Vow Wulls

No wonder people find English hard to learn as a second language. We have oddball past tenses. We have weirdly inconsistent plurals, driven mostly by what language gave us the word.

moose/moose
but…
goose/geese

mouse/mice
but…
house/houses

We have weird spelling in general.

Today’s rant, though, is about our vowels specifically. They’re awe-ful, as in, “I am full of awe that any second-language speaker figures out how to say these words.”

home/come
one/cone

And so on. Much (most?) of this is, apparently, due to the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the 12th and 18th centuries, wherein the pronunciation of long vowels changed but the spelling of words stayed the same. As the article says, that’s the how, but no one knows the why.

But it’s even worse than all this suggests. Different language communities within the same country pronounce the same vowels differently. This week’s example is from Taylor Swift’s visit to Canada. Maybe you’ve heard something about it.

The Eras Tour

Now, is that the Eras Toor, according to those Westerners among us? Or the Eras Tore, according to the Atlantic Canadians? I’ve heard both pronunciations this week on the radio in Ottawa. You be the judge.

And all you English-as-a-second-language learners? I’m sorry. On the other hand, maybe it’s a blessing: clearly, anything goes.

our/tour

Well, almost anything.

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5 Responses to Vow Wulls

  1. Then, there are the Scottish and other dialects. In a novel by a Scot, apart from some bits of phonetically spelled dialogue that I could make sense of only in context, I came across “outwith” meaning “without” in the sense of “outside” e.g., of the city limits. That’s not exactly a pronunciation challenge but certainly adds to the challenges for ESL readers and speakers. .

  2. barbara carlson says:

    My young French-Canadian friend learned almost perfect English as an adult and wants me to correct her (rare) mispronunciations. Last year she learned she’s been saying Nobel Prize as Noble Prize and was very chagrinned.
    Last week she heard a Mitsubishi TV channel ad. The announcer said Noble Prize, not Nobel and wondered if she HAD been right. No.
    But now with AI bots (and uneducated voice actors) reading texts, all kinds of words are being mispronounced like PREsent/preSENT — SUSpect/SusPECT — etc.
    I guess anything goes. But they trip me up when I hear them. Jarring to my ear.

    • Isabel Gibson says:

      Barbara – Yes, I can imagine that achieving that last few percentage points in a second language would be disproportionately tough. As for varying the emphasis on the same set of letters by part of speech, that must be even harder than learning the Polish/polish tricks.

      • barbara carlson says:

        I met a couple of women awhile ago and when I asked where they were from, one of them said. “We’re PAH-lish.”

        • Isabel Gibson says:

          Barbara – 🙂 Well, English as we speak it is harsher and flatter than many (most?) other languages — I exclude the Irish from this assessment — so maybe the way they say it is closer to, well, the way they say it. I met a young woman today whose name tag said “Imai.” I asked, “Ee-may”? Yes! She gets I-may a lot, I understand. I was her new favourite.

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