Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not ‘un-animous’, it’s ‘you-nanimous’. Makes total sense.
Don’t even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce ‘ough’.
English is tough, but it can be understood through thorough thought, though.
I’m learning Swedish slowly, and I was raised in the US south, so I am constantly corrected on pronunciation lol.
Skank right? Or rather “skänk” with the sharp exhale emphasis on the sk- pronounced as wh- (similar to “who”). Hard to describe phonetically. But still lol.
My favorite is the Swedish word for fast or quick
With words starting with “un” you can figure out pronunciation by removing the “un” and see if the rest of the word is it’s own word which means the opposite. “animous” is not a word so you would use the long “u” sound in “unanimous”. Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Through that logic I’d always figured unanimous stems from “without animosity” and the word animous just got lost to time, which would make un-animous the more sensible pronunciation. But it seems that while they do share a common etymology, it’s not “un” as in negation, but rather “un” from “unus” meaning one, with both sharing “animus” meaning mind.
I also found out that animous used to exist as a synonym for animus at one point.
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don’t know unanimous, chances are I don’t know if animous exists either.
Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no ‘derstand’.
Most radiology teachers want to be unionized.
Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
Thanks. I am a native English speaker. I just hate how inconsistent it is so I try to think up as many rules as I can to apply some kind of logic to it.
Mais oui.
Once you understand the rules, I find French pronunciation generally more reliable than English.
The French heavily curate their language too, which probably contributes to it’s reliability and overall clarity. There are official words with official pronunciations, gendering, etc. No willy-nilly adding words from colloquialisms or slang like in English.
Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce “preface”. It’s obviously pre-face and it’s before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
