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English sibilant pronunciation patterns | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5022 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 9 of 13 08 February 2015 at 4:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good ol' Latimerias! Oh my! You could fill a book with all the Greek/Latin/scientific stuff that I hadn't bothered to cross-check in English just yet... which immediately set me in 'oops!' mode :) Of course, I just checked and learned the right spelling for another word you just made me think of is "coelenterate" (jellyfish, coral, and relatives), and I'm pretty sure any 'coe-' word sneaking in through the Greek/Latin door must cause similar problems with the patterns I proposed. I don't know, but what about coelurosaurus/sauria? /k/ or /s/? (I'm guessing /s/) Or anything coming from "coeruleus" (blue)? Is "cerulean" the only proper English derivative? (honest, I don't even know how to check and that's all I can think of) Speaking of which (not really, I have just strange ways of associating stuff), what is the right pronunciation for "caesura" (the mid-line pauses in poetry)? I hope all these and other related words can still be lumped in a relatively compact exception list, because I really want to both keep the set of patterns minimal and include these -- after all, I'm not exactly your average English learner -- thanks for giving me this little 'headache' ;)
And don't forget German -- amen! :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5022 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 10 of 13 08 February 2015 at 5:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
OK, thanks :)
I may be flat-out wrong about this (tarvos said the same while I was writing), but I have never, ever heard fission with /ʒ/, always /ʃ/. Maybe you were thinking of fusion? Anyway, assuming we are right, maybe the problem is the order of precedence of the patterns I chose in my list, because I see a clear one here: voiced sound+"sion" → /ʒ/, and /ʃ/ when preceded by unvoiced sounds, "-ssion" being a particular case of the latter. Or maybe are there more exceptions? Once that is clear/checked or debunked, on how clearly it can be inferred without altering the previous "rules", or their order, or how they should be completely rearranged, I'm all ears! There's a little book I used to tell my students about: "The Patterns of English Spelling", in ten light volumes, which I'm pretty sure is 100% right because it basically lists everything. Now this is something I won't go through, so I'd rather be right 95% of the time by using a pattern scheme that fits in a regular sheet of paper. Of course, English being the hodgepodge of overlapping patterns it is, I couldn't expect to get it perfectly right on the first try :) Edited by mrwarper on 08 February 2015 at 5:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4855 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 13 08 February 2015 at 6:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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No, I'm not mixed up. Some people say fission with /ʒ/. And, as I said, other people say fission with /ʃ/.
There's clearly a bit of unpredictability, but "voiced sound+"sion" → /ʒ/, and /ʃ/ when preceded by unvoiced sounds" is pretty good as a rule. If you follow that rule, you mostly end up with correct forms. But there certainly are areas where the native speakers use alternatives that don't fit the rule. Another exception: "nasion" has /z/. That word is special because the -sion at the end is not the usual -sion morpheme. "scissors" is another word on the short list of exceptions to the ss rule. It sounds plausible that fission with /ʒ/ is from analogy with fusion; anyway, regardless of the origin, it exists. Anyway, these are all corner cases. The rules are good. I wish only to point out that rules (plus a few exceptions) can define a way of pronouncing English that is acceptable, but cannot describe how English is pronounced by native speaker communities in general, because variation is a real thing. Edited by robarb on 08 February 2015 at 6:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5022 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 12 of 13 08 February 2015 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You bet it is! :) Although I don't follow the principle that natives are always right, considering only pronunciations listed in dictionaries provides variation enough to drive anyone crazy, which is why I ditched the word "rule" and went with "patterns" from the beginning.
And one "corner case" which I'd dare say is present in every learner's vocabulary, so not negligible at all. Since iguanamon's post expanding on Ari's "caesar" I'm afraid we'll keep getting all sorts of exceptions from medicine (I'm guessing 'nasion' is an almost exclusively medical term like it is Spanish), although I hope many will be expanded into additional patterns. As I said, I'm torn about this. On one hand, there's already a ten-volume book dealing with the whole question, on the other I concur that although 'minor' patterns will affect every learner sooner or later and so I want them listed, most one-off exceptions can be safely ignored by most learners... unless it's hard to find somebody who doesn't know the word ;( BTW, finally found "caesura" in Wikipedia -- apparently it is /siːˈʒjʊərə/ or /sɪˈʒʊrə/, so pretty closely related to scissors, caesareans, excisions, etc... just different intermediate stages from Latin. Anyway, I'm pretty sure anyone with the time and will to do a deep search through a dictionary will find most 'one-off' exceptions to any pattern are really two- or three-off mini-patterns just waiting to be spotted... but hey, isn't that part of the fun? Edited by mrwarper on 08 February 2015 at 1:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5176 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 13 of 13 10 February 2015 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've heard fission with an sh, and that other symbol I don't know how to make my keyboard make. :) Both seem to be correct.
Is sugar one of your exceptions? I've never figured out why it's pronounced with the 'sh' sound, but there you go. I don't know this is an American English thing, but "Celt". I say with a K sound as do many people. But if you're talking about basketball team, it's the "selts". Some people use the S pronunciation for anything Celtic. Ironic that a word so close to the heart of English gets dithered over in its pronunciation! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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