If it’s pronounced syllabically, it’d be doubled. But-Ter, but even that frequently alters the second /t/ to a [d].
I think he(?) was talking about transliterating it to another language. whereas a lot of English speakers would pronounce it more like “budder,” languages where double consonants are pronounced distinctly (e.g. Japanese) would probably have issues with it.
here’s a video of a native Japanese speaker trying to pronounce “Massachusetts.” those double consonants throw a wrench into everything,
Right, but my point is that just because we use two letters doesn’t mean there actually are “double consonants,” whatever that is supposed to mean. There really are no “double consonants” in Massachusetts /ˌmæsəˈtʃuːsəts/ (/tʃ/ is a single consonant). (Of course at the end there is a cluster of two consonants, which is often difficult for non-native speakers.) Rather, there is only the orthographic tradition in English of sometimes repeating a letter to represent a (single) consonant.
The fact the we spell it with two letters has nothing to do with the North American alveolar tap pronunciation. An illiterate person in North America–who has never even seen the spelling–would pronounce it the same. And there are many other words (later, writer, etc.), spelled with one letter for the consonant sound, in which North Americans also use the alveolar tap, instead of /t/.
I agree that, as you point out, this only might possibly affect the pronunciation of a person who is completely unfamiliar with a word, (never heard it pronounced by a native speaker), and completely unaware of English orthography patterns. But the word itself–as it is pronounced by native speakers–doesn’t have “double consonants.”
Indeed, a Japanese speaker may be inclined see that orthography and somehow think it is analogous to the way Japanese is transcribed or transliterated with the roman alphabet, where such double letters (not double consonants), are used to represent protracted unreleased stops between consonants. (Is that what’s happening in the video? I’m not in a position to listen to it at the moment. It would make sense, I suppose, if the the Japanese speaker is very familiar with how Japanese is represented with the Roman alphabet, but somehow at the same time completely ignorant of English orthography–which seems rather uncommon to me.)
IIRC from Gesenius, doubled consonants in Hebrew (represented by a דגש חזק) are supposed to be “strengthened” in classical Hebrew. So there is or was a difference in pronunciation.
I realize that “lazy American diction” renders ‘butter’ minimally, as /bədər/, but am I correct that in some English dialects both T’s are pronounced?
But in that case, and I believe it’s generally true of languages distant from English, the first letter in Busan/Pusan, ‘ㅂ’, isn’t really ‘p’ or ‘b’. ‘P’ is closer in that particular case I agree. But if ‘ㅍ’ as in Pyeongyang is one Latin letter, it’s also ‘p’. Some past systems made the aspirated ‘ㅍ’ into “p” followed by an apostrophe, at least sometimes, but that’s a nuisance. Also IME even native speakers argue whether some subtle consonant sound differences in Korean are real as the language is now spoken (not necessarily ‘ㅂ’ vs. ‘ㅍ’, but others) though one can look up the technical terms for how each supposedly differs.
The ROK 2000 convention of transliterating the ‘ㅓ’ as ‘eo’ rather than ‘o’ (Pyeongyang v Pyongyang as NK and most of the world write it) probably isn’t an improvement either, even over just ‘o’, that also included basically a French circumflex over the ‘o’ in some systems, but obviously it’s a benefit to be able to use a standard English keyboard. Although, transliterating the compound vowel ‘ㅐ’ as ‘ae’ rather than ‘ai’ in older systems is an improvement, in suggesting a more correct pronunciation.
Overall you can’t win, is my take on this issue.
There’s also either and ether.
Well, the American pronunciation is not any lazier than the leaves of fall which turn red in America, but only yellow in Europe. (Hence the quotation marks, I’m sure.) Pronunciation is a natural phenomenon. Is it lazy for one iris to be purple instead of blue?
In any case, I’m not sure how it would be motor-physiologically possible to pronounce two /t/s in succession, without inserting an extraneous vowel in between–or, as in Japanese, pronouncing the first with a protracted unreleased stop, which might be something like Scottish dialect? I don’t know.
That’s an interesting case, because ‘either’ can be pronounced with one of two initial vowel sounds (/aɪ/ (eye) or /iː/ (ee)), one of which distinguishes it from ‘ether’ quite nicely without having to rely on the distinction between /θ/ and /ð/.
So, yes, for people who say /ˈiːðər/, the voicedness of the ‘th’ phoneme is indeed the only feature which distinguishes it from /ˈiːθər/.
Surely you know how Sean Ferguson got his name?
(And sorry about calling you that…)
ETA: Although I know a longer version, similar stories appear in Did US immigration officials really change family names arbitrarily?. SD is there…
In our case, the name had been preserved through 100 years of Church records in a small town in Teruel (current population 421, but in the 19th century it was an important mining centre); it was the Civil Registry that screwed things up c. 1914, that being the year of my grandfather’s birth. Maybe we should separate Church and State when it comes to defining people’s names!
I know someone of Norwegian ethnicity whose name starts with “KJ-” and she pronounces it with the sound youre referring to (the “ch” in “chair”). It’s not that dumb a transliteration.
I was about to say. Assuming that the only way to get the “ch” sound is with the letters CH is very anglocentric. Other languages do it differently even with the Latin alphabet.
Off the top of my head:
French: TCH
Hungarian: CS
Norwegian: KJ
Which “ch” sound? I know at least three sounds which are represented by that digraph in English.
As in “chair”, I think we’re talking about.
Which is sort of related to my OP. Since our newspapers are written in English, the spelling of foreign words and names - particularly if they are from a different alphabet - should be spelled phonetically.
That assumes that the readers are familiar with a consistent phonetic system like the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is probably not the case. And if you specify “Kyi as in chair”, that’s plain wrong, since the “ky” is not the same as the “ch” in “chair”. I am not even sure that consonant occurs in English.
FWIW, I can think of one English word with a true “double consonant:” tailless. As in, “That B-2 bomber has no empennage. It is tailless.” If speaking quickly, one might skip the second L and say “tayless,” but in most situations I (at least) would pronounce both Ls.
One interesting thing related to the OP’s question is that we inherit some phonetic spellings from other languages, but we also supply our own. This leads to the somewhat unusual situation of having two valid (but fairly different) spellings for the same word. For example, because the French colonized North Africa, it’s common to see English speakers write words that are phonetically French. The name “Mahmoud” is essentially the same name we typically spell as “Mohammed,” but it’s phonetically French. Or take the Arabic word for a dry gully or valley, which shows up in place names. (I’ve also heard American soldiers in Iraq use this word as a topographical term). I used to see English speakers write “ouadi,” but now it’s much more common to see “wadi,” which is phonetically English.
Arabic and Hebrew are both fairly vague about vowels, which is another reason you see several different spellings for Semitic words in English. Plus, there are many different Arabic dialects, so how one transliterates a word may depend on what dialect one is transliteration from. I imagine this applies to other languages as well.
Also, I hear that one can distinguish groups of Hebrew speakers based on how they pronounce a particular word; it’s a sort of shibboleth, I suppose.
clap clap clap
Also in how they transliterate it. Ashkenazi Jews often base transliterations on German transliterating conventions; Sephardis follow Spanish conventions. There are many sounds for which they are the same but a handful which are different.
Is it really “essentially” the same name, though, as in John vs Jean? The root is identical, but even without (most) vowels I would say محمود is not the same as محمد. Perhaps you meant Mohammed versus Muhammad? I suppose this exemplifies the problem under consideration 