Clocked in at 7.15am.
Going to clock out now, 9.15pm.
No recordings tonite, sorry
Aww 
Ok, I finally got home. Monday is the busiest of my weekdays. I’ll be back to this topic soon, promise 
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Well, this is the opposite of what I claim in this whole thread, indeed.
How can it be if in english every vowel has AT LEAST three or four different sounds?
That excluding diphtongs, Which are really common.
Words like “gauge” for example, are a real mystery to me. Why is that U there?
No, english is not written as it is pronounced.
That’s why you learn reading english word by word, and reading italian letter by letter.
Do you know how I learned how to read by myself?
I heard some older kids singing a doggerel which contained the alphabet.
Then I found an alphabet. I understood that it was the graphical transcription of the doggerel and I tried to figure out how each letter could have a sound.
You only need some memory to learn the symbols and the sounds, and the next step is absolutely no brainer, in italian. That would be impossible in english.
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Well, no. The R is always rolling.
We have some exceptions, but very self-contained.
People from Parma have an R which resembles a french R.
People from Vicenza have an R which resembles an indian R.
But that’s it.
Everybody else is rrrrrrrrrrrrrolling.
Well, obvoiusly you mustn’t count people from Bozen whose native language is german, or people from Aoste, since Aostan isn’t an italian dialect, but it is a french patois
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Again, French is worse. Take the word for water: “de l’eau” and ignore the grammatical indefinite article "de l’ " for a moment. So that is EAU. And how to pronounce it…? Exactly, with a single vowel that is not even in the word.
Just face it, Italian is generally an overlogical exception amongst languages. I believe Turkish makes the same claim of a having a single pronunciation for every symbol/letter. The Italian C also has some different sounds depending on the next/previous letters, but ok.
Being raised in one of the “illogical” languages isn’t such a bad thing. Especially when being confronted with other languages later.
Later. Water. 
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Yes. Very true. And I like this. I find it convenient. That’s why I approve @guga’s idea to have IPA phonetic transcription as the international standard as orthography for any language. But that’s science fiction, isn’t it? 
Yes. But the key fact is that ORTHOGRAPHY is the unbreakable rule for pronunciation in italian.
If you know orthography rules, you simply CAN’T get a pronunciation wrong.
It would be wonderful if it were so in english… in english, if you haven’t heard their sound, you could never figure out the pronounciation of words like gauge, tomb, island, Tucson…
Even wikipedia says that one of the most common errors of italians learning english is to consider orthography as a suggestion for pronunciation!
Oh, not at all. We’re not discussing which language is “the best”. We’re just underlining differences.
I think italian is a difficult language, much more than english.
But this pronunciation thing is really easy, when compared with all the other languages, and I think most of thw people don’t know that. You could study for an afternoon and then be able to pronunce italian correctly (or at least, figure out how it should be pronounced correctly) forever.
That is awesome, to me. I’d love to learn so easily such a thing from an obscure and stranger language.
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Fun fact:
in italy, if you ask “How do I write this english word?” you won’t get a spelling as a reply,
Italian people do not take the time to spell a long english word… 
They simply answer saying that word according to the ITALIAN PRONOUNTIATION RULES.
And that is enough, for the listener, to understand how that word should be written.
And what if it happens the english word actually respect -by chance- italian orthography rules in matter of pronounciation?
Well, it happens this:
“How do I write this english word?”
“You can write it just as you read it”.
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Read? 
You meant “heard”, right?
Else I didn’t get what orthography means. It’s that thing where you like watching birds, right? 
He meant it in the sense of “pronounce”, because “to read” in Italian is often implying “out loud”.
Watch out, since “bird” is a slang for “penis” in Italian 
don’t make me link the discussion on the Language Thread.
Orthography is the set of rules regulating how language must be written. In Italian, since spelling is not word-by-word, it’s full of spelling rules. Things like “plurals of words ending in -cia and -gia are in the form -ce and -ge if the C and G are preceded by another consonant, while they are in the form -cie and -gie if they’re preceded by a vowel”. Yes, this very rule is a nightmare for most people.
But these rules allow us to perfectly write words we hear for the first time, and consequently, allow us to perfectly read a word we never encountered.
This can’t happen in English. Since I’ve always pronounced “koh-loh-nel” for “colonel”. It was just a year ago that I found out it’s pronounced “kernel”. What the…?
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And training a wrong pronunciation while they’re at it…
How does that work with words like “though” and “tough”, the Italian H being silent?
The phonetic alphabet was invented quite recently. What I like about non-orthographic languages is that there might be some history to why a particular word is written or pronounced the way it is. Learning those etymologies is enriching.
Plus you would need a global dictator to enforce everyone to stop writing the old way and only use IPA. Looking to some recent minor spelling rule changes in Dutch “to make things more logical and reduce spelling errors” and the resistance to it, I’d say that is never gonna happen. The end result is that older people write new “errors”.
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I forgot - this stands if we hear it from a person with a neutral accent.
In fact, one of the most common spelling errors my classmates did in elementary school was putting double consonants in words. Since it’s a typical trait of Sardinian accent.
Well, that’s your problem then. I get the feeling Italians want the rest of the world to adapt to them, even in languages and contexts other than Italian.
And watch out, “slang” in Dutch means snake, which is a word for penis in English. 
Although in Dutch, the verb “vogelen” (to bird) is slang for f*cking.
Imo, your context must change with the language you’re using. From all the examples above, I get the feeling “you Italians” have some issues with that. Which is ok, but don’t “blame” the others for it then.
When in Rome…
Same with gestures. I only watch out in the UK to not ask for two things with my palm facing me.
Bird bird bird!
In English, that’s a word for a young woman.
As in: @tasse-tee is a real bird. (no offence, Katie!)
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That’s like the R at the end of “idea” that some people do.
Colonel, and its spelling originates from French/Latin/Italian
Somewhere in history, both spelling and pronunciation was coronel. Then they went back to the original spelling, while the English kept the R.
Why? Because humans.
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Click the link right below the sentence you quoted. 
If you pronounce English with a an extremely heavy Dutch spelling pronunciation accent, or rather like Dutch with a few English sounds such as þ and æ incorporated, you match English to its spelling.
Ask the French. As a basic hypothesis I would propose a process along these lines:
- Original Anglo-French, something like /gaʊdʒ/
- Possible reduced intermediary /gadʒ/
- Great Vowel Shift (a → e) /geɪdʒ/
This one appears quite straightforward to me. Not in the same ballpark as how a word like plough ended up being pronounced plow, the way it’s somewhat obscuringly written in American English. The self-evident change there is /plux/ → /pluf/. Add in the later vowel shift and we get /plaʊf/. I guess the /f/ just kind of fell off at some point?
We could have had that back in '96. The relevant ministers and such asked academics to come up with a proposal. It was a pretty decent proposal. Then they threw out everything, came up with weird af nonsense like the tussen-n and pretended it came from the academic community!
Anyway, IPA spelling would not be great. It’d immediately diminish the value of IPA. Right now we mean two or three different sounds by the grapheme g in Dutch, all of which are perfectly acceptable. If you switched that to /ɣ/ you’d be implicitly saying the Flemish /ʝ/ is worse to people like me who know what that means. To the general public, meanwhile, /ɣ/ would quickly come to mean what g does now.
That’s a much worse situation. It’s implicitly discriminatory toward alternative equally valid pronunciations while diminishing the value of IPA. If you were serious about keeping the IPA spelling up to date, instead of being an easy read Jane Austen would be incomprehensible gibberish.
To me, “bird” means something like: “that girl is attractive, but that’s the only value of her” - implying that she’s a bit stupid, or something. @PiecesOfKate, what do you think of “bird”?
So is grammar, and the ever-ongoing war between descriptivism and prescriptivism 
Of course it’s currently also discriminatory, because the two sounds I mentioned (as well as /x/) are the only acceptable sounds. The /h/ sounds they use in some West Flemish dialects instead need not apply. But the point is that graphemes such as g and r represent several acceptable distinct pronunciations, whatever they may be, whereas IPA is more precise — too precise, even in broad phonetic transcription. The same is true for ei/ij, e and o, although those don’t vary as much.
Yeah something like that. I don’t think of it as necessarily referring to someone attractive, but definitely the no-value/a bit stupid part.
It’s weird though as some English men say ‘my bird’ when referring to their significant other. I guess that’s just in jest, though.
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@Someone, yesterday evening I watched the first video before going to a friend’s house, and I did a bit of practice on the way.
And… now I have the beginnings of a rolled R! 
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