For all the bad rep French gets about not pronouncing letters in words, at least the t in tsunami is clearly pronounced. As is the p in psychologie, pseudo and pneumonie.
While it’s true from an English speaker’s perspective, to a non-native whose alphabet contains the ‘ts’ sound as a separate letter: there’s no ‘t’ sound in our ‘ts’ sound (which is just the letter ‘c’ for us - boring details in the spoiler section), since it’s not a series of ‘t’ and ‘s’, but one consistent sound on its own, deserving its own letter.
So we would naturally say the ‘ts’ in tsunami doesn’t have a ‘t’ or an ‘s’ (or any silent letter) in it.
spoiler
The 3 c’s in ‘pacific ocean’ are all pronounced differently. We don’t have that madness. Spelling to pronunciation is consistent. The first ‘c’ is just an ‘s’ sound, so we just use our letter for the ‘s’ sound. Which is ‘sz’. It might look weird, but only because the letter ‘s’ is preserved for the ‘sh’ sound. Unusual, but consistent.
The middle ‘c’ is pronounced ‘k’. We just use ‘k’ when it sounds like ‘k’.
So what do we use ‘c’ for? The ‘ts’ sound. Consistently. ‘tsunami’ is spelled ‘cunami’ here.
This is why it sounded so weird when as a kid I watched an American film and they looked at a written word and went “How do you pronounce it?”.
WTF mate, it’s written right there!
Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound. Also “gy” is not very logical as it should be “dy” but when the italians first tried to write hungarian down they used g cause in italian g can sound like “gy” in many cases. And then lastly “ly” is just utterly useless, it used to represent a seperate sound with some words contrasting them “boj” vs “boly” was a thing from what i could find, but the dialect modern standard hungarian was based on did not have this distinction so they just used “j” everywhere but kept “ly” where there wasnt a word with “j” that was spelt the same otherwise. This means modern day hungarian speakers in for example slovakia will say all “ly” as the sound for “ly” and “j” will be a mix between the two. As for features they couldve written down but didnt, in both of the dialects i grew up with(family from szeged, but grew up in the north west) there are two “e” sounds, sometimes written as “e” and “ë” when the distinction is wanted. Szeged is an example itself with it being possible to write it as “Szëged” because in the dialect there its pronounced as “Szöged”. On the other hand where i grew up its “Szegæd” where “æ” is pronounced kind of like “a” in english “ash”. Point is hungarian spelling is very much not logical, there are even more examples like “lesz” actually being pronounced with long sz usually so “lessz” would be more accurate, “is” and “se” being clitics like “-e”, and there actually being a long and short “e” distinct from “é” in some words technically making them phonemes like in “ere”(his vein) pronounced “ere” vs erre(this way) pronounced as “eere” or more often written as “ēre”. So yeah many holes tho still a thousand times better than most european languages spelling.
Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound.
Totally agreed. Like, also, everything else that you mentioned, but especially this. I really don’t get where they got the idea from, since every (most?) language around has it the other way around, including Latin and German (and their derivatives like romance languages and such). Maybe Turkish and/or Romanian that I can think of, but AFAIK even they put diacritics on their ‘s’ when referring to the ‘sh’ sound (I don’t speak any of those, though, so I might be horribly wrong).
It’s especially annoying because most Western European speakers are more used to the Polish sz-s system (which makes more sense), completely butchering words like Szoboszlai (I’m playing E-Football and the commentator pronounces his name like three different wrong ways, about never right).
I had a relatively old teacher ~30 years ago that said ‘j’ and ‘ly’ are pronounced slightly differently, giving two examples, and I couldn’t hear any difference : ).
I used to go to uni in Szeged so it was quite eye-opening reading about the weird 'e’s. So if I got that right, that’s the reason they say stuff with ‘ö’ instead of ‘e’ in certain cases (because it’s not exactly ‘ö’, but that’s the closest regular letter we’ve got)?
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’ (or not? Could be regional) and stuff, but what I meant by ‘consistent’ is that almost always if you see something spelled a certain way you can expect it to sound that certain way, without bullshit silent letters and completely different consonants or vowels. Not in terms of phonemes but actual letters.
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’
(I’m still salty about ‘bicikli’ keeping the ‘k’ but the short for ‘lakodalom’ is ‘lagzi’ and not ‘lakzi’)
Phonetically though, the sound in question is composed of a t and an s sound. You can recognise that regardless of your own language.
Ts is an affricate, composed of a stop and fricative with the same place of articulation. The analysis is similar to analysing diphthongs as being composed of two vowel sounds.
Not exactly, a few languages will pronounce them differently, treat them differently for syllable weight, geminate them and even contrast them. A few examples being, in languages that need this que, “ts” is pronounced longer than “c”. Syllable weight and syllable structure often treats them as one, with some languages being CV for example where a syllable is always composed of one consonant and one vowel yet they will allow affricates which means they are one consonant(this is alsk the case for prenasalization). In languages that have geminates its often a rule that if theres a geminate in a syllable, its always the coda(so after the vowel) and there can be no other consonant in the coda if its geminate yet it will allow affricates, this is the case for hungarian and sami languages for example from what i know. And lastly in polish for example they even contrast directly with the wikipedia example of “dżem” vs “drzem” where dż is a single retroflex affricate segment and drz is a retroflex d and z after eachother but are not an affricate. They should probably do research on how this looks in your throat and do those sonic analyses they did with prenasalized stops to determine they are actually pronounced differently and arent just quirks in the syllable structure.
“means they are one consonant” is the perspective of the language’s speakers, not of the actual sounds they are making. The former is a subjective matter, the latter is essentially objective. Whether speakers believe they are saying one consonant or two, a “ts” affricate always consists of stopping the air with the the tongue behind the teeth (the t) and then releasing it with a lot of turbulence with the tongue still behind the teeth (the s). Those sounds are physically distinct, even if speakers think of them as comprising a single logical unit.
This is also consistent with there being a slightly differently pronounced sequence comprising a t and an s sound which is not analysed as a single consonant! Both are two physical sounds.
In my language most native speakers don’t realise that diphthongs are made of two vowel sounds, but they still are :)
True, I might have phrased it wrong. The way we (I?) pronounce that ‘c’ the tongue position is slightly different from ‘t’ (less of the very tip of it, a tad bit further to the back, close to the tip), hence I thought it deserves the status of a separate sound instead of a transition between the two. Mind you I’m not a linguist and it may be completely bonkers from an actual expert’s perspective.
It’s the difference between a purely phonetic viewpoint and one based in the language - you’re not really wrong to see it one way, just that there’s another as well.
But you certainly can say “let’s” and not just “le’'s” right? We don’t have it word-initial in a standalone context, but it exists. Certainly, it should be pronounced then, right?
No because in careful speech for example “let’s” is pronounced as “l-e-t-s” while in languages that do have the “c” sound, even with careful, slow pronounciation its “l-e-c”. English, like every language, has rules about clusters and its basically a rule that “s” always has to be farther away from the syllable nucleus(the vowel basically) than the stop(t in this case). This results in “step” being valid but “tsep” not being valid. Theres also the extra layer of brits being more european so they often pronounce it as “cunami” while americans pronounce it as “sunami” from what i gather. Also another thing is that english doesnt have any base words that distinguish the “c” sound, theyre always loanwords and you can pronounce them as “s”
It drives me crazy that people skip the ‘t’ in ‘tsunami’. Do you want a vinegar wave? That’s how we get vinegar waves
For all the bad rep French gets about not pronouncing letters in words, at least the t in tsunami is clearly pronounced. As is the p in psychologie, pseudo and pneumonie.
While it’s true from an English speaker’s perspective, to a non-native whose alphabet contains the ‘ts’ sound as a separate letter: there’s no ‘t’ sound in our ‘ts’ sound (which is just the letter ‘c’ for us - boring details in the spoiler section), since it’s not a series of ‘t’ and ‘s’, but one consistent sound on its own, deserving its own letter.
So we would naturally say the ‘ts’ in tsunami doesn’t have a ‘t’ or an ‘s’ (or any silent letter) in it.
spoiler
The 3 c’s in ‘pacific ocean’ are all pronounced differently. We don’t have that madness. Spelling to pronunciation is consistent. The first ‘c’ is just an ‘s’ sound, so we just use our letter for the ‘s’ sound. Which is ‘sz’. It might look weird, but only because the letter ‘s’ is preserved for the ‘sh’ sound. Unusual, but consistent. The middle ‘c’ is pronounced ‘k’. We just use ‘k’ when it sounds like ‘k’. So what do we use ‘c’ for? The ‘ts’ sound. Consistently. ‘tsunami’ is spelled ‘cunami’ here.
This is why it sounded so weird when as a kid I watched an American film and they looked at a written word and went “How do you pronounce it?”. WTF mate, it’s written right there!
Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound. Also “gy” is not very logical as it should be “dy” but when the italians first tried to write hungarian down they used g cause in italian g can sound like “gy” in many cases. And then lastly “ly” is just utterly useless, it used to represent a seperate sound with some words contrasting them “boj” vs “boly” was a thing from what i could find, but the dialect modern standard hungarian was based on did not have this distinction so they just used “j” everywhere but kept “ly” where there wasnt a word with “j” that was spelt the same otherwise. This means modern day hungarian speakers in for example slovakia will say all “ly” as the sound for “ly” and “j” will be a mix between the two. As for features they couldve written down but didnt, in both of the dialects i grew up with(family from szeged, but grew up in the north west) there are two “e” sounds, sometimes written as “e” and “ë” when the distinction is wanted. Szeged is an example itself with it being possible to write it as “Szëged” because in the dialect there its pronounced as “Szöged”. On the other hand where i grew up its “Szegæd” where “æ” is pronounced kind of like “a” in english “ash”. Point is hungarian spelling is very much not logical, there are even more examples like “lesz” actually being pronounced with long sz usually so “lessz” would be more accurate, “is” and “se” being clitics like “-e”, and there actually being a long and short “e” distinct from “é” in some words technically making them phonemes like in “ere”(his vein) pronounced “ere” vs erre(this way) pronounced as “eere” or more often written as “ēre”. So yeah many holes tho still a thousand times better than most european languages spelling.
Totally agreed. Like, also, everything else that you mentioned, but especially this. I really don’t get where they got the idea from, since every (most?) language around has it the other way around, including Latin and German (and their derivatives like romance languages and such). Maybe Turkish and/or Romanian that I can think of, but AFAIK even they put diacritics on their ‘s’ when referring to the ‘sh’ sound (I don’t speak any of those, though, so I might be horribly wrong).
It’s especially annoying because most Western European speakers are more used to the Polish sz-s system (which makes more sense), completely butchering words like Szoboszlai (I’m playing E-Football and the commentator pronounces his name like three different wrong ways, about never right).
I had a relatively old teacher ~30 years ago that said ‘j’ and ‘ly’ are pronounced slightly differently, giving two examples, and I couldn’t hear any difference : ).
I used to go to uni in Szeged so it was quite eye-opening reading about the weird 'e’s. So if I got that right, that’s the reason they say stuff with ‘ö’ instead of ‘e’ in certain cases (because it’s not exactly ‘ö’, but that’s the closest regular letter we’ve got)?
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’ (or not? Could be regional) and stuff, but what I meant by ‘consistent’ is that almost always if you see something spelled a certain way you can expect it to sound that certain way, without bullshit silent letters and completely different consonants or vowels. Not in terms of phonemes but actual letters.
Phonetically though, the sound in question is composed of a t and an s sound. You can recognise that regardless of your own language.
Ts is an affricate, composed of a stop and fricative with the same place of articulation. The analysis is similar to analysing diphthongs as being composed of two vowel sounds.
Not exactly, a few languages will pronounce them differently, treat them differently for syllable weight, geminate them and even contrast them. A few examples being, in languages that need this que, “ts” is pronounced longer than “c”. Syllable weight and syllable structure often treats them as one, with some languages being CV for example where a syllable is always composed of one consonant and one vowel yet they will allow affricates which means they are one consonant(this is alsk the case for prenasalization). In languages that have geminates its often a rule that if theres a geminate in a syllable, its always the coda(so after the vowel) and there can be no other consonant in the coda if its geminate yet it will allow affricates, this is the case for hungarian and sami languages for example from what i know. And lastly in polish for example they even contrast directly with the wikipedia example of “dżem” vs “drzem” where dż is a single retroflex affricate segment and drz is a retroflex d and z after eachother but are not an affricate. They should probably do research on how this looks in your throat and do those sonic analyses they did with prenasalized stops to determine they are actually pronounced differently and arent just quirks in the syllable structure.
“means they are one consonant” is the perspective of the language’s speakers, not of the actual sounds they are making. The former is a subjective matter, the latter is essentially objective. Whether speakers believe they are saying one consonant or two, a “ts” affricate always consists of stopping the air with the the tongue behind the teeth (the t) and then releasing it with a lot of turbulence with the tongue still behind the teeth (the s). Those sounds are physically distinct, even if speakers think of them as comprising a single logical unit.
This is also consistent with there being a slightly differently pronounced sequence comprising a t and an s sound which is not analysed as a single consonant! Both are two physical sounds.
In my language most native speakers don’t realise that diphthongs are made of two vowel sounds, but they still are :)
True, I might have phrased it wrong. The way we (I?) pronounce that ‘c’ the tongue position is slightly different from ‘t’ (less of the very tip of it, a tad bit further to the back, close to the tip), hence I thought it deserves the status of a separate sound instead of a transition between the two. Mind you I’m not a linguist and it may be completely bonkers from an actual expert’s perspective.
It’s the difference between a purely phonetic viewpoint and one based in the language - you’re not really wrong to see it one way, just that there’s another as well.
But you certainly can say “let’s” and not just “le’'s” right? We don’t have it word-initial in a standalone context, but it exists. Certainly, it should be pronounced then, right?
No because in careful speech for example “let’s” is pronounced as “l-e-t-s” while in languages that do have the “c” sound, even with careful, slow pronounciation its “l-e-c”. English, like every language, has rules about clusters and its basically a rule that “s” always has to be farther away from the syllable nucleus(the vowel basically) than the stop(t in this case). This results in “step” being valid but “tsep” not being valid. Theres also the extra layer of brits being more european so they often pronounce it as “cunami” while americans pronounce it as “sunami” from what i gather. Also another thing is that english doesnt have any base words that distinguish the “c” sound, theyre always loanwords and you can pronounce them as “s”