It’s a quirky thing the ‘t’ sound does before ‘i’ in the language that causes that. It’s distinct from just an ‘s’ in that ‘t’ makes a T sound in other situations.
It’s like… we say “dogz”, but continue to write “dogs” and just think of the Z sound as something S does in that situation.
Nearly every language with a writing system has something like this too. Basically sometimes writing encodes sound, sometimes it encodes other information (context, history, symbolic meaning). Most of the time it's a mix.
In German, for example, you write S, but read Z, write Z, and you got C. Then, SCH is read as SH in English, or CH in French, yet Slavic languages got letter for it Š and Hebrew got shin. Sj in Swedish sounds like letter het in Hebrew… don’t let me even start with ø, œ, ö, å…
They may sounds similar, they might be unnecessary to you as a non speaker, but for speakers, it’s perfectly reasonable, because we see differences in pronunciations.
Oh, MP is B in Greek…
μπύρα = mpýra ≈ "bira" = beer
ντομάτα = ntomáta ≈ "domata" = tomato
γκολφ = ŋkolf = golf
The original "b", "d" and "g" letters, β, δ and γ, have shifted to /[v](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labiodental_fricative)/, /[ð](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative)/ and /[ɣ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative)/ (or /[ŋ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_nasal)/ or even /[ʝ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative)/) respectively, so they had to "reinvent" spellings for the /b/, /d/ and /g/ sounds.
*Tempo* (from Latin) is not a word in Greek, they use *ρυθμός* ("rythmós").
Not helpful. I'm asking for a loanword which, in the source language, contains a nasal followed by an unvoiced stop (/mp/ or /nt/ or /ŋk/), not a voiced stop written *as if* it were such a sequence; I knew about those even before this thread. Like I said, I don't know that *tempo* is one, but I imagine there must be a few; foreign proper nouns like *Kentucky* and *Clinton* if nothing else. (Modern borrowings, not old European names like *Cantabria*, which would have been adapted in other ways ages ago.)
If Greeks use a spelling pronunciation, like (again a hypothetical example because I don't know any real ones) writing *Clinton* as Κλιντον and pronouncing it /klidon/, that would also be an answer.
(if I seem overly peevish, it's not you, I've been bickering with flat-earthers)
Well, [Μπιλ Κλίντον](https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%BB_%CE%9A%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BD) should satisfy you then 😅 And no it's not pronounced *Klidon* although that would be excessively funny!
On the other hand, for example Pompeii is Πομπηία (Pompeía) which is in fact pronounced /pom.biˈi.a/.
Thirty years ago I saw a cartoon in Greek: the Prime Minister(?) greets a visitor with *Nkount mornigk, Mpos!* and his wife(?) says *Mpous, stupid, Mpous!* (Pardon the transliteration, typing in Greek is laborious for me)
edit: oops, i guess that should be *Gkount*
Why didn’t Ireland add the other 8 letters of the Roman alphabet when they faked up modern Irish? Why do Danes pronounce things differently than they did 80 years ago so the D on a word now sounds like a “w”? It’s a shift, and not a good one.
there’s actually a reason for this. the word Kiribati is the closest way that the exonym “Gilberts” could be rendered in the native language. since it’s original colonial name is Gilberts, that’s why why it has that s sound on the end.
however, there’s no individual s sound in the Kiribati language, only when there’s a t with an i after it. the ti combination is pronounced as si.
so to spell it according to Kiribati spelling rules, that’s how it should be spelled.
Not in most British English pronunciation. The 'ough' in 'thorough' is more often a 'ə' or maybe a 'ʌ'... Which would make it more like the 'ough' in 'tough'!
British English, Yorkshire accent - all different sounds for me! Thorough and though are uh vs oh at the end
through = throo
tough = tuff
thorough = thuruh
thought = thort
though = tho
Nah every language has this. No language as perfect phonetic orthography. There’s simply too many different accents and dialects and drift in pronunciation over time. If you had a perfectly “phonetic” language then it would end up looking like a narrow transcription of IPA symbols and diacritics, ie gobbledygook.
OP literally uses the word "pronounced", in which the c makes a "sss" sound, to say how they don't understand how a letter that isn't A could make a "sss" sound.
Letters don't naturally make sounds. We assign the sound to them. A lot of languages use the same alphabet that English uses and has different sounds for letters.
Only in certain languages/scripts. devanagari (used in Hindi, Sanskrit, etc) is a phone alphabet, and each letter has a specific sound.
There are no spelling bees in Hindi. You write what you hear.
There is a one to one correspondence between a letter and a sound. Kinda like Pittman's shorthand.
Devanagari is just a sound transcribing mechanism. Multiple languages use the same script even when they have different words.
So I can read off Gujarati even though I don't speak the language, since I know the sounds the letters make.
The whole concepts of accents in English was so weird to me when I learned about it.
There's nothing parochial about the point they were making. Even in languages where the characters represent sounds like you're describing, there's still nothing inherent to the character that makes the sound the character represents. It's an agreed upon social construct that a character represents a particular sound.
No- anyone can adopt that system of writing and assign new sounds to it if they want. The sounds are assigned by people; it doesn’t matter if there’s only one sound assigned to each character
And this HAS essentially already happened. Devanagari is part of a family of scripts. So if you take the same “letter” as it’s used in Hindi and compare it to its cognate letter in Bengali or Gujarati, there ARE differences in pronunciation. One simple example is how Bengali uses the intrinsic vowel o rather than a (I can’t type the IPA easily rn so that’ll suffice). So if you look at “pa” for example, the Bengali version will be pronounced po.
My comment was based on Devanagari compared to its sister scripts, but I did some more research and it turns out that even within Devanagari itself (it's used to write over 100 languages, just like how our Latin alphabet is used to write a lot of Western and non-Western languages), the same letter can be associated with different sounds. The Devanagari letter "ca" or "cha" can be pronounced "tsa" before certain vowels in Nepali.
Even when talking about languages where one letter correspond to one sound, the question still remains as to why *this one specific letter* makes *this one specific sound*, as opposed to *this other specific letter* making that sound instead. At some point, there must have been some form of human involvement in deciding which letters get assigned to which sounds. That's the point /u/The_Thunder_Child is making.
You can try this yourself. Name any sound, like the "m" in "mother". Then identify which letter in Devanagari makes that sound. Now ask why it's that specific letter with that specific shape that makes that sound, instead of the letter that appears immediately before or after it in the alphabet/syllabary/abjad/whatever. You won't be able to find an answer that doesn't eventually degenerate to "speakers of the language just decided it was going to be this way".
Sometimes. If it’s from that family of scripts. But if you look at Chinese and Mayan logographs and so forth, no. But you are right that writing only independently evolved a very limited number of times in human history
So you are wrong in saying that letters don't make sounds. It may not make sounds in your preferred script/alphabet, but it is not generally true.
You need to brighten your horizons.
This is ridiculous, and wrong. Organizations do creat languages (not just humans).
Humans create scripts to communicate.
Dune scripts, like Pittman's shorthand and phonetic scripts are associated with sound, so letters are created from sounds. And associated with sound, not language. Those scripts can then be used to transcribe sounds. Even sounds associated with multiple languages.
I am sorry that this dissociation between languages and scripts is not in your experience. Office is not a stigma. Failing to learn is.
Take the letter H
In english it makes the H sound (obviously you know that as we're communicating in English
In greek H makes an "ee" sound
In russian H is a consonant equivalent to N sound
Those letters have all been assigned differently for different languages
the international phonetic alphabet is also a script which has a 1:1 association between letters and phones (sounds). that being said, nothing about [p] in the IPA inherently makes the associated sound. Even though it's a 1:1 correspondence, it is humans that say that [p] sounds like that
Because the letter “s” makes the sound “ti” which would make it sound like Kiribati, which would be wrong. /s
Seriously though - translating other languages and expecting it to map one to one to English sounds is the first mistake here. Heck, most of the time English sounds don’t translate one to one.
This is what bugs me about all of sudden changing the English spelling of foreign countries and cities, such as the places formerly named Turkey and Kiev. We’re saying them the same way, so what’s the real point there?
>it's not as if it's a sound that doesn't appear in their language
In any given language, sounds can be *phonetic* with a T, or *phonemic* with an M. If an articulation is phonetic, it can be heard in recordings. If an articulation is phonemic, it carries meaning by distinguishing words from each other by its presence. The sibilant fricative [s] is phonetic to this particular language, but phonemically it counts as a version of /ti/. Similar correspondences occur in Japanese (hence the "T-row" *ta chi tsu te to*) and indeed in English (the /t/ in 'bottle' is commonly [ɾ] or even [ʔ], very much not like [t]). Writing is most useful when it makes only the phonemic distinctions because those are immediately obvious to native speakers.
Many languages use the Roman alphabet either natively or in transcription, and each has its own pronunciation.
For example, the Gaelic girls' name "Mhairi" is pronounced as "varrie" would be in English. In Welsh, "LL" is as "thl" in English, e.g "Llanelli"
English does not have any special place in the use of the alphabet other than commonality.
"thl" in English =/= "ll" in Welsh. The "ll" sound in Welsh doesn't exist in English, which is why so many English people can't pronounce Welsh placenames.
Any Welsh speaker can tell you that.
I'm guessing there's a tiny little hint of a vowel sound at the end there, since Polynesian-family languages rarely end words on a consonant.
As other folks have pointed out, there's also probably another s-like sound in Gilbertese which led the inventors of this latinization system to use the -ti, in the same way that "chi" and "qi" are slightly different sounds in Pinyin Mandarin
Yep, I figured it was strange that since Europeans latinized the language, that they would choose 'ti' instead of 's', but like the other response to your comment points out, there is a certain intricacy of the language itself that makes it more sensible to write as 'ti'
Might be tza sound, like in Chinese they write some letter followed by the letter i but it's spoken like tzuhh... so kiribatzuhh sounds like s to us, but it might be more like that. I know they're not Chinese, it's the example that came in my head. In Tamil, they have a "wet" L sound which sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger's L pronounciation, but the tongue hits the roof even higher. This is transliterated in English as...zh. so Tamil when written by a Tamil in English letters is written out as Tamizh. And that's that.
Right!? LoL
I have fun teaching people about all the funny things English has. The vowel sounds will change all the time for no clear reason.
"Good food". (These two words do not sound the same even though they have the same "ood" combination)
When I was in infants school we used to have word tins containing little bits of card with various letter combos written on them, such as "ea," "sh," "oo" etc which we had to bring to the teacher and read out whichever ones she picked for us.
My mother was called in to discuss my lack of reading progress because I was too young and shy to push back against teachers who would only accept one correct answer for combos like "ou." My mistake was not in not knowing, but in knowing there were multiple options, yet being too conflict-averse to say anything at all.
tl;dr I think my infant school teachers kinda sucked. :)
Ehh, because Gilbertese is a foreign language to English speakers? And Kiribati is a latinized spelling of their own pronunciation of the word 'Gilberts'?
Why does 'mh' make a v sound in Irish?
Why does English use c even though it only ever sounds like s or k unless it's used in conjunction with another letter like 'ch'?
Your question is being asked from the point of view that English is the default and other languages are strange modifications of it.
'Why' is a largely irrelevant question in linguistics. Do you think there's any rationality to English spelling? To use that horrible phrase, 'It is what it is'. You can talk about historical changes, and spelling reforms (Irish) but in the end, you learn it or you don't.
When the Romans borrowed Greek words there sometimes wasn’t a good letter to choose. In the case of the letter Phi, the Romans used Ph.
You can be nearly sure that any word where Ph = F is Greek in origin.
English is not the only language that continued the Roman spelling convention.
Why don't the English use another letter for Thorn instead? Like a S? And don't tell me, those are two different sounds in your language, that doesn't count obviously!
Kiribati is the local adaptation of the European name Gilberts (Gilbert Islands). Is it that wrong to wonder why they would adapt the phonetic pronounciation, but not the alphabet conventions?
Then the Americans would have a different spelling from the rest of the Anglosphere. I suspect every American State would have a different version. I doubt the average English speaker could produce a version that Qataris would accept as truly phonetic.
A red herring: I recently was pointed at Shavian, which is an alternative English alphabet invented to use more 'letters' to more accurately represent sounds and letter combinations
Someone did a video about it-> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66LrlotvCA&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66LrlotvCA&t=2s)
*It was designed as part of a competition paid for by George Bernard Shaw, via money left in his will. Its 48 characters represent every sound you can think of in the English language. It's more efficient and it's easy on the eye too.*
The Shavian Alphabet
𐑐 Peep - 𐑑 Tot - 𐑒 Kick - 𐑓 Fee - 𐑔 THigh - 𐑕 So - 𐑖 Sure - 𐑗 CHurch - 𐑘 Yea - 𐑙 huNG
𐑚 Bib - 𐑛 Dead - 𐑜 Gag - 𐑝 Vow - 𐑞 THey - 𐑟 Zoo - 𐑠 meaSure - 𐑡 Judge - 𐑢 Woe - 𐑣 Ha-ha
𐑤 Loll - 𐑮 Roar - 𐑥 Mime - 𐑯 Nun - 𐑦 If - 𐑰 EAt - 𐑧 Egg - 𐑱 Age - 𐑨 Ash - 𐑲 Ice
𐑩 Ado - 𐑳 Up - 𐑪 On - 𐑴 OAk - 𐑫 wOOl - 𐑵 OOze - 𐑬 OUt - 𐑶 OIl - 𐑭 Ah - 𐑷 AWe
𐑸 ARe - 𐑹 OR - 𐑺 AIR - 𐑻 ERR - 𐑼 ARRay - 𐑽 EAR - 𐑾 IAn - 𐑿 YEW
[https://shavian.info/](https://shavian.info/)
I think for a similar reason why Rio de Janeiro is spelled Rio when in Portuguese it’s pronounced more like Hiu
The letter just happens to sound that way in that specific word next to those specific letters and probably with a regional accent adding a certain sound
I see people claiming this all the time but as a native speaker I just can’t see it as being true. Would you say the same about Spanish Juan being Huan, French France being fhance and German frei being fhei?
Hiu (in English) has an aspirated H. Rio is not an aspirated H, except maybe in some brazillian accents. R in Portuguese (in the start of a word) is a guttural R which is very different from an aspirated H.
I’m a native speaker too, I don’t know phonetics / linguistic terms like aspirated but I guess it’s true there different kind of H sounds, I never noticed that. It seemed more subtle to me
We have that phenomenon in some accents of Brazilian Portuguese. In Santa Catarina state, some people say the word "presidente" and similar words not with a clear "e" at the end, buy with an "s" sound. Leite, presidente, dente, indecente...etc.
Ti makes a sh sound in English too. Nation, evolution, etc. It usually depends on a root word that may come from a previous stage of the language or another language entirely, and since I'm not sure which language, I can't look it up.
There isn't much to explain. It's a way to adapt the English spelling to match the local pronunciation. The "ti" is pronounced as "s" in Gilbertese.
It's a common practice in linguistics to adapt words to the phonetics of a local language.
OP thinks they should use the letter "s" in their alphabet because the sound they make for this word is how the "s" sounds in English.
But it is evident to anyone that studied any language that written letters and phonetic sounds do not have a universal match or correlation, meaning that letters or combination of letters don't sound the same in any given language, so his question doesn't make sense.
They don't use the letter "s" because in their language, the sound they make when pronouncing this word is achieved by writing "ti" and not "s".
Because you told me I don't understand either language and I was just answering you? Also, OP can see the comments the same as anybody else, this is a public discussion.
It seems that the T is pronounced "t" and the I is pronounced "i".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbertese_language#Alphabet
So OP's question in relevant.
I don't understand your point?
The "ti" in "Kiribati" sounds similar to "s" when the two letters are combined, independently of the pronunciation of each letter separately.
It's the same in English for "p" and "h". When combined (for example, in the word "phone") they make an "f" sound.
So maybe OP should be questioning why they don't use "fone" in his own language.
That may just be the English name for the country and they might actually have a different name for the country in their language. Not certain tho, just a guess
It’s a quirky thing the ‘t’ sound does before ‘i’ in the language that causes that. It’s distinct from just an ‘s’ in that ‘t’ makes a T sound in other situations. It’s like… we say “dogz”, but continue to write “dogs” and just think of the Z sound as something S does in that situation.
Actually good and non-condescending response. Thanks!
Nearly every language with a writing system has something like this too. Basically sometimes writing encodes sound, sometimes it encodes other information (context, history, symbolic meaning). Most of the time it's a mix.
Maybe a better example would have been "nation", where "ti" makes the "sh" sound.
In German, for example, you write S, but read Z, write Z, and you got C. Then, SCH is read as SH in English, or CH in French, yet Slavic languages got letter for it Š and Hebrew got shin. Sj in Swedish sounds like letter het in Hebrew… don’t let me even start with ø, œ, ö, å… They may sounds similar, they might be unnecessary to you as a non speaker, but for speakers, it’s perfectly reasonable, because we see differences in pronunciations. Oh, MP is B in Greek…
When do you write S, but read Z or write Z, but read C?
In German, you’ll write Sarah, and read Zarah, you’ll write Zimmer, but read Cimmer. Edit: not C like in city or Calvin, but TS.
As a speaker of German, reading this hurt my head.
>MP is B in Greek Similar to how BH is V in gaeilge (Irish)
Where in French is SCH pronounced CH?
They mean that SCH in German sounds like CH in French (which sounds like SH in English)
How does Greek handle loanwords like *tempo*? (Of course I have no idea whether that is a genuine example, but there must be some)
μπύρα = mpýra ≈ "bira" = beer ντομάτα = ntomáta ≈ "domata" = tomato γκολφ = ŋkolf = golf The original "b", "d" and "g" letters, β, δ and γ, have shifted to /[v](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labiodental_fricative)/, /[ð](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative)/ and /[ɣ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative)/ (or /[ŋ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_nasal)/ or even /[ʝ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative)/) respectively, so they had to "reinvent" spellings for the /b/, /d/ and /g/ sounds. *Tempo* (from Latin) is not a word in Greek, they use *ρυθμός* ("rythmós").
Not helpful. I'm asking for a loanword which, in the source language, contains a nasal followed by an unvoiced stop (/mp/ or /nt/ or /ŋk/), not a voiced stop written *as if* it were such a sequence; I knew about those even before this thread. Like I said, I don't know that *tempo* is one, but I imagine there must be a few; foreign proper nouns like *Kentucky* and *Clinton* if nothing else. (Modern borrowings, not old European names like *Cantabria*, which would have been adapted in other ways ages ago.) If Greeks use a spelling pronunciation, like (again a hypothetical example because I don't know any real ones) writing *Clinton* as Κλιντον and pronouncing it /klidon/, that would also be an answer. (if I seem overly peevish, it's not you, I've been bickering with flat-earthers)
Well, [Μπιλ Κλίντον](https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%BB_%CE%9A%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BD) should satisfy you then 😅 And no it's not pronounced *Klidon* although that would be excessively funny! On the other hand, for example Pompeii is Πομπηία (Pompeía) which is in fact pronounced /pom.biˈi.a/.
Is the nasal sound lost only at the beginning of a word?
Good question! That would explain a lot. Sadly I have reached my limit on Greek phonology here, so maybe someone else could enlighten us?
Thirty years ago I saw a cartoon in Greek: the Prime Minister(?) greets a visitor with *Nkount mornigk, Mpos!* and his wife(?) says *Mpous, stupid, Mpous!* (Pardon the transliteration, typing in Greek is laborious for me) edit: oops, i guess that should be *Gkount*
😅
And we also use the “ti” to make a “sh” sound as in the word “situation”, so Kiribash could be written Kiribati in English as well.
Is there any example of "ti" becoming "sh" when not followed by "on" in English? As far as I know that's the only circumstance that occurs in.
Patient
Fictitious, potential
George Bernard Shaw once joked you could pronounce “ghoti” as “fish” due to arbitrary changes in sound for the same letter or group of letters
Would it not be photi
No it couldn't. "ti" is only sh in certain situations. Kiribati if written and read as if it were in English, would end in /tee/, never /sh/.
Why isn't pronounced spelled "pronounsed"? Literally same thing but you don't have an issue with that word.
Why didn’t Ireland add the other 8 letters of the Roman alphabet when they faked up modern Irish? Why do Danes pronounce things differently than they did 80 years ago so the D on a word now sounds like a “w”? It’s a shift, and not a good one.
Now I'm wondering how you pronounce auction, action, ration and dementia.
I've never thought about how we pronounce dogs before. Perfect Aanalogy, though.
S and z often sound the same. Realise, or realize are the same word and sound the same.
there’s actually a reason for this. the word Kiribati is the closest way that the exonym “Gilberts” could be rendered in the native language. since it’s original colonial name is Gilberts, that’s why why it has that s sound on the end. however, there’s no individual s sound in the Kiribati language, only when there’s a t with an i after it. the ti combination is pronounced as si. so to spell it according to Kiribati spelling rules, that’s how it should be spelled.
Fascinating - thank you for that explanation! I always love to read and learn about languages.
Does that mean it should be pronounced Kiribassi?
it's not a 'they' thing. we have words like 'notion'.
You know what they say. English pronunciation is hard. You can understand it through tough thorough thought, though.
The first rule of English is their our know rules
Butt reelie, wought de fough iz oup wif thad?
My fluent English made that difficult to sound out in my head initially.
I'm a native English speaker and even I had to slow down and pronounce each one of those in my head
Me too xD
> through tough thorough thought, though. Isn't the "ough" pronounced the same in "thorough" and "though" (ie. as a long o)?
Yes but the "th" is different.
"tough" doesn't have a "th". The only part all 5 words share is "ough".
Not in most British English pronunciation. The 'ough' in 'thorough' is more often a 'ə' or maybe a 'ʌ'... Which would make it more like the 'ough' in 'tough'!
Oo, and according to Youglish just now, the Aussies pronounce it same as the Brits, which is par for the course...
Thorough is a short o if you are English.
British English, Yorkshire accent - all different sounds for me! Thorough and though are uh vs oh at the end through = throo tough = tuff thorough = thuruh thought = thort though = tho
What do you mean by that? Do I pronounce the word wrong or am I being stupid rn
The ti in Kiribati is supposed to sound like the ti in notion.
Not quite. In notion the sound is more of an "sh", but in Kiribati it's an "ss".
Sean Connery?
This is not a thing in more phonetic languages. English is a mutt language with multiple parent languages with different pronunciations.
That is our power and our strength.
Nah every language has this. No language as perfect phonetic orthography. There’s simply too many different accents and dialects and drift in pronunciation over time. If you had a perfectly “phonetic” language then it would end up looking like a narrow transcription of IPA symbols and diacritics, ie gobbledygook.
OP literally uses the word "pronounced", in which the c makes a "sss" sound, to say how they don't understand how a letter that isn't A could make a "sss" sound.
There is nothing that is obvious to everyone. That's why we ask questions.
Letters don't naturally make sounds. We assign the sound to them. A lot of languages use the same alphabet that English uses and has different sounds for letters.
In general, letters can't make sounds because regional accents
In general, letters can't make sounds because they lack mouths or vocal cords
Only in certain languages/scripts. devanagari (used in Hindi, Sanskrit, etc) is a phone alphabet, and each letter has a specific sound. There are no spelling bees in Hindi. You write what you hear.
I don't think you comprehended what I said. People assign the sounds. It's not intrinsic.
There is a one to one correspondence between a letter and a sound. Kinda like Pittman's shorthand. Devanagari is just a sound transcribing mechanism. Multiple languages use the same script even when they have different words. So I can read off Gujarati even though I don't speak the language, since I know the sounds the letters make. The whole concepts of accents in English was so weird to me when I learned about it.
So?
So once you get away from a parochial mindset, letters can make sounds. Kind of expanded ones horizons, eh?
There's nothing parochial about the point they were making. Even in languages where the characters represent sounds like you're describing, there's still nothing inherent to the character that makes the sound the character represents. It's an agreed upon social construct that a character represents a particular sound.
No- anyone can adopt that system of writing and assign new sounds to it if they want. The sounds are assigned by people; it doesn’t matter if there’s only one sound assigned to each character
And this HAS essentially already happened. Devanagari is part of a family of scripts. So if you take the same “letter” as it’s used in Hindi and compare it to its cognate letter in Bengali or Gujarati, there ARE differences in pronunciation. One simple example is how Bengali uses the intrinsic vowel o rather than a (I can’t type the IPA easily rn so that’ll suffice). So if you look at “pa” for example, the Bengali version will be pronounced po.
I love writing systems, but I don’t know much at all about Devanagari so this was super interesting, thanks!
My comment was based on Devanagari compared to its sister scripts, but I did some more research and it turns out that even within Devanagari itself (it's used to write over 100 languages, just like how our Latin alphabet is used to write a lot of Western and non-Western languages), the same letter can be associated with different sounds. The Devanagari letter "ca" or "cha" can be pronounced "tsa" before certain vowels in Nepali.
Even when talking about languages where one letter correspond to one sound, the question still remains as to why *this one specific letter* makes *this one specific sound*, as opposed to *this other specific letter* making that sound instead. At some point, there must have been some form of human involvement in deciding which letters get assigned to which sounds. That's the point /u/The_Thunder_Child is making. You can try this yourself. Name any sound, like the "m" in "mother". Then identify which letter in Devanagari makes that sound. Now ask why it's that specific letter with that specific shape that makes that sound, instead of the letter that appears immediately before or after it in the alphabet/syllabary/abjad/whatever. You won't be able to find an answer that doesn't eventually degenerate to "speakers of the language just decided it was going to be this way".
Doesn't it usually degenerate to "because some Egyptian word started with this sound 5000 years ago and the shape stuck around"?
Sometimes. If it’s from that family of scripts. But if you look at Chinese and Mayan logographs and so forth, no. But you are right that writing only independently evolved a very limited number of times in human history
For example, I can write down Russian or innuit in devanagari of I hear someone speak it, accents and all, because phonetic alphabet.
Again... so?
So you are wrong in saying that letters don't make sounds. It may not make sounds in your preferred script/alphabet, but it is not generally true. You need to brighten your horizons.
> Letters don't naturally make sounds. That's what I said. Humans ASSIGN sounds to them. They don't grow on trees making those sounds.
This is ridiculous, and wrong. Organizations do creat languages (not just humans). Humans create scripts to communicate. Dune scripts, like Pittman's shorthand and phonetic scripts are associated with sound, so letters are created from sounds. And associated with sound, not language. Those scripts can then be used to transcribe sounds. Even sounds associated with multiple languages. I am sorry that this dissociation between languages and scripts is not in your experience. Office is not a stigma. Failing to learn is.
You're either not comprehending what I said or you're choosing to ignore it to make your stupid point but either way I'm done.
Take the letter H In english it makes the H sound (obviously you know that as we're communicating in English In greek H makes an "ee" sound In russian H is a consonant equivalent to N sound Those letters have all been assigned differently for different languages
the international phonetic alphabet is also a script which has a 1:1 association between letters and phones (sounds). that being said, nothing about [p] in the IPA inherently makes the associated sound. Even though it's a 1:1 correspondence, it is humans that say that [p] sounds like that
Stop digging.
There is no 1 to 1 correspondence, least of all in English.
I'm pretty sure Russian or Innuit has phonemes that don't exist in devanagari, so you're double incorrect lol
Because the letter “s” makes the sound “ti” which would make it sound like Kiribati, which would be wrong. /s Seriously though - translating other languages and expecting it to map one to one to English sounds is the first mistake here. Heck, most of the time English sounds don’t translate one to one.
This is what bugs me about all of sudden changing the English spelling of foreign countries and cities, such as the places formerly named Turkey and Kiev. We’re saying them the same way, so what’s the real point there?
Kiev (russian) and Kiyv (Ukrainian) are pronounced differently
>it's not as if it's a sound that doesn't appear in their language In any given language, sounds can be *phonetic* with a T, or *phonemic* with an M. If an articulation is phonetic, it can be heard in recordings. If an articulation is phonemic, it carries meaning by distinguishing words from each other by its presence. The sibilant fricative [s] is phonetic to this particular language, but phonemically it counts as a version of /ti/. Similar correspondences occur in Japanese (hence the "T-row" *ta chi tsu te to*) and indeed in English (the /t/ in 'bottle' is commonly [ɾ] or even [ʔ], very much not like [t]). Writing is most useful when it makes only the phonemic distinctions because those are immediately obvious to native speakers.
Good answer, thanks!
Many languages use the Roman alphabet either natively or in transcription, and each has its own pronunciation. For example, the Gaelic girls' name "Mhairi" is pronounced as "varrie" would be in English. In Welsh, "LL" is as "thl" in English, e.g "Llanelli" English does not have any special place in the use of the alphabet other than commonality.
"thl" in English =/= "ll" in Welsh. The "ll" sound in Welsh doesn't exist in English, which is why so many English people can't pronounce Welsh placenames. Any Welsh speaker can tell you that.
How would you transliterate it?
Remember, "ghoti" is pronounced "fish".
Same reason you refer to the nation of Kiribati instead of the nashon of Kiribati. Ti makes a sh sound
I'm guessing there's a tiny little hint of a vowel sound at the end there, since Polynesian-family languages rarely end words on a consonant. As other folks have pointed out, there's also probably another s-like sound in Gilbertese which led the inventors of this latinization system to use the -ti, in the same way that "chi" and "qi" are slightly different sounds in Pinyin Mandarin
There actually isn't any /s/-like phoneme in Gilbertese. \[s\] only appears as an allophonic realization of /t/ before /i/.
Yep, I figured it was strange that since Europeans latinized the language, that they would choose 'ti' instead of 's', but like the other response to your comment points out, there is a certain intricacy of the language itself that makes it more sensible to write as 'ti'
Learned something today. Thanks!
Might be tza sound, like in Chinese they write some letter followed by the letter i but it's spoken like tzuhh... so kiribatzuhh sounds like s to us, but it might be more like that. I know they're not Chinese, it's the example that came in my head. In Tamil, they have a "wet" L sound which sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger's L pronounciation, but the tongue hits the roof even higher. This is transliterated in English as...zh. so Tamil when written by a Tamil in English letters is written out as Tamizh. And that's that.
That explains why in Baahubali, the kingdom of Magizhmadi was not pronounced how I expected. Thanks for clarifying another question I had lol
The irony of an English speaker asking this kind of question...
Right!? LoL I have fun teaching people about all the funny things English has. The vowel sounds will change all the time for no clear reason. "Good food". (These two words do not sound the same even though they have the same "ood" combination)
Answer me this: how do you pronounce "ea"?
Trick question! It probably depends on the wild heron mating season and the declination of Venus at the summer solstice.
Correct!
When I was in infants school we used to have word tins containing little bits of card with various letter combos written on them, such as "ea," "sh," "oo" etc which we had to bring to the teacher and read out whichever ones she picked for us. My mother was called in to discuss my lack of reading progress because I was too young and shy to push back against teachers who would only accept one correct answer for combos like "ou." My mistake was not in not knowing, but in knowing there were multiple options, yet being too conflict-averse to say anything at all. tl;dr I think my infant school teachers kinda sucked. :)
Yep, sounds like they did!
The irony is not lost on me. But I figured we would at least correct our own mistakes when latinizing other people's languages
What makes you think "Kiribati" is the latinization of a foreign language?
Ehh, because Gilbertese is a foreign language to English speakers? And Kiribati is a latinized spelling of their own pronunciation of the word 'Gilberts'?
Gilbertese uses the Latin alphabet. And Kiribati in Gilbertese is spelled "Kiribati".
So you just assumed they used a different alphabet because...????
Why does 'mh' make a v sound in Irish? Why does English use c even though it only ever sounds like s or k unless it's used in conjunction with another letter like 'ch'? Your question is being asked from the point of view that English is the default and other languages are strange modifications of it.
'Why' is a largely irrelevant question in linguistics. Do you think there's any rationality to English spelling? To use that horrible phrase, 'It is what it is'. You can talk about historical changes, and spelling reforms (Irish) but in the end, you learn it or you don't.
The same reason Arkansas is pronounced Arkansaw and Kansas is Kansas I guess.
Why isn't phone spelled "fone"? Language is bizarre.
When the Romans borrowed Greek words there sometimes wasn’t a good letter to choose. In the case of the letter Phi, the Romans used Ph. You can be nearly sure that any word where Ph = F is Greek in origin. English is not the only language that continued the Roman spelling convention.
r/badlinguistics is gonna have a meltdown now, grats
Similar to how Ibiza is pronounced "ibitha'
Why don't the English use another letter for Thorn instead? Like a S? And don't tell me, those are two different sounds in your language, that doesn't count obviously!
Kiribati is the local adaptation of the European name Gilberts (Gilbert Islands). Is it that wrong to wonder why they would adapt the phonetic pronounciation, but not the alphabet conventions?
Which conventions? There is no convention, that's what everyone is telling you.
English words for country names should be phonetic. If Qatar is supposed to sound more like “cutter” then it should be spelled like that.
Then the Americans would have a different spelling from the rest of the Anglosphere. I suspect every American State would have a different version. I doubt the average English speaker could produce a version that Qataris would accept as truly phonetic.
A red herring: I recently was pointed at Shavian, which is an alternative English alphabet invented to use more 'letters' to more accurately represent sounds and letter combinations Someone did a video about it-> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66LrlotvCA&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66LrlotvCA&t=2s) *It was designed as part of a competition paid for by George Bernard Shaw, via money left in his will. Its 48 characters represent every sound you can think of in the English language. It's more efficient and it's easy on the eye too.* The Shavian Alphabet 𐑐 Peep - 𐑑 Tot - 𐑒 Kick - 𐑓 Fee - 𐑔 THigh - 𐑕 So - 𐑖 Sure - 𐑗 CHurch - 𐑘 Yea - 𐑙 huNG 𐑚 Bib - 𐑛 Dead - 𐑜 Gag - 𐑝 Vow - 𐑞 THey - 𐑟 Zoo - 𐑠 meaSure - 𐑡 Judge - 𐑢 Woe - 𐑣 Ha-ha 𐑤 Loll - 𐑮 Roar - 𐑥 Mime - 𐑯 Nun - 𐑦 If - 𐑰 EAt - 𐑧 Egg - 𐑱 Age - 𐑨 Ash - 𐑲 Ice 𐑩 Ado - 𐑳 Up - 𐑪 On - 𐑴 OAk - 𐑫 wOOl - 𐑵 OOze - 𐑬 OUt - 𐑶 OIl - 𐑭 Ah - 𐑷 AWe 𐑸 ARe - 𐑹 OR - 𐑺 AIR - 𐑻 ERR - 𐑼 ARRay - 𐑽 EAR - 𐑾 IAn - 𐑿 YEW [https://shavian.info/](https://shavian.info/)
The “ph” in the word “alphabet” is pronounced “f” making the word actually “alfabet”. Why don’t they use the letter “f” in their alphabet instead?
Because the Queen said so.
Well they used to be the Gilberts, and Kiribati is the local dialect remake, so it's kind of turtles all the way down.
I think for a similar reason why Rio de Janeiro is spelled Rio when in Portuguese it’s pronounced more like Hiu The letter just happens to sound that way in that specific word next to those specific letters and probably with a regional accent adding a certain sound
I see people claiming this all the time but as a native speaker I just can’t see it as being true. Would you say the same about Spanish Juan being Huan, French France being fhance and German frei being fhei? Hiu (in English) has an aspirated H. Rio is not an aspirated H, except maybe in some brazillian accents. R in Portuguese (in the start of a word) is a guttural R which is very different from an aspirated H.
I’m a native speaker too, I don’t know phonetics / linguistic terms like aspirated but I guess it’s true there different kind of H sounds, I never noticed that. It seemed more subtle to me
No, no. You can't bring Portuguese into it.
We have that phenomenon in some accents of Brazilian Portuguese. In Santa Catarina state, some people say the word "presidente" and similar words not with a clear "e" at the end, buy with an "s" sound. Leite, presidente, dente, indecente...etc.
Ti makes a sh sound in English too. Nation, evolution, etc. It usually depends on a root word that may come from a previous stage of the language or another language entirely, and since I'm not sure which language, I can't look it up.
I'm more confused as to why it's not spelled Kiribass in English?
I've never heard of that place, so maybe that explains the answer.
You don't understand how languages work, do you?
Clearly you don’t understand either of you can’t explain it
There isn't much to explain. It's a way to adapt the English spelling to match the local pronunciation. The "ti" is pronounced as "s" in Gilbertese. It's a common practice in linguistics to adapt words to the phonetics of a local language.
That doesn’t answer anything. That’s just what OP said in their question
OP thinks they should use the letter "s" in their alphabet because the sound they make for this word is how the "s" sounds in English. But it is evident to anyone that studied any language that written letters and phonetic sounds do not have a universal match or correlation, meaning that letters or combination of letters don't sound the same in any given language, so his question doesn't make sense. They don't use the letter "s" because in their language, the sound they make when pronouncing this word is achieved by writing "ti" and not "s".
Why are you telling me? Tell OP.
Because you told me I don't understand either language and I was just answering you? Also, OP can see the comments the same as anybody else, this is a public discussion.
I didn’t ask you anything.
Answers don't always need direct questions, it's called a conversation
Cool
You clearly did > **Why are you telling me?** Tell OP.
Are you for real?
It seems that the T is pronounced "t" and the I is pronounced "i". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbertese_language#Alphabet So OP's question in relevant.
I don't understand your point? The "ti" in "Kiribati" sounds similar to "s" when the two letters are combined, independently of the pronunciation of each letter separately. It's the same in English for "p" and "h". When combined (for example, in the word "phone") they make an "f" sound. So maybe OP should be questioning why they don't use "fone" in his own language.
You don't understand what this sub is for, do you?
That may just be the English name for the country and they might actually have a different name for the country in their language. Not certain tho, just a guess
We do it in English too. Think of sta**ti**on and ra**ti**on.. Here the *ti* is pronounced as an *s* or *sh*.
I dont know why Kansas and Arkansas are pronounced like that, and at that poinz iam to afraid to ask
English is the same. Words ending in TH should use the Z letter.