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there is a law inside the alphabet

malbui said:
This is interesting as I grew up with Irish and I was today years old when I noticed similarities in sound between "big" and "beag". Completely different registers in my brain.
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Maybe to you there is a difference, however slight? Someone, especially an adult, who is trying to learn a new language, will most likely not be able to "hear" sounds they are not used to, and/or differentiate between them and any similar sounds in your native language.

Swedish is not tonal, but it is a pitch-accent language, and to anyone who is not used to that, it's very difficult to actually hear the, to us, very obvious difference, never mind try to reproduce it.

I may be ot now, but I have no idea what the t is.
 
malbui said:
This is interesting as I grew up with Irish and I was today years old when I noticed similarities in sound between "big" and "beag". Completely different registers in my brain.
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When my Irish wife differentiates her nephew from her brother as Shaun beag it sounds more like “bake” to me, used to the sound of Scottish Gaelic from Harris. She’s from Galway but lived for years in an tSudaire if that matters. Maybe my ears.
 
malbui said:
On a vaguely similar note, there has occasionally been amusement in Irish pubs in which the toilets are labelled as Gaeilge. "Fir" for the Gents and "Mná" for the Ladies. Natives don’t give it a second glance but English speakers can easily get misled.
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It's a slightly weird experience being in Ireland, mainly characterised by "these people are really bad at spelling." I'd get the"fir" and "mnà" part all right, but I remember being slightly thrown by a car park labelled "saor". In Gaelic, saor means free in the sense of not captive (also a carpenter, for no readily apparent reason), but also "cheap". The term for free as in no charge is "an-asgaidh". So I'm sitting there in my car thinking, if the parking is cheap, won't you tell me how much it actually is?
 
Wudang said:
When my Irish wife differentiates her nephew from her brother as Shaun beag it sounds more like “bake” to me, used to the sound of Scottish Gaelic from Harris. She’s from Galway but lived for years in an tSudaire if that matters. Maybe my ears.
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It sounds more like "bake" to me too, but we're talking beginners. Also seeing the word written.
 
Here's a much better map of phonemes:

1765212251711.jpeg
This is one that only covers the English vowels, but there are similar that include all the phonemes. If there's a law to be found in the kinds of noises people make with their mouths, it will probably be found by taking into account the geography of the noisemaker.
 
Rolfe said:
It sounds more like "bake" to me too, but we're talking beginners. Also seeing the word written.
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I _think_ I tend to pronounce it something like "beck", but I’m feeling odd sitting in my office talking to myself and trying to listen to what I’m saying. Nobody else ever does.

There’s also the issue of massive linguistic variation. Cousins of mine from barely 150km from my roots are incomprehensible when they start telling wild stories and forget that there are foreigners present. So my accent is only a single datapoint.
 
Rolfe said:
It's a slightly weird experience being in Ireland, mainly characterised by "these people are really bad at spelling." I'd get the"fir" and "mnà" part all right, but I remember being slightly thrown by a car park labelled "saor". In Gaelic, saor means free in the sense of not captive (also a carpenter, for no readily apparent reason), but also "cheap". The term for free as in no charge is "an-asgaidh". So I'm sitting there in my car thinking, if the parking is cheap, won't you tell me how much it actually is?
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"Bad at spelling". From a user of a language full of random gees and accents pointing in the wrong direction 😆
 
Helen said:
Maybe to you there is a difference, however slight? Someone, especially an adult, who is trying to learn a new language, will most likely not be able to "hear" sounds they are not used to, and/or differentiate between them and any similar sounds in your native language.

Swedish is not tonal, but it is a pitch-accent language, and to anyone who is not used to that, it's very difficult to actually hear the, to us, very obvious difference, never mind try to reproduce it.

I may be ot now, but I have no idea what the t is.
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Oh, there is a clear difference. What I meant and probably failed to express was that I’d never consciously noted the similarity in sound between two utterly distinct words because they sit in different places in my brain.

Similarities can cause bizarre confusion. If I’m thinking in English and see the word "dream" in isolation, my inner voice pronounces it as "dreem" and we all know what that means. If I’m thinking in Irish, I read it as something like "dram", which means "crowd". Only fleeting confusion, but it exists.

As for Swedish phonetics, forget it. I love the Scandinavian languages and would like to speak them better, but the only way I can muddle through is to blame it on a mouthful of cardamom roll.

Mmmmmmm. Cardamom roll.
 
theprestige said:
Here's a much better map of phonemes:

View attachment 66865
This is one that only covers the English vowels, but there are similar that include all the phonemes. If there's a law to be found in the kinds of noises people make with their mouths, it will probably be found by taking into account the geography of the noisemaker.
Click to expand...
That "map" is awful. It doesn't look like a person at all.
 
They are odd, I agree - especially Danish, which most Swedes and Norwegians find increasingly difficult to understand, since they're very laid-back about actually pronuncing anything, and it's only getting worse. Written Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are fairly similar, spoken Swedish and Norwegian as well, but not spoken Danish (Danish kids learn their mother tongue more sliwly than all other kids, it takes them about two months more to reach the same level of understanding).

And I consider you an honorary Swede, for your love of hockey and cardamom buns, anyway.
 
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Rolfe said:
That was really interesting.

Probably coincidentally, it highlights a couple of places where Gaelic learners consistently slip up. The Gaelic for dog is cù, right there in the group of c-words mentioned (canis, chien etc.) Unfortunately the Scots word for cow is coo, pronounced exactly like cù. Cue predictable mistakes. (The Gaelic for cow is bò, nicely in line with beef and bovine and so on.)

Also, big. The Gaelic for big is mòr (as mentioned in the video). Mòr, more, not much scope for getting that wrong, surely? Except, the Gaelic for small is - beag. Pronounced pretty close to big. And in the genitive it actually becomes big.

Yes, I have made this mistake. More than once. Despite my actual name being a feminisation of mòr.
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This reminds that it is generally believed that black, blank, and blanco are all cognates. That is, all derived from the same root. Prot indo european that probably meant something like empty.

As to the op, no idea what you are on about to be honest, sounds a bit like my bipolar sister when she was manic, Theres a word for when folks make connections between things that aren't really there.

Also, the latin alphabet is phonetic, sure, its pretty inconsistent in English but that's what happens when Germanic language gets most of its words from Latin partially via Norman French.

ETA: Regarding Dog, there is the german substrate hypothesis. That is that German is kind of a hybrid with a non indo european language. Perhaps dog is a word retained from that but only in england? Probably not.

ETA: What's up with the Irish? Its like they took letters from Latin and said, everyone else thinks they make this sound, to hell with that, its going to make a totally different sound here. I mean, I can read most Latin and German languages and get the sound pretty close sure, accents might be in the wrong place and it maybe a series of sound we don't normally put together in English, but not Irish, not even close with Irish.
 
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malbui said:
I _think_ I tend to pronounce it something like "beck", but I’m feeling odd sitting in my office talking to myself and trying to listen to what I’m saying. Nobody else ever does.

There’s also the issue of massive linguistic variation. Cousins of mine from barely 150km from my roots are incomprehensible when they start telling wild stories and forget that there are foreigners present. So my accent is only a single datapoint.
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Soon after I typed that someone on the TV used the word several times and now I don't know what I think. And while I was typing this the lenited form - bheag - was used and I should shut up now.

malbui said:
"Bad at spelling". From a user of a language full of random gees and accents pointing in the wrong direction 😆
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The spelling is perfectly rational, as you'd realise if you guys hadn't gone completely overboard leaving out about half the letters in most words. And we used to have accents pointing in both directions, until some joker in the 1980s decided to rationalise that, and now since Windows 11 my keyboard has lost the "acute" accent (which was useful) and so the world goes to hell in a handbasket.
 
Rolfe said:
and now since Windows 11 my keyboard has lost the "acute" accent (which was useful) and so the world goes to hell in a handbasket.
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In Windows Power Toys there is a tool to cycle through accented characters. As I recall one of my Windows PCs has a version I hacked to add something that escapes me. Try it (some other good things in there) Feel free to DM for help
link
 
Wudang said:
When my Irish wife differentiates her nephew from her brother as Shaun beag it sounds more like “bake” to me, used to the sound of Scottish Gaelic from Harris. She’s from Galway but lived for years in an tSudaire if that matters. Maybe my ears.
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I don't believe that's how they spell Sean.
 
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