These things are necessarily fluid. It still feels like a German word to me, but on the other hand A) I know some German and B) I’m probably older than you.
No, no, no, no. Pirates don’t talk about cows. They’re on ships, where cows are uncommonly found.
You talk like a pirate because you say aye, matey.
We really need an eye-patch smiley.
You pronounce “what” like “hat”?
Powers &8^]
Like a pirate what.
There has been a considerable loss of proper “wh” in my lifetime, but plenty of others still pronounce it. I do, for one, and so does the delectable Andrea Corr. It’s curious that it’s dying out so quickly, seeing that it’s been a part of English phonetics for as long as we have records of the language.
Hence my qualification of “unless you’re Stewie Griffin.” I’ll grant that /hw/ is not an unheard of sound in English; just an increasingly rare one. (Unlike, say, the voiceless uvular plosive that begins Quran, which does not occur in English. I think.)
Who is Andrea Corr?
If I haven’t already conceded that I carelessly left out the silent-w-before-h thing, I should have. My point, of course, is that in contemporary English you don’t rarely see blends of /w/ + other consonants, as you see, say, /b/ + /r/ or /s/+/l/. What you do see is a silent /w/ before l (as in crawl and bawl); a silent w before r, as in wreck; and a silent h, as in your example.
So crawl = crall?
And wreck=reck?
:smack: Someone vote me off the island.
For me, wreck = reck – I can’t imagine how to say them differently.
But what =/= hat. What ~ hwut. But the w is not silent. If anything is silent in the typical pronunciation, it is the h.
Irish actress and pop star. Known with her sisters Caroline and Sharon and their brother Jim as “The Corrs”, a wildly popular band around the world, except that they never quite cracked the US market. Frequently voted the most beautiful woman in the world (though her sisters aren’t far behind her).
She’s Irish, and a lot of Irish accents, plus most Scottish accents, aspirate the w in ‘what,’ etc. So did old British RP (not modern RP). My accent is RP with some old-fashioned aspects; I aspirate the wh.
Elementary school teachers tell kids lies all the time, because they can’t handle the truth.
Like ‘magic E,’ the e at the end of a word that magically makes the vowel in the middle of a word sound like it’s a capital letter. That’s a really really useful thing to know when learning to read English. But it doesn’t always apply and there’s nothing magical about it and the ‘middle of a word’ bit isn’t quite true to begin with.
There are pretty much always reasons why the magic e doesn’t change the pronunciation like you’d expect it to, but you won’t understand those until you’ve understood magic e first, and once you’ve got to that stage you probably don’t need to be told those rules because you manage quite well without consciously knowing them.
As long as you know the e rules, they work most of the time. (: Elementary teachers just start with stuff like “kite” without explaining why “little” doesn’t follow that rule…“kitten” has two Ts protecting the vowel. :rolleyes: I did the E rule/s with my son over the weekend and he’s doing pretty well so far. I just combine it with stuff he already knows…ai, ie, igh, ck, ph, ch, whatever. He even has the Y down (most of the time). I COMPLETELY chucked his school’s system last week and have been doing things differently with him. It’s like this little “ding ding” went off in his head. He’s a kid who needs…rules…codes…methods…There are only so many times “The cat and the rat sat on a mat” will help you. 
Kids need to learn that words are composed of sounds, but every letter still needs to be ‘read’.
I think the biggest mistake elementary teachers make are:
- Memorize a bunch of common words that could be “sounded” out. (My son has words like she, he, them, this, etc. on his list…it’s 60 words. wtf)
- “E” after a vowel makes the vowel “say its name”.
- “When one vowel goes walking…”
- Pronouncing letters as their names when sounding things out. instead of k/a/t it’s kuh Ah tih.
- Treating kindergarten like it’s preschool.
I never learned it that way. We did short/long (teacher lingo) vowels, morphemes, sight words, stuck em all together and were reading just fine by first grade. And spelling tests.
Kids are SO pampered these days. :o
Quoth Cecil:
Is he saying that “how” is pronounced the same way as “house”? If so, I don’t think that’s universal, but more a matter of local pronunciation. They don’t sound the same to me.
He’s saying that how sounds exactly like house if you omit the latter’s coda: i.e., the concluding consonant sound – in this case, /s/ or /z/ depending on whether it’s a noun or a verb. (How has no coda, just an onset and a nucleus.)
Missed the edit window. I wanted to add:
Or perhaps you’re saying you’ve heard either how or house pronounced with a vowel other than /(aʊ/. Is that what you meant? If so, which word have you heard with another vowel, and where?
Yeah, one of the authors of The Science of Diskworld talked a lot about “lies told to children”. It the things we teach kids that are wrong, but are useful ways to teach concepts that are used for the next level of learning. Like teaching the Bohr model of the atom to get across the concept of nucleus and electron shells, even though the modern model does not have electrons zipping around in neat orbits.
[QUOTE=CitizenPained]
4. Pronouncing letters as their names when sounding things out. instead of k/a/t it’s kuh Ah tih.
[/QUOTE]
You spell cat with a k? [Adam Savage]“Well there’s your problem.” [/Savage]
Sounding out the letters is a common starting place, it just doesn’t always work because some sounds use letter combinations (th), many letters have multiple sounds (c, g, vowels), etc.
And yet you turned out to be a highly proficient reader early on, right? That’s my point above: despite these “mistakes” that elementary teachers make, children who really want to read figure it out anyway…
…if they have comprehensible and systematic input as guidance, along with encouragement to provide motivation. (If they don’t see reading valued–especially at home–they’re at a serious disadvantage, and pure phonics alone can’t make up for that.)
To go back to one of the particulars:
Most people don’t seem to realize that “sounding out” has one big fundamental flaw, because you cannot produce an onset consonant without some kind of vowel after it. Usually what people use are the unstressed vowels /ǝ/ or /ɪ/. However, neither of those is the actual vowel in the word “cat,” for instance. The word is not /kǝæt/, though that is what happens when you “sound it out.” Nevertheless, this doesn’t trip up most learners. They hear the word naturally spoken, or see it in a picture book, and if it’s properly contextualized lexically, they figure it out. From then on, “cat” becomes a sight word and “sounding it out” was just a red herring.
Phonic approaches to decoding text work much better when onsets are grouped with rimes in the same way that the Japanese or Korean syllabaries are. It’s okay that the letters change–kids can handle that.
I don’t think most people realize that the sh in shine is not simply a combination of s & h or that the ch in church is not simply c +h. And even people who realize that miss the fact that the th of then is not not the th of thin. And don’t get me started on ng.
I blame the Electric Company.
Well, that’s not true. Not completely. But kids are taught (at least we were when I was a lad) to “sound out” words by saying “c” + “h” + “arm” = charm, and so forth. I’m sure it causes no end of confusionn. It wasn’t until I undertook a deliberate (albeit autodidactical) study of phonetics that it ever occurred to me to pay attention to where my tongue, teeth, and lips were when making sounds. (And when I write “it occurred to me,” I mean "I was instructed to do so byPeter Ladefoged.
Quoth Irishman:
From my experience teaching physics, I find that I have to spend a lot more time un-teaching these wrong things than on actually teaching the more correct ideas which supposedly follow from them. I’ve no proof of this, but I strongly suspect that kids would do a lot better in science if we just told them the truth to begin with, so they could develop the proper intuition: Not the whole truth, obviously, since they won’t have the appropriate background, but leave out the incorrect pieces in the simplifications.
I know it’s hard to judge one’s own pronunciation, but when I pronounce “how” and “house”, it sure sounds differently to me. Plus, my lips move differently. For “how”, they end in a pucker position, like an “oo”, but in “house”, they stay stretched, no “oo”.
But then, I’m a Canuck, so it may be part of that “aboot” stuff you guys always mention.