malloc + 4??

[CBFalconer]

[...]

There is a similar phenomonon in english. The word 'a' can be
thought to mutate to 'an' when it precedes a word beginning with
a vowel, as it is dificult to pronounce otherwise. Welsh is a
lot more severe.

And similarly, "the" is pronounced with a long 'e' when followed
by a vowel, though the spelling doesn't change.

Oh? I would pronounce "the ant" just the same as "the cat".

Are you sure? How about "The President of the United States"? I
would pronounce it "Thuh President of thee United States". You not?

I would use either "thuh" or "thee" with abandonment there.
Assuming I want to make any pronouncements on the subject
However, I am not the ultimate authority.

 

[Peter Pichler]

BTW, the average native French speaker can speak French grammatically
correct, but cannot write French grammatically correct.

The same can be said about the English. The first time I've read 'their'
instead of 'there' in a paper, it confused me so much that I had to go
to the author to ask him WTF he'd meant. The same for 'write' and 'right'
and many others (such as 'see' and 'sea', in an attempt to bring this
thread back on topic).

Peter

 

[Alan Balmer]

Shouldn't that be "the average native French speaker can speak
grammatically correct French , but cannot write grammatically correct
French"?

The same can be said about the English. The first time I've read 'their'
instead of 'there' in a paper, it confused me so much that I had to go
to the author to ask him WTF he'd meant.

My current pet peeve is "lose" and "loose".

 

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

[...]
There is a similar phenomonon in english. The word 'a' can be
thought to mutate to 'an' when it precedes a word beginning with
a vowel, as it is dificult to pronounce otherwise. Welsh is a
lot more severe.

And similarly, "the" is pronounced with a long 'e' when followed
by a vowel, though the spelling doesn't change.

Oh? I would pronounce "the ant" just the same as "the cat".

Would you say that it is /possible/ (in correct English) to pronounce
the "e" in "the cat" like the first vowel of the word "ago"? Does the
same apply to the "e" in "the ant"?

Assuming you pronounce "ago" "uh-go," not "ah-go," then certainly.
Yes and yes.

However, Keith is right, at least in my dialect of American English!
I didn't realize it until I repeated some sentences to myself and watched
which pronunciation I used:

"For Pete's sake, get in the boat!"
"For Pete's sake, get in the airplane!"

"Have you seen the caterpillar?"
"Have you seen the anteater?"

"The President of the United States of America!"

Repeat these sentences at full conversational speed, without
trying to pronounce the "the"s any particular way. When I do
that, I find that I am unconsciously inserting a sort of "y"
sound in between "the" and "airplane," and so on, thus turning
the "thuh" into a "thee" before a vowel. It's very subtle, and
it's not wrong English not to make the switch in pronunciation,
but I think it's something that comes naturally to speakers of
at least one American English.

Very interesting! (but off-topic)

-Arthur

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

My current pet peeve is "lose" and "loose".

I've always had a fondness for "read", which can be pronounced like either
"red" or "reed", and may mean a present tense verb, past tense verb, or a
noun. Americans are particularly bad about turning verbs into nouns and
vice versa without changing the spelling, which also confuses a new speaker.

As a native English speaker, I've never had trouble correctly spelling or
pronouncing words I've never seen or heard before, but that's because my
parents used a very different method to teach me than what's used in
schools. Particularly, they taught me words in groups which had similar
behavior instead of groups that had similar meanings; I now know that
behavior follows what language English "borrowed" the word from, and can
apply that to new words without trouble.

Another oddity of English is that while there many synonyms for most common
words, non-native speakers tend to only learn and use one of them, usually
the one that most resembles their own language. This leads to situations
where, for example, a native speaker has to translate between an Asian and a
European both speaking mutually exclusive subsets of English.

S

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

Oh? I would pronounce "the ant" just the same as "the cat".

"Thee ant" flows more naturally than "thuh ant", whereas "thee cat" is less
natural than "thuh cat". Some people only say "thee" or "thuh" in all
cases, but it seems more common for pronunciation to mutate based on the
following word.

S

 

[CBFalconer]

I've always had a fondness for "read", which can be pronounced
like either "red" or "reed", and may mean a present tense verb,
past tense verb, or a noun. Americans are particularly bad
about turning verbs into nouns and vice versa without changing
the spelling, which also confuses a new speaker.

Every so often I have to look with horror on what came back after
I post something. My minor typos insist on looking like ignorant
spelling foulups. I especially remember a lose/loose foulup a few
days ago. I have even fouled there/their.

 

[Peter Pichler]

Every so often I have to look with horror on what came back after
I post something. My minor typos insist on looking like ignorant
spelling foulups. I especially remember a lose/loose foulup a few
days ago. I have even fouled there/their.

Lose/loose can be explained as a simple typo. Bot for us, non-native
speakers, who'd learnt the language mostly by reading, there and
their are *visually* two completely different things. And I usually
don't bother pronouncing it when I'm reading it, that would slow me
down. The visual information is all I need. Thus errors like these
can sometimes confuse me, though not for longer than a second or two
nowadays.

Now, can this explain so many readers confusing C and C++?

Peter

 

[Ben Pfaff]

I've always had a fondness for "read", which can be pronounced like either
"red" or "reed", and may mean a present tense verb, past tense verb, or a
noun. Americans are particularly bad about turning verbs into nouns and
vice versa without changing the spelling, which also confuses a new speaker.

I'm fond of "resent", which can be interpreted as "feel bitter or
indignant about" or "sent again". The ambiguity between these
two meanings can occasionally be important. As a result I always
hyphenate the latter into "re-sent".

 

[Alberto =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gim=E9nez?=]

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El 8 Apr 2004 08:33:51 GMT, Joona I Palaste escribió:

People here might know next to nothing about Finnish, but like it's
been said, Finnish is pronounced pretty much like it's written. I have
studied (at least cursorily) many languages, and I truly believe Finnish
gets the closest to a 1-1 correspondence between written glyphs and
spoken sounds.

I'm spanish, and I have to say that spanish is *exactly* pronounced as
it is written, except for "h" letter, that is not pronounced at all.

- --
Alberto Giménez, SimManiac en el IRC
http://www.almorranasozial.es.vg
GNU/Linux Debian Woody 3.0 GnuPG ID: 0x3BAABDE1
Linux registered user #290801
Windows 98 no se cuelg·$%&/# NO CARRIER
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[Alberto =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gim=E9nez?=]

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El Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:50:17 -0400 (EDT), Arthur J. O'Dwyer escribió:

in Spanish pronunciation are what happens to 'c[aou]' versus 'c[ei]' and
'gu[ao]' versus 'gu[ei]'. But I'm a little out of it, so maybe I missed

yes, i forgot that in my last post
hm, i could add "r" versus "rr", but i don't think it is a
pronounciation "peculiarity", and with qu[ei], where u is not pronounced
(in spanish no word is written with "qua" or "quo")

- --
Alberto Giménez, SimManiac en el IRC
http://www.almorranasozial.es.vg
GNU/Linux Debian Woody 3.0 GnuPG ID: 0x3BAABDE1
Linux registered user #290801
Windows 98 no se cuelg·$%&/# NO CARRIER
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Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

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[Dan Pop]

Dan Pop a écrit :

That's not true. The most popular contest is "la dictée de Pivot" also
known as "Les Dicos d'or" and the winners are usually French, but there
is a category for non native French speakers.

Obviously, a non-native French speaker cannot win at the category reserved
to native French speakers I was talking about open contests.

Although your last example is a common mistake, it's very easy to avoid
it for a native french speaker: just replace the verb by another one
(usually "prendre") and its pronunciation discriminates between the
infinitive and the past participle.

It doesn't matter how easy it is to avoid, what really matters is that it
is a *very* common mistake. If the written form sounds correctly, far too
many people don't bother to make the slightest effort to check that it is
the correct form.

The most difficult part of the
French grammar is the agreement of the adjectives and past participles.
In some cases, it only depends on the order of the words in the sentence.
Besides French grammar, spelling French is difficult because of the many
ways (not as much as English, though) to write the same sound and
because of the presence of mute letters (much more than English), e.g.
"saint", "sain", "sein", "seing", "ceint", "cinq" all share an identical
pronunciation but a different meaning.

It's not that difficult, once you get the hang of it. As a non-native
French speaker I was able to correctly spell words I was hearing for the
first time. And the context helps a lot when disambiguating between
words with identical or near identical pronunciation, just like
in English.

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Shouldn't that be "the average native French speaker can speak
grammatically correct French , but cannot write grammatically correct
French"?

Could be. I'm not a native English speaker and I've never bothered to
study the English grammar.

Dan

 

[Joona I Palaste]

El 8 Apr 2004 08:33:51 GMT, Joona I Palaste escribió:

I'm spanish, and I have to say that spanish is *exactly* pronounced as
it is written, except for "h" letter, that is not pronounced at all.

Close, but no cigar. Some minor points: Why is the 'u' in "qu"
pronounced differently than the normal 'u'? (For example "una
quilogramme".) Why do 'l' by itself and "ll" have separate
pronunciations? (I don't know how the "ll" is pronounced correctly,
but I think I know it's *not* pronounced as two 'l' sounds.)
Why can 'y' be both a consonant (like in "yo") and a vowel (like in
"hay")?
I suppose 'j' in Spanish is always pronounced like 'h' in English.
Fair enough, but seeing as it's pronounced in Finnish like the
consonant 'y' in English and Spanish, it strikes me as a little weird.

 

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

Close, but no cigar. Some minor points: Why is the 'u' in "qu"
pronounced differently than the normal 'u'? (For example "una
quilogramme".)

Is this correct in some Spanish dialect with which I'm unfamiliar?
I thought the word for "kilogram" in Spanish was... well.. "kilogramo."
Certainly the "gramme" ending in Joona's word isn't Spanish; Spanish
doesn't double consonants. Looks like a weird Ibero-British hybrid
to me.
(After Googling: is this something like Catalan?)

Why do 'l' by itself and "ll" have separate
pronunciations? (I don't know how the "ll" is pronounced correctly,
but I think I know it's *not* pronounced as two 'l' sounds.)

The two-'l' letter is the "elle" (pronounced roughly like the
English letter "A": "A-yay"). In words, it's pronounced like the
English 'y': "me llamo" -> "may yamo". And perfectly regularly so.

Spanish used to consider both the 'll' and the 'ch' to be letters
in their own right, along with the enye (n+tilde; sorry, not in my
encoding). But IIRC recently the Spanish people in charge of the
"official" language decided to give up the separate letters for 'ch'
and 'll', and now you'll find "llama" in between "liviano" and "local"
in the dictionary.

Why can 'y' be both a consonant (like in "yo") and a vowel (like in
"hay")?

I'd say, because Spanish doesn't consider 'y' either a consonant or
a vowel, just as in English. The 'y' sound is kind of in-between.
In any event, the 'y' in "yo" isn't really acting like a consonant:
it's just adding the extra "ee" sort of sound. Just like it's doing
in "hay," which without the 'y' would be pronounced "ahh." With the
'y', it's pronounced "ahh-ee," but run together into "ai."

[It's weird trying to write down phonetic descriptions in "English"
syllables, when we're talking about a *more* phonetic language in the
first place, and I know English isn't your first language in the second
place. ]

I suppose 'j' in Spanish is always pronounced like 'h' in English.

Correct, AFAIK.

Fair enough, but seeing as it's pronounced in Finnish like the
consonant 'y' in English and Spanish, it strikes me as a little weird.

Sounds to me like *Finnish* is the weird one. ;-))

-Arthur

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

Close, but no cigar. Some minor points: Why is the 'u' in "qu"
pronounced differently than the normal 'u'? (For example "una
quilogramme".) Why do 'l' by itself and "ll" have separate
pronunciations?

'ch', 'll', and 'rr' are considered separate letters in the Spanish alphabet
with their own pronunciation, not combinations of two letters. For example,
the word "churro" has four letters and should come _after_ "cuba" in sort
order. Arguably, 'qu' should be another (composite) letter as well,
especially since 'q' isn't used on its own.

"kilogramo" or just "kilo" are the words I know in Spanish, by the way.
However, since 'k' is not in the Spanish alphabet, I presume the correct
spelling is "quilogramo". The -mme ending in your spelling looks French,
not Spanish.

(I don't know how the "ll" is pronounced correctly, but I think I know it's *not*
pronounced as two 'l' sounds.)

The exact pronunciation of 'll' depends on dialect; most pronounce it as the
French do, with a 'y' sound.

Why can 'y' be both a consonant (like in "yo") and a vowel (like in
"hay")?

For every word I can think of, you get the correct pronunciation (for most
dialects) if you replace 'y' with 'i' -- in fact the name of 'y' is "i
griega", or "greek i". Of course, there are dialects where the consonant
sound of 'y' is very different, but that's an aberration.

I suppose 'j' in Spanish is always pronounced like 'h' in English.
Fair enough, but seeing as it's pronounced in Finnish like the
consonant 'y' in English and Spanish, it strikes me as a little weird.

When switching between English, Spanish, and French, the 'j' probably trips
me up more than anything else since it has totally different sounds in each.
Most other letters sound the same in at least two of them.

S

 

[Joe Wright]

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El 8 Apr 2004 08:33:51 GMT, Joona I Palaste escribió:



I'm spanish, and I have to say that spanish is *exactly* pronounced as
it is written, except for "h" letter, that is not pronounced at all.

With all due respect, Spain (Iberia) has four (more?) regions with
their own languages. Castille, Andalusia, Catalonia, Basque, etc.
Which of these are you talking about? Then there is Central and most
of South America. Do you suppose these people write and pronounce
Spanish the same, or even like you do? How do you pronounce
'tortilla' where you live, and what would you get if you ordered it?
How would you pronounce it in Mexico and what would you get?

Phonetic spelling is tedious so bear with me if you can.
In Spain it is 'tor-TILL-ya' and is very much like an omelette.
In Mexico it is 'tor-TEE-ya' and is a dry corn pancake.

 

[Old Wolf]

I must agree with you here. One can make a fairly good guess at a
Finnish word's pronunciation by interpreting its letters as letters
in the International Phonetic Association's alphabet
(http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html)

Close, but no cigar. Some minor points: Why is the 'u' in "qu"
pronounced differently than the normal 'u'? (For example "una
quilogramme".) Why do 'l' by itself and "ll" have separate
pronunciations? (I don't know how the "ll" is pronounced correctly,
but I think I know it's *not* pronounced as two 'l' sounds.)
Why can 'y' be both a consonant (like in "yo") and a vowel (like in
"hay")?

Another minor point that comes to mind: 'c' in "capitan" vs. 'c'
in "Barcelona". I'm no authority on Spanish pronunciation but I
believe these two are different.

I suppose 'j' in Spanish is always pronounced like 'h' in English.

In fact 'j' in Spanish is a consonant that does not occur in English
(it does occur in German, and most other european languages).
English speakers say it as 'h' because it is the closest-matching
English sound. In fact it is common for allophones (sounds which differ
audibly but are interchangeable in pronunciation without affecting
the word) to be "heard" as only one sound, by people who have not put
effort into discerning the difference. Another example is English 'th'
in "thick" vs. "then".

At any rate this isn't a "problem" , I interpret "pronounced as it
is written" to mean "the same letter has the same pronunciation,
regardless of its context".

 

[Joona I Palaste]

I must agree with you here. One can make a fairly good guess at a
Finnish word's pronunciation by interpreting its letters as letters
in the International Phonetic Association's alphabet
(http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html)

In fact, I once had a cursory glance at ASCII-IPA to see how the
Finnish word "yhdysvaltalainen"'s (USAn) pronunication is written in
ASCII-IPA. Turns out it's /yhdysvaltalainen/.

Another minor point that comes to mind: 'c' in "capitan" vs. 'c'
in "Barcelona". I'm no authority on Spanish pronunciation but I
believe these two are different.

Oh yes, I didn't think about that one.

In fact 'j' in Spanish is a consonant that does not occur in English
(it does occur in German, and most other european languages).
English speakers say it as 'h' because it is the closest-matching
English sound. In fact it is common for allophones (sounds which differ
audibly but are interchangeable in pronunciation without affecting
the word) to be "heard" as only one sound, by people who have not put
effort into discerning the difference. Another example is English 'th'
in "thick" vs. "then".

At any rate this isn't a "problem" , I interpret "pronounced as it
is written" to mean "the same letter has the same pronunciation,
regardless of its context".

Yes, and this means that neither Spanish nor English is "pronounced
as written". Finnish is *almost* - the 'n' in "ng" or "nk" is not
pronounced like a normal 'n'. Otherwise it's "pronounced as written".

 

[Richard Delorme]

Dan Pop wrote :

Obviously, a non-native French speaker cannot win at the category reserved
to native French speakers I was talking about open contests.

May I know which contests? I know that an Austrian, the Prince of
Metternich supposedly won the famous and first such contest, "la dictée
de Mérimée", but other sources say it was his daugther-in-law, Pauline
Sandoz, a native French speaker and not the Prince himself. Moreover, at
this time (1857), French was the international language used in
diplomacy, so many non native French spearkers possessed an almost
perfect knowledge of the French language, which is not the case anymore.

[...] getting it right when writing requires
a solid understanding of the French grammar (otherwise, it's trivially
easy to mix up, e.g. the infinitive and past participle of most regular
verbs).

Although your last example is a common mistake, it's very easy to avoid
it for a native french speaker: just replace the verb by another one
(usually "prendre") and its pronunciation discriminates between the
infinitive and the past participle.

It doesn't matter how easy it is to avoid, what really matters is that it
is a *very* common mistake. If the written form sounds correctly, far too
many people don't bother to make the slightest effort to check that it is
the correct form.

What I meant is that you don't need a "solid understanding of the French
grammar" to avoid this mistake if you are a native French speaker, as
you can use a simple method based on pronunciation. However it is true
you cannot write correct French without paying some attention.

It's not that difficult, once you get the hang of it. As a non-native
French speaker I was able to correctly spell words I was hearing for the
first time. And the context helps a lot when disambiguating between
words with identical or near identical pronunciation, just like
in English.

Such words are often used during French spelling contests. For example,
"les cuisseaux de veau et les cuissots de chevreuil" was used by Mérimée
in his famous spelling contest. "Cuissot" and "cuisseau" designate, with
an identical pronunciation, the same part of different animals. As they
are not a very common words, it's quite hard to get the right spelling.