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Comment by Epenthesis | Hacker News Reader

A good addition might be to point out good first guesses for the vowels in non-English names (Examples used assume a General American accent):

* "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see")

* "E" as in "e" in "pet", or the "ai" in "pain"

* "I" as in the "i" in "pit" or the "ea" in "peat"

* "O" as in the "o" in "cot" or the "o" in "cone"

* "U" as in the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "doom"

(Americans might notice that this approximately reflects the sounds those letters represent in Spanish)

Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"

(Edit: Improved the example given for "a")

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Also known as "pronouncing Latin alphabet vowels as in Latin" :)

I like how English managed to offset for his relatively simple grammar by totally destroying its spelling. The whole fact that things like "spelling bees" can exist was very hard to grasp to me as a kid watching stuff dubbed in Italian.

Seven years old me was always very confused by why the kids in TV shows were rewarded for knowing how to spell stuff, which is something every second grader can do in Italy for any arbitrary word. In Italian you just write things the way you hear them, and there's an almost 1:1 strong correspondence between written and spoken language. If you don't know how to write something, you also don't know how to say it.

They had a crazy vowel shift where vowels, which for example in Romanian are defined as sounds that "stand by themselves" [1] all became 2-sound things.

To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "ă" which is pronounced "uh").

A became ei.

E became i (ok, this one's the exception, but in practice it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! - pronunciations for it).

I became ai.

O became ău.

U became iu.

So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which is crazy enough anyway).

I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't used in Latin.

[1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't need an additional supporting sound.

Without counting all those circumstances where A is still /a/, u is /a/ or a similar vowel, and so on. Basically, there's nothing that's still pronounced as it should :)

> Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"

Used to be written that way; compare Calcutta -> Kolkata, suttee -> sati.

> (Examples used assume a General American accent that pronounces "cot" and "caught" differently)

In combination with the directive to read "a" as in "caught", I don't know how to take this except as a call to add lip rounding to the pronunciation of foreign "a". But that can't be right?

> "A" as in the "au" in "caught"

Not an expert, but I can't offhand think of a language where this is even approximately how a is pronounced—which ones are you thinking of?

Try "ah". This confusion could be caused by the caught-cot merger, possibly in combination with the father-bother merger.

Thanks for the suggestion. It was difficult for me to think of an example without resorting to IPA, since my own American accent is fully cot/caught + father/bother merged.

* Spanish: "hacer"

* French: "pas"

* Italian: "casa"

* Mandarin (written using pinyin): "bàng"

* German: "katze"

* Japanes (written in romaji): "arigato"

* Bahasa Indonesia: "bahasa"

Note that the sounds in these various languages are not exactly the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest sound in the native phonological inventory of a General American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently).

It's worth noting that "given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently" is a bit misleading qualifier - there are many who have some difference between "caught" and "cot" (with "caught" being similar to "cot" but longer/smoother, with a clear differentiation), but it's clearly not the sound you intended that would match Italian "casa" and IPA 'a'; so pronouncing "caught" and "cot" differently apparently does not necessarily imply pronouncing "caught" the same way you do.

Also, if I listen to the audio examples at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger then it's exactly the other way around, that the "merged" pronunciation seems like an appropriate representation of "a" in words like Italian "casa", with "non-merged" "cought" sounding very different from that?

Oh wow, my mistake!

I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood which direction the split went.

Apparently there's a subset of American-English speakers that would pronounce "caught" as "kaat". I've always heard it like a longer/smoother "cot" though.

I'd say a good first guess is the "a" in "about" instead.

Yes, in my dialect of American English (raised in Southern California by parents from the midwest), "cot" and "caught" are pronounced almost identically.

I was also raised in Southern California, and both my sisters and I—all born in the 1950s—have had complete cot/caught merger since childhood. The local friends our age whom I surveyed informally about the distinction in 1975 or so, after I learned about it in a linguistics class in college, also had the merger.

Our parents, who were born in the 1920s, both made the cot/caught distinction. Our mother was from the midwest, but our father grew up in the same Southern California city as we did. This suggested to me that, with respect to at least this one phonemic distinction, our language acquisition was influenced more by our peers than by our parents.

I should note that my sisters and I were initially flabbergasted that anyone pronounced those words differently and had trouble hearing the difference, while our parents were upset to learn that we pronounced them the same.

In southern English English, it rhymes with the number 0 (nought).

That's also how it rhymes in northern Illinois (Chicago/Rockford/Quad Cities). I've never pronounced "cot" and "caught" alike. Using different pronunciations is a pretty good indicator that someone came from the Chicago area.

Gotta be careful with “caught”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot–caught_merger

"The cot–caught merger or LOT–THOUGHT merger, formally known in linguistics as the low back merger, is a sound change present in some dialects of English where speakers do not distinguish the vowel phonemes in "cot" and "caught". ...An additional vowel merger, the father–bother merger, which spread through North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has resulted today in a three-way merger in which most Canadian and many American accents have no vowel difference in words like "palm" /ɑ/, "lot" /ɒ/, and "thought" /ɔ/."

Most of New England, as well as much of old England

This too can be looked up

> If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"

Please stop making up stuff like "an Indian language". If you mean Hindi-Urdu and that language family, then just call it that, don't subtly encourage people to think that is the language for all of India.

I believe it's true for most of the sprachbund, including my native language Kannada (which is a Dravidian language very much unrelated to Hindi)

Example?

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