English words that are spelled differently then how they are pronounced

[tasmanian]

Know.
Knowledge.

 

[Caecus Veritas]

arkansas
herb
salmon

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: Saint Michael

Originally posted by: Howard

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Champagne and colonel are both French words adopted into the English language, and bologna might be as well. If you're going to use that qualification, there's a bunch of shit like rendezvous, hors d'oeuvres, etc. that make no sense.

Anything with a "gh." Half the time it's an "F" sound, as in tough, and the rest, it's a long vowel, as in night. The g is always silent. What a load of shit.

There are so many in English. It's almost like a language founded on exceptions. Like having a word "lead," that can be pronounced two different ways. Well what the hell is that? One spelling, two pronunciations? That's silly.

ghost, ghastly

Ghostly, ghastly, lead, led, see, saw. All those are examples of Germanic vowel gradation. It's common in most other Germanic languages (like German: ich sehe - I see, ich sah - I saw). They aren't exceptions, really, it's just there aren't any rules one can use to predict the proper forms because the signs required for recognizing the need for such rules have long since disappeared. I'm learning Old Norse right now, for example, and the only way to recognize many conjugations and declensions is through already knowing what the word was in Proto-Norse, the language that preceded Old Norse, because the identifying word endings had disappeared by Old Norse times (~800-1300). The same thing happened to English.

Yes, but lead and led are spelled and pronounced differently (well, I guess it depends which form of "lead" you're using). Ditto with see and saw. That's normal. Words that are spelled and pronounced differently make up 99.999% of all the words out there. It's when you have things like lead, read, bass, live, minute, desert, tear, etc., that share the same spelling but are pronounced differently and have different meanings, that things get confusing. In reading, the meaning of these words is solely derived from context, as you have two different potential meanings (and some are completely ambiguous, such as "I got Jim a bass for Christmas").

That's the thing about Spanish. Spanish has words which are spelled the same, and mean different things... but they have accent marks to handle those situations. That's why papa and Papá don't get confused (except by garment manufacturers who sold T-Shirts saying "I saw the potato" when the pope was in town). English doesn't have that. Makes it something of a bitch for people to learn the language.

 

[Anubis]

ALL OF THEM

 

[Mermaidman]

English, Great Britain, Worcestershire . . .

 

[eelw]

cache
solder

 

[Noobtastic]

Laugh

 

[jonks]

Phonetic

Irony ftw

 

[KLin]

nvm

 

[Saint Michael]

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy

Originally posted by: Saint Michael

Originally posted by: Howard

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Champagne and colonel are both French words adopted into the English language, and bologna might be as well. If you're going to use that qualification, there's a bunch of shit like rendezvous, hors d'oeuvres, etc. that make no sense.

Anything with a "gh." Half the time it's an "F" sound, as in tough, and the rest, it's a long vowel, as in night. The g is always silent. What a load of shit.

There are so many in English. It's almost like a language founded on exceptions. Like having a word "lead," that can be pronounced two different ways. Well what the hell is that? One spelling, two pronunciations? That's silly.

ghost, ghastly

Ghostly, ghastly, lead, led, see, saw. All those are examples of Germanic vowel gradation. It's common in most other Germanic languages (like German: ich sehe - I see, ich sah - I saw). They aren't exceptions, really, it's just there aren't any rules one can use to predict the proper forms because the signs required for recognizing the need for such rules have long since disappeared. I'm learning Old Norse right now, for example, and the only way to recognize many conjugations and declensions is through already knowing what the word was in Proto-Norse, the language that preceded Old Norse, because the identifying word endings had disappeared by Old Norse times (~800-1300). The same thing happened to English.

Yes, but lead and led are spelled and pronounced differently (well, I guess it depends which form of "lead" you're using). Ditto with see and saw. That's normal. Words that are spelled and pronounced differently make up 99.999% of all the words out there. It's when you have things like lead, read, bass, live, minute, desert, tear, etc., that share the same spelling but are pronounced differently and have different meanings, that things get confusing. In reading, the meaning of these words is solely derived from context, as you have two different potential meanings (and some are completely ambiguous, such as "I got Jim a bass for Christmas").

That's the thing about Spanish. Spanish has words which are spelled the same, and mean different things... but they have accent marks to handle those situations. That's why papa and Papá don't get confused (except by garment manufacturers who sold T-Shirts saying "I saw the potato" when the pope was in town). English doesn't have that. Makes it something of a bitch for people to learn the language.

Lots of words in English also used to be pronounced exactly as they are spelled, but a variety of sound shifts changed the pronunciation. Actually lots of pronunciations are predictable based on sound shift patterns if you study the historical linguistics of English. So are accent shifts. For example, most nouns that have a corresponding verb spelled the same way are pronounced with an accent on the first syllable, where the verb is pronounced with an accent on the second syllable:

I'm going to play a record (REH-curd). I'm going to record (ruh-CORD) a song. The differences in the sound of the two syllables are also predictable based on the English accent system. Keeping track of all these rules is difficult, though, it's actually easier to just memorize everything. And that's what most people do.

 

[Caecus Veritas]

live.

 

[Saint Michael]

Originally posted by: sirjonk
Phonetic

Irony ftw

But "ph" is pronounced as it's spelled, because "ph" doesn't actually represent "p" and "h" but the Greek letter phi. Our alphabet was derived from Latin which took the letter phi from Greek and turned it into "ph". In Greek and Latin (at least at the time English was adopting words from them) "ph" was pronounced as "f".

 

[Cristatus]

oooh...what about read and read?

(C)

 

[dionx]

mnemonic
buffet (not Warren)
depot

 

[Q]

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Epitome. Every time I was reading that, I would say "ep ih tohm." I knew the word epitome, but I thought it was epitomy.

I had no idea that's how it was spelled.

Oh: chaos

 

[ChaoZ]

Fire, water, crap load of words.

 

[Slew Foot]

Douche


Ok maybe that's French or something

 

[ManyBeers]

pseudo--should be-- suddoh
psychiatrist--should be--fizzeuhkeyuhtrist

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: yamadakun
Colbert

isn't that like french? they all have that silent t crap over there, lol

 

[BooGiMaN]

id have to say vineyard since you dont pronounce each word seperately like most compound words

 

[Saint Michael]

Originally posted by: ManyBeers
pseudo--should be-- suddoh
psychiatrist--should be--fizzeuhkeyuhtrist

I don't know how you came up with the psychiatrist pronunciation, but that first one is how pseudo is pronounced.

 

[Xstatic1]

enough, indict

 

[ManyBeers]

Originally posted by: Saint Michael

Originally posted by: ManyBeers
pseudo--should be-- suddoh
psychiatrist--should be--fizzeuhkeyuhtrist

I don't know how you came up with the psychiatrist pronunciation, but that first one is how pseudo is pronounced.

The psychiatrist one i heard in a movie years ago and my mother and i laughed at the guys pronunciation. As for pseudo , i asked a friend of mine once how to spell it and he said "sutto", which i thought was funny because i knew how to spell it. So i modified his spelling a little to how i think it should be spelled.

 

[Saint Michael]

Originally posted by: ManyBeers

Originally posted by: Saint Michael

Originally posted by: ManyBeers
pseudo--should be-- suddoh
psychiatrist--should be--fizzeuhkeyuhtrist

I don't know how you came up with the psychiatrist pronunciation, but that first one is how pseudo is pronounced.

The psychiatrist one i heard in a movie years ago and my mother and i laughed at the guys pronunciation. As for pseudo , i asked a friend of mine once how to spell it and he said "sutto", which i thought was funny because i knew how to spell it. So i modified his spelling a little to how i think it should be spelled.

Oh, I see what you were doing. The "key" would be pronounced "kee" through analogy with the actual, wouldn't it? Phonetic spellings don't work with English in its current state because most vowels and vowel combinations have more than one sound commonly associated with them. There is no safe, neutral value for any given vowel.

 

[BoomerD]

Bow (bo) (bow and arrow)
Bow (bow) (bow of a boat)
Bough (bow) (bow of a tree)


There are lots of odd and unusual words in English...some sound much different than they spell, (school =! Shoul) Many that spell the same as other words but either pronounce differently (see above) and have different meanings, OR pronounce the same with different meanings.