--- In quizbowl_at_y..., Andrew Feist <feistatduke_at_y...> wrote: > Good catch, both of you! (I KNEW I should have > written everything down before I started.) And S > before a consonant morphs into sh. Sprechen Sie > Deutsch? -> shprech' uhn zie Doytsh. Did I mention > "eu" = oy? I probably missed that too. (And, yes, > "typisch" is the word I had in mind. Now that I'm at > home, I have a dictionary to look in; right next to > typisch is Tyrann, Typhus, and Typographie. The > pronounciation guide says y is pronounced the same as > ueh (as in Fuehrer).) "oo" is, I think, rather rare, > but it's a longer version of o (like a -> aa). > > So we've changed s, v, and eu; as you can see above > "ph" is pronounced "f". Actually, it's arguable that German and French are among the most difficult languages to pronounce, largely because of the need to dissect words in German to understand stresses and vowels (and the pronunciation of certain consonants), and in French because of all of the spelling combinations, and understanding when *not* to pronounce certain letters. For example, just to use "sprechen" as an example: 1. "s -> sh" is only valid before "p" and "t," and then only at the beginning of a word or of a stem. So the "sp" in "sprechen" does indeed become "shp," but the "st" in "düster" is just "st." 2. There are in fact two pronunciations of "ch," depending upon the letters which precede it. 3. The "uh" at the end is in fact closer to a schwa, although usually spoken with a slightly darker "color" than the English schwa. There is a "solution," but to an extent it's as hard to put in practice as any other solution. The International Phonetic Alphabet can represent essentially any sound in almost any Western language. Many of the symbols are standard keyboard characters, but there are exceptions (for example, sounds like "ng," "aw," and the ubiqitous schwa). Once you know the pronunciation of each of the symbols, any word in any language which can be transcribed using IPA can be pronounced once you write out the word in IPA. However, this makes packet editing harder, because it places limits on the systems which can be used to edit packets (you need a system capable of printing the IPA symbols), and teaching someone to read IPA is not a simple task. It *is* a solution, albeit an impractical one. --AEI, the proud owner of a 250-page manual on diction in French, German, Italian, and Latin.
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