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Comment by JBorrow | Hacker News Reader

One thing on the rhyming - you say on one page it rimes with 'lover' and on another that it rhymes with 'hover'. In many people's accents, these are spoken quite differently...

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And both options are different to how I first read it (rhymes with clover).

That's how I always pronounced the bird (rhyming with clover), but looking it up now, it does actually rhyme with "lover." It's just "lover" with a "p" in front.

(And it's the same for US vs British English, that is, they can both use the rule "p + lover" and pronounce it correctly respectively.)

"Hover" is more ambiguous, though. It can rhyme with "lover" or have a rounder "o" sound.

It's funny because I wouldn't have thought twice about how to pronounce it if it just never mentioned the rhyming thing, but now I can't stop saying plover, hover, lover. Plover, hover, lover.

I've never seen a title like "Redis (rhymes with "Candice") is an in-memory..."

But you have probably noticed that close to nobody pronounces debian correctly (deb-ian, like the names), or gif (whichever is right), or PNG (ping), or the people pronouncing dogecoin as dog-e-coin, etc.

Confusion about how to pronounce something is extremely common, due to most open source communication happening in written form, and English being a weird language where pronunciation and spelling seem mostly unrelated to each other.

Maybe we need to have a latin/binomial nomenclature like in species naming. So pluvialis apricaria instead of golden plover. mensa elephantus for PostgreSQL. mensa parvus for SQLite.

The purpose is to have an agreed name in all languages, and not worry much about pronounciation. Now what about Oracle...

mensa pythia?

mensa diabolica?

Freaking English. Can't we revamp the dictionary to make the alphabet truly phonetic? So many of the words have dubious pronunciation. To the point that if you have just read a word in a book, there is no guarantee that you can pronounce it.

That's impossible to some degree because English pronunciation varies so much across dialects.

Or rather, you could make writing phonetic but then spelling would have to vary by dialect.

I just realized it's done precisely like that in my language! Never even thought about it. But there is a standard "written" version of the language and dialects are mostly spoken.

Isn't that true for every language?

Nope. Most languages have no written standard, and some have more than one (E.g., American vs. British vs. Australian English, or Nynorsk vs. Bokmal Norwegian).

please specify the language so people can learn things, it's the internet

That's really hard with old languages. Accents and new words surpass the alphabets with time. Turkish for example switched to using Latin alphabet on 1928 and they were able to map every sound to a specific letter. If you know the Turkish alphabet song you can read every text with perfect pronunciation. There aren't even any letter combinations to consider, letters have one sound and are individual.

We have an alphabet that can be used to give something close to certainty regarding punctuation. ɪt wʊd biː ˈkʌmbəsəm - to begin with, but I’m sure we could get used to it.

I think I’d prefer it. I enjoy reading text which has been written ‘in an accent’, where the usual way is to bend the standard alphabet so ets cluen yer en aboot tha propa wuy ta sey et.

The problem here is that a vowel is split in some dialects but not others. Phonemic spelling would not solve this problem.

Okay, so you're saying we should just discard the centuries or even millennia of etymology encoded into spellings because it's better to make sure symbols on the page directly correspond to your preferred pronunciation.

In at least England, this would cause spelling to have regional variations. E.g. 'bath' in southern English is often pronounced as if was spelt 'barth' while in the North it would be 'baf'.

Not while using an alphabet with just 5 vowel letters. Switching to IPA would do the job, though.

5 vowels, and then 25 more vowel combinations (e.g. ea)

I don't think those 25 combinations are enough to cover all the cases of unique vowel sounds, diphthongs, and pairs of distinct adjacent vowels that you find in English. 'ea' for instance is ambiguous between sounds like those in 'great', 'deal', and 'creatine'.

Yes, they are different in standard British English:

hover /ˈhɒvə/

lover /ˈlʌvə/

rover /ˈrəʊvə/

The bird "plover" is like "lover": /ˈplʌvə/

Not only that, but (at a guess) I'd say think the southern /ʌ/ sound in Plover might come out more /ɔ/ in northern English?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel

I know you’re correct, but I cannot for the life of me remember or imagine how people pronounce these differently, even after having it explained many times. Is “hover” done like “over” (long ‘o’)?

> Is “hover” done like “over” (long ‘o’)?

No, it's not that - at least in British English - referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English, "hover" uses ɒ ("LOT, blockade, song") while "lover" uses ʌ ("STRUT, untidy, trustee, sung").

In British English, plover (the bird) rhymes with lover but not with hover.

I always have difficulties in the opposite direction, namely imagining how such vowels can be merged - a classic for me was a programming manual once that told me "char" (the keyword) should be pronounced care, "like the start of the word character". Confused the heck out of me, since where I come from the vowel at the start of the word character is nothing like the one in care.

This British pronunciation of hover https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/hover does not sound at all like the vowel in 'lot' or 'song'.

I'm British, and sitting at my desk saying "hover" "lot" "song" over and over again. They're definitely very close. I say hover like hoh-ver, which is very similar to the vowel I say in lot (loh-t) and song (soh-ng).

Yes. It does. Source: have been British for 54 years

Hover is “hovver”

Lover is “luvver”

Did you listen to the audio file at the link? I take it the British pronunciation at dictionary.cambridge.org is an unrepresentative example?

No, that's correct and so is what they're saying

Look up lot and song on the same website, it’s the same vowel. Then compare with lover, an entirely different vowel is pronounced.

I did look up lot and song at the same website. The audio examples of British pronunciations provided for those two words use an entirely different vowel sound.

Lover (and plover, the bird) are pronounced with the "o" sounding the same as the "u" in "cut" or "gut" or "puck".

Hover is pronounced with the "o" as in "hop" or "hot".

Fun fact: the "o" [in "lover"] sounding the same as the "u" in "cut" is actually an "a" in spanish.

As fun as that, also in italian. Though of course the British pronounciation of vowels is far from being as "clear cut" as in spanish or italian.

Not in my accent! I think you'll have to be more specific.

(both accents fairly neutral, English from England, Spanish from Spain)

That's curious. I have never heard the word "cut" being pronounced without the "a" sound (in the vecinity of how "cat" sounds in "category") by someone who had a neutral English accent. Where is it from?

...and this is why IPA was invented.

Indian pale ale?

Seems like this has upset some people.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ipa&oq=ipa&aqs=chrome.0.69i5...

First hit on Google is for India Pale Ales.

I always heard the phonetic alphabet referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet. It doesn't seem very international given that it is entirely in English.

Also Russia has its own version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_spelling_alphabet#:~....

So IPA is a bit of a misnomer I feel.

The International Phonetic Alphabet isn't just "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie"—in fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with the NATO "Phonetic Alphabet", and anywhere you heard that referred to as the International Phonetic Alphabet was just simply wrong. It's an actual alphabet, designed to represent all the phonemes humans actually use in speech—not just in English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

Either way the acronym is ambiguous at best.

How is IPA ambiguous when talking about pronunciations of words?

If someone has no idea what IPA is, how are they supposed to figure it out when there's a bunch of other things that have the same acronym?

Also, ALL acronyms are ambiguous. That's why it's best practice to say the actual thing you're talking about then put the acronym next to it the first time it's used.

Well I googled IPA and the first Wikipedia hit (2nd result) was India Pale Ale, which is the acronym I am familiar with.

The first link was to https://ipa.co.uk Web results The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising: IPA

So I think calling it ambiguous is ok, you are if course free to disagree, but what I said wasn't fundamentally incorrect. But it seems like HN has a bee in its bonnet.

Ho as in hot, lo sounds like lu from lush.

I think hov-er and huv-er.

This is an oversight. We settled on "lover" a while ago for this reason, it should be updated.

Huh, I learn something new each day. I definitely would consider these words to be "very" rhyming and can't even envision which one mutates in other accents. Thanks!

Just don't pronounce the P as a separate letter.

I don't think that's the problem the clarification is designed to address. A plover is a type of bird, and in some accents it doesn't rhyme with either lover or hover.

Nevertheless, the parent is right, in my accent hover and lover don't rhyme either. All three have different vowels.

In my accent, lover, hover and clover have three different vowels in the first syllable. Plover rhymes with lover for me. Does it rhyme with clover for you?

Yeah, it does.

I suspect it's not the standard pronunciation in my region, since Wiktionary lists it as an alternative American pronunciation and I'm Australian, but for whatever reason that's how I pronounce it.

I expect that many people pronounce "plover" as "clover" if they saw it written down first before they heard someone who knows the pronunciation say it. There are plenty of words like that in English.

I pronounced it as rhyming with "clover" too before learning that it's actually incorrect.

That's possible too, though I don't subscribe to the idea that a widely used pronunciation can be incorrect.

And mover has a fourth, now that I think about it.

I think GP was alluding to the drug P (meth).

A simpler explanation would be "pee-lover".

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