces a V” 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.

It’s 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 I’ve 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.

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556

Women as in “wimmin”? Not all English speakers say it that way. With my accent it’s indistinguishable from “woman”. Suggest and stagger have different vowels before and after the double G – they’re not the same phonemes at all. And is rely supposed to be in opposition to -ly adverb forms? It’s not a suffix in rely, and that’s why it doesn’t follow the suffix rule. Ditto for apply and reply.

I do prefer language rules to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but they’re 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 they’re not noticeable.

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