Wiktionary has a nice guide to English pronunciation. It doesn’t go into dialectal differences within countries, but it’s concise. (I think my Ohio dialect is better represented by the Canadian English column than the US.)
WTF?
How did I manage to unearth a vintage-2016 zombie and not realize I was doing it?
Sorry, y’all.
It’s ok, we wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally insult the god by pronouncing Odin wrong. To be on the safe side, they could pronounce it as “flaming-eyed father of all” or similar.
If you ever met him he would probably be in disguise and give you a fake name. So you could just pronounce it the way he gave it to you.
That’s funny, because I would have guessed it would’ve gone the other way round - the 'cot’s the same and the ‘caughts’ variable.
Just goes to show you never can tell with vowels - they’re infinitely mutable, and damn sneaky
Don’t apologize. The following post alone was worth the price of admission:
Jupiter and Yahweh have very different etymologies. Still, why and when did the diminutive form ‘Jove’ arise?
The Latin form is Iuppiter, genitive Iovis; all of the oblique cases have a root of Iov-. So I don’t think it’s anything more than a coincidence.
It is not diminutive. The dictionary says that Juppiter comes from Jovis-pater, Jovis/Djovis analogous to Zeus (Indo-European, “the bright one”). Jahweh is Semitic, of course.
The only thing I have to add here is that the version of the Elder Edda I read when I was in high school insisted on spelling it “Othin” and didn’t explain why.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane. If memory serves, this then spun into a very long, vociferous argument in… IMHO? Maybe ATMB?.. about the usage of IPA on the message board.
To continue with the zombie revival, I didn’t notice this the first time around… the quoted post lists “scythe” as having a similar “th” sound as “weather”.
My immediate reaction was to think “NOPE!”… Scythe is a hard-TH sound, like “thistle”. But then I double-thought, and realized I pronounce it hard in noun form, soft in verb form. Am I alone in this?
I say it as the “th” in “teethe” or “seethe,” voiced. I would say scythe that way for either noun or verb form, except I can’t remember ever needing to use it as a verb.
And similarly, I thought ‘tithe’ (v.) had a voiced ‘th’ (“soft”); ‘tithe’ (n.) unvoiced (“hard”). But dictionaries suggest we’re both wrong. (‘Scythe’ shows an optional unvoiced pronunciation in one dictionary, but the option is unrelated to the noun/verb distinction.)
Methinks were both extrapolating improperly from words like ‘teeth/teethe’, ‘wreath/wreathe’, ‘loath/loathe’ where the verb has an extra ‘e’ on the end.
I would characterise the th- in thistle as the *soft *one (θ) , and the one in weather as the *hard *one (ð). But I see that’s opposite to correct usage. Weird. That’s why I prefer “voiced” and “unvoiced”
Scythe uses ð in my pronunciation, in both noun and verb forms.
Yes, “soft” and “hard” are not good terminology when we’re talking about specific phonemes.
Thanks! Sorry I missed the bat-signal. Now which question did you mean?
Unfortunately, I think I forgot, over the course of three years.