Do you pronounce ''world'' with one or two syllables?

JJM   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 20:39 GMT
Adam:

"Because English, unlike Dutch and most other European languages, is NOT a phonetic language."

Oh really? If English is not phonetic, what are all those sounds people make when they speak it?

I think what you're actually trying to say here is that English spelling is not particularly phonetically efficient.
Frances   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 20:56 GMT
Here's an mp3 of me saying world, Carl, Carroll and Whirl:

http://www.geocities.com/fkosovel/worldcarl.html

Tell me what you think.
Kirk   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 21:21 GMT
<<Oh really? If English is not phonetic, what are all those sounds people make when they speak it?

I think what you're actually trying to say here is that English spelling is not particularly phonetically efficient.>>

You took the words straight out of my mouth :) I always chuckle when someone claims that English isn't "phonetic." I can list the 40+ contrastive phonemes (depending on the dialect) of English if anyone doubts that.

Anyway, even back to what the poster intended, English spelling, for all its supposed craziness, is overall pretty consistent. The egregiously spelled words are almost always high frequency, more basic words anyway. Also, for all the myriad of English dialects out there, English spelling doesn't do a half-bad job. But we really don't need to get into the spelling reform debate here again, so I'll just stop.
zarafa   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 21:39 GMT
People probably say that English isn't "phonetic" because that's the term we learned in school. At least I did. Maybe language teachers are more sophisticated these days.
Kirk   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 21:44 GMT
<<People probably say that English isn't "phonetic" because that's the term we learned in school. At least I did. Maybe language teachers are more sophisticated these days.>>

Yeah, I realize that technical linguistic terminology is different from how many words are commonly used, so I try not to be snobbish about it. You're probably right, that that's the way people heard it taught to them in school.
Richard   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 21:48 GMT
It's that strange letter R that is almost a vowel, but not completely.

Kissimmee/Orlando, Florida
World: one syllable
Whirl: one syllable
Carl: one syllable
Carroll: two syllables

It's very weird how that works.
Lazar   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 21:57 GMT
The English <r> is an approximant, which means that the airflow is less restricted than in most other consonants. So it is sort of vowely, as consonants go.
Travis   Thursday, June 09, 2005, 23:10 GMT
What should be said here is not that "English is not a phonetic language" but rather "English orthographic is not phonemic or phonetic" (examples of phonemic orthographies being, say, the Finnish, both Roman-script and Cyrillic-script Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, the Japanese Kunrei romaji orthographies, and (mostly) the Spanish, Polish, and Japanese kana orthographies, and examples of phonetic orthographies being, say, Italian orthography. The difference between phonemic orthographies is that they represent individual phonemes and do not take into account how they are actually realized in context, whereas phonetic orthographies do specifically take such things into account, and do not solely concern themselves with phonemic contrasts alone. Note that what most people would call "phonetic" is actually phonemic, in most cases.
JJM   Friday, June 10, 2005, 08:04 GMT
"But we really don't need to get into the spelling reform debate here again, so I'll just stop."

I agree. For all the noise about English spelling, my impression is that overall, it doesn't act as a particularly strong impediment to literacy. I do think the "phonetic alphabet" business is highly over-rated anyway.

Whatever their language, most people who learn to read it only approach it phonetically in the very early stages. For persons fully literate in any language, I'm convinced written words quickly become immediately recognized "pictographs."*

And even so-called "phonetic alphabets" can never be 100% efficient. They will at best only approximate the sounds of a single arbitrary "standard" version of any given language rather than its various dialect sounds.

A highly efficient phonetic alphabet - such as IPA - if adopted, could actually cause chaos. In the case of English, it could mean a myriad of different spellings for the same word, to cater for all the differing pronunciations in BE, AE, Canadian English, Australian English, etc, etc...

* I very much doubt that any native English speaker with average reading skills following the text of my posting is breaking up each word and mentally sounding them out in order to understand the passage!
greg   Friday, June 10, 2005, 08:20 GMT
To some extent, English spelling may be considered a living tribute to etymology and history. A great deal of orthographic inconsistencies could actually be a heritage of (Old/Middle/Modern) French or caused by changes such as the great vowel shift. A kind of sweet invitation to lexical investigation. Certainly better the way it is now than Schoonmaker's absurdities.
Adam   Friday, June 10, 2005, 09:12 GMT
"The Anglo-Saxons didnt speak English (at least nothing you would recognise. "

They also didn't speak Dutch or German.
Adam   Friday, June 10, 2005, 09:15 GMT
"Ever compared old 'english'to Dutch?! Ever heard about beowulf?"

Old English looks nothing like Dutch.

And people were speaking Old English before Dutch was created. Dutch was only created in about 700AD, which makes it quite young. And even then it was Old Dutch, and not like the Dutch that is spoken today.
Adam   Friday, June 10, 2005, 09:18 GMT
English is not Phonetic
Josef Essberger

Some languages are "phonetic". That means you can look at a written word and know how to pronounce it. Or you can hear a word and know how to spell it. With phonetic languages, there is a direct relationship between the spelling and the sound.

It is important to understand that English is not a phonetic language. So we often do not say a word the same way it is spelled.

Some words can have the same spelling but different pronunciation, for example:

I like to read [ri:d].
I have read [red] that book.
Some words have different spelling but the same pronunciation, for example:

I have read [red] that book.
My favourite colour is red [red].


Students sometimes ask: "Why is English so difficult to pronounce?" This is really the wrong question. The right question would be: "Why is English so difficult to spell?"

All languages are spoken first and written second. If you only speak English, it is very easy to pronounce. The difficulty comes when you write English and then try to speak it the same way as you write it. When you practise pronunciation, try to forget about written English. Think only about the sound of the words.

To illustrate this point, we say that the spelling "ough" can be pronounced with seven different sounds. But this is the wrong way to put it. It would be better to say that the seven different sounds can be represented in writing by the same spelling. So you see that it cannot help at all to think about "ough". It's much more helpful to think about the seven sounds:

though (like o in go)
through (like oo in too)
cough (like off in offer)
rough (like uff in suffer)
plough (like ow in flower)
ought (like aw in saw)
borough (like a in above)

Think and practise the sounds of English. Afterwards, you can say how silly the spelling is. It is English spelling that causes the difficulty, not English pronunciation!

© 2001 Josef Essberger

http://www.englishclub.com/esl-articles/200104.htm
Kirk   Friday, June 10, 2005, 10:17 GMT
<<A highly efficient phonetic alphabet - such as IPA - if adopted, could actually cause chaos.>>

That's for sure. I think some of the widely different phonetic transcriptions seen on this forum have demonstrated that well.

[If wi w@` 4@ A5 r\aI4 In aIp_hi"eI In"stE4 @ t_hr\@"dISIn5= Or\"TAgr\@fi DEn "Evr\iw@nz w3`dz Ud_} gE4 A5 @b"skj3`4 In D@ mIks]

:)
Don   Friday, June 10, 2005, 11:21 GMT
<<Pardon me for going off on a tangent, but I have a question for people who don't say "where," "when," "what" and "whale" with a "hw." Do you also say "whirl" like "wirl?" I am a hw-er, but I can pronounce all the words I cited with a plain "w" and not think it feels strange. But saying "wirl" feels very unnatural. I think there's something about the "hw" sound that sounds right for what "whirl" means.>>

Zarafa,

I pronounce words like ''where'', ''when'', ''what'' and ''whale'' with a /W/ sound as well as ''whirl''. I don't think pronouncing any of these words with a /w/ sound sounds strange including ''whirl''. It only sounds different. I don't know why ''whirl'' would sound any different that way, than the other words.

Anyway, here's my pronunciation for the following words:

where - /Wer/

when - /WEn/

what - /WQt/

whale - /We5/

whirl - /W3`.@5/

whirled - /W3`.@5d/

world - /w3`.@5d/

Carl - /kAr.@5/