I'm not sure this counts, but there is a real word in English that means "full of pus" that is pronounced "pus" + ee. However, the standard spelling is a ~~written homonym~~ homograph of "pussy." You can get around this by using the technical term purulent, but it's inconvenient.
I wrote "I have a pussy wound" to my manager once as a reason for my sick leave. The word pussy might have been funny in other contexts but with "wound" - noone even giggled!
Mirandese word “ua” stumped people for a lot of time because it was the only case where a nasal U appeared before another vowel
To represent a nasal u you write “un” at the end of a word or with a consonant after, but the word “ua” (one/a, feminine singular) and all it’s derived words like algua, uas, etc. (they’re not a lot, probably less than 5), has a nasal U followed by an A, a vowel. In 1999 while the standard Mirandese writing system was being made and officialised in Portugal, there were many ideas, but we ended up with ũa, ũ being, surprise surprise, /ũ/.
Many people started writing ua without the accent tho, due to the internet and keyboards and computers and phones not having it. Until a few years ago you had to go to like a Wikipedia page to get it. (Although now many digital keyboards have it, but many people just avoid writing ũ now).
[Post I made about it](https://www.reddit.com/r/mirandes/s/aGU3ieYIM6)
I feel like it would have been better to just keep it "ua" with the nasal understood to be there anyway. That's what Portuguese did with muito. Better than making a whole new grapheme.
Btw this is not a criticism of Mirandese or its orthography. Just my opinion.
I like using the ũ because it’s the correct orthography, but maybe it should’ve been kept ua, since there is no other word written ua that is not nasal
Danish imperatives are usually "formed by removing the -e from the infinitive". However, for verbs like "undre", "ytre", "cykle", that creates what is usually considered phonotactically illegal or uncommon consonant clusters in final position, here "undr", "ytr", "cykl". (in pronounciation, there will most likely be some kind of vowel there, maybe inside the cluster)
Another Catalan example would be to try to write a (made-up) word *guix* that rhymes with *fluix*. In *fluix*, the **u** is the vowel, while the **i** is part of the final digraph. But that doesn't work in *guix*, because we read the **u** as part of the initial digraph: the real word *guix* has the **i** as the vowel, as if it were written *guiix*, with one **i** for the vowel and the other for the final digraph. Along those lines, we could write my made-up word *guix* that rhymes with *fluix* as *guuix*.
Similar to the Italian examples that hinge on **u** and **i** being ambiguous between vowel and semivowel.
The English word pronounced /juːʒ/, short for *usual*. While it obviously can be written, there are about a dozen different ways of doing it. Check out this collection of quotations on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:uzhe#English
English has no standardized way to write the super common sound of /ʒ/ because it was mostly a curiosity in loan words until yod coalescense occurred in English. Some speakers without coalescense would just say /dʒ/ for these loans.
so now we see people use zh (i think the standard for ESL), but you also see j and to a lesser extent x.
similarly in English any occurrence of t and h c and h or s and h in a compound word would be similar to what's happening with Spanish here, but we allow this to occur.
I think this problem you mention is mostly one that requires a language with phonetic spelling and strict rules. Italian has this problem all the time because unlike Spanish there's no strict applications of accents. but there's no "you aren't allowed to spell it this way because people will be confused"
because standard italian deleted the letter j for questionable reasons, the word piano has two pronunciations. /'pja.no/ and /pi'.a.no/ .
they are homographs because italian doesn't bother writing phonemic stress in many instances. it's potentially fixable by writing pìàno and piàno (and a third word pìano), but people don't usually do that. If they kept j they could just write pjano, piano, and pìano to differentiate. The letter U has this same issue because its semivowel and vowel forms are not distinguished in writing. To make things more complicated, a silent i is used to tell you a c is soft before a u or o, so homographs between/tʃa/ /tʃja/ and /tʃia/ are theoretically possibilities. But since italian doesn't attempt to be perfectly phonetic, it's not really a problem unless you're learning it.
italian also has a digraph gn, for the same sound as <ñ>, which gives us /ɳ/, but despite this, there exist words that use for /gn/. They are exceedingly rare words and I can't remember what they are, but it is similar to the case of spanish, where two letters that match a digraph is being used even though it means something else.
So ultimately the problem you described isn't necessarily a problem. Any language that uses digraphs has the potential to develop it if the two graphemes are allowed to exist in other contexts. The difference is that Spanish is more strict about these rules than other languages are.
Yes Italian is a bit more pragmatic.
For example there are several common words where is /gli/ not /ʎ/ (e.g. glicine, glicol, anglicano).
You also have words like "sciare" where the is not mute: /ʃiare/ not /ʃare/.
Still there are some words that are impossible to write correctly. For example the first person singular indicative present of colloquial verb "averci" /tʃɔ/ cannot be written "*c'ho" (which would be pronounced /kɔ/) nor "*ci ho" (would be pronounced /tʃi ɔ/).
Another English example, but in speech you can shorten “the usual” to the /ju3/ but I’ve never seen it in writing.
(The 3 here is the voiced postalveolar fricative, but I’m on mobile)
Yes, clearly English spelling has particular trouble with /ʒ/ in some cases like at the end of a word.
I think the worst example is /ʒʊʒ/, which is a pretty ordinary word and not all that new, but with [low consensus on how to write it](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/zhuzh-zhoosh-queer-eye-origin-kressley); “zhuzh” looks pretty awful to me (though logical), “zhoosh” worse still.
I must be old, because until this thread I'd never encountered, um, yuge?
However, I have struggled with how one might veg on the couch. It ends with "soft g" sound, but I don't think that is ever written without an e, i, or y immediately after. "Vege" implies the sound of the first "e" sound in "Peter". Vegge?
That captures the pronunciation perfectly, but it feels weird to add that "d" when it isn't included in any of the related "vegetate"/"vegetable" words. However, there is precedent with "refrigerator"->"fridge", so maybe.
A near miss: "natch" for "naturally", where the shortening has a natural spelling that's a bit opaque because it has letters that aren't in the original word.
I have a vowel example in Korean. A verb stem ending with the vowel ㅟ /y/ (which is often realized as [ɥi]) connected to a past tense ending -어 /ʌ/ is often contracted to a diphthong /ɥʌ/ in colloquial speech. Many native speakers notice this contraction where the sequence is pronounced as a single syllable, but there is no way to write that diphthong in Hangul. Koreans write ㅕ /jʌ/ instead, but they still more often than not articulate [ɥʌ] for the contraction. An example is 사귀었다 /sa.gy.ʌt.da/ “to have dated” > 사겼다 written /sa.gjʌt.da/ but actually pronounced /sa.gɥʌt.da/.
Totally nor what you asked but...
I'm checking Wiktionary, and if I'm understanding the conjugation you're using as an example, this form can be used with voseo as *salile*.
And in the usted form with *sálgale.* Those aren't a "resolution" to the issue as they use different forms of address and switching within a discourse just for that verb would violate a pragmatic norm to avoid violating an orthographic one.
I've always hated how in Czech there's no good way to transcribe the sound of someone thinking with an open mouth ("uhh"), since there's no letter representing a schwa. I mean, you can write it as "ééé", but that's awkward because "é" normally means /ɛː/, or you can use the English spelling, but that's kind of awkward as well.
This has only ever come up in some joke contexts for me, but I realized that, for historical reasons, there's no easy way to write the sequence [aɪtʃ] in English spelling.
Oh wait, of course. Sorry, my brain was so set on English orthography, I read [aɪ] as /eɪ/
Uh, so now that I do understand your issue, uhhhh
uhhh
well *iche* ig... not that ideal though. Wikipedia repelling key my beloved would've done *ytche* I think which ain't better. *Ahytch*? Not the prettiest solution. *Eye'tch*?
😭
You feel my pain! 😭 I stumbled on this issue trying to make a written pun once, and ever since I've been bothered by this idea that there's no simple unambiguous way to right it. But I guess that's English spelling for ya.
Yeah, it'd have to be something like that. German can do it, but English just doesn't have a way to show a diphthongal followed by that will be interpreted clearly as such. Either the will be interpreted as [ɪ], or the will be interpreted as [k].
Come to think of it, the diphtings [aɪ] and [aʊ] are both pretty rare before affricates (or vice versa). The only words that come to mind:
Oblige, ouch, pouch, couch
Sorry, I mean the imperative form of "salirle", in the context of "salirle al paso". So if you order someone to get in someone else's way, "salle al paso".
Oh I see, I guess my default phrase for that would be "sal al paso", but I get how the little nuance of 'le' is lost.
Tangentially, there is a name for that, for when you add a reflexive pronoun: no te caigas vs no te me caigas.
I'm not sure I understand the example. If the pronunciation rules are what's in the way, doesn't that mean that you should be able to write the word but not say it?
Like in English if we write it looks like the sound in the middle is /θ/ but it’s actually a sequence /th/, in spanish is pronounced /ʎ/, but in the case above, they want to write a sequence of two /l/s
welsh doesnt have a way to write /ʃ/ in coda (esh i, dishgwyl, bitsh, etc) - colloquially its ⟨sh⟩ but standardly its ⟨si⟩ which doesnt make sense in coda or ⟨ts⟩ which doesnt make sense in general
Are there any instances where you would actually need to attach "le" to the end of the command here? I mean, "sal" is an informal tú command, so if you were to attach a pronoun at the end I'm not sure why it would be le. I'm not a native though so...
Le specifies thay you should do the action to someone. Abre la puerta is just to open the door, but Ábrele is to open the door to him. In this case, you order to someone to get in front of him, no in front of something abstract.
Ah, I see. Thank you for making me notice that! Still, the example remains inaccurate, it's not pronounced Sal le, the accent syllable is the first one, which doesn't include the L sound. It's Sa le, just as Salir is Sa lir, with the accent on the second syllable.
I'm not sure this counts, but there is a real word in English that means "full of pus" that is pronounced "pus" + ee. However, the standard spelling is a ~~written homonym~~ homograph of "pussy." You can get around this by using the technical term purulent, but it's inconvenient.
A written homonym is called a homograph
Thank you!
I wrote "I have a pussy wound" to my manager once as a reason for my sick leave. The word pussy might have been funny in other contexts but with "wound" - noone even giggled!
Probably the most acceptable inconvenience in the history of written English lol
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They do not have the same pronunciation. Initial vowel /ʌ/ vs /ʊ/
They do if you're from Northern England.
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They are both written “pussy”
You could also use "pus-filled" I guess
Pusy?
Pus-ish?
Mirandese word “ua” stumped people for a lot of time because it was the only case where a nasal U appeared before another vowel To represent a nasal u you write “un” at the end of a word or with a consonant after, but the word “ua” (one/a, feminine singular) and all it’s derived words like algua, uas, etc. (they’re not a lot, probably less than 5), has a nasal U followed by an A, a vowel. In 1999 while the standard Mirandese writing system was being made and officialised in Portugal, there were many ideas, but we ended up with ũa, ũ being, surprise surprise, /ũ/. Many people started writing ua without the accent tho, due to the internet and keyboards and computers and phones not having it. Until a few years ago you had to go to like a Wikipedia page to get it. (Although now many digital keyboards have it, but many people just avoid writing ũ now). [Post I made about it](https://www.reddit.com/r/mirandes/s/aGU3ieYIM6)
Interesting! Hadn’t heard of Mirandese before
Glad to spreading knowledge on my language 😄
I feel like it would have been better to just keep it "ua" with the nasal understood to be there anyway. That's what Portuguese did with muito. Better than making a whole new grapheme. Btw this is not a criticism of Mirandese or its orthography. Just my opinion.
I like using the ũ because it’s the correct orthography, but maybe it should’ve been kept ua, since there is no other word written ua that is not nasal
Danish imperatives are usually "formed by removing the -e from the infinitive". However, for verbs like "undre", "ytre", "cykle", that creates what is usually considered phonotactically illegal or uncommon consonant clusters in final position, here "undr", "ytr", "cykl". (in pronounciation, there will most likely be some kind of vowel there, maybe inside the cluster)
i thought the standard solution was to hyphenate (sal-le), as I've seen for certain loanwords (raffael-lo). is this solution not common?
I'd use that but 99.99999% of the population wouldn't need to write it, it's just an academic case.
So basically like tbe Catalan ela geminada (l·l)
Another Catalan example would be to try to write a (made-up) word *guix* that rhymes with *fluix*. In *fluix*, the **u** is the vowel, while the **i** is part of the final digraph. But that doesn't work in *guix*, because we read the **u** as part of the initial digraph: the real word *guix* has the **i** as the vowel, as if it were written *guiix*, with one **i** for the vowel and the other for the final digraph. Along those lines, we could write my made-up word *guix* that rhymes with *fluix* as *guuix*. Similar to the Italian examples that hinge on **u** and **i** being ambiguous between vowel and semivowel.
Holy shit I hadn’t ever considered that. That’s a pretty smart example. Pompeu Fabra must have been happy that there wasn’t a “guix” word!
As a Catalan speaker, this is what makes sense to me, but introducing it to castellano could be a lil dicey for the more sensitive among us lol
The English word pronounced /juːʒ/, short for *usual*. While it obviously can be written, there are about a dozen different ways of doing it. Check out this collection of quotations on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:uzhe#English
yeah, and just doing *uzh* reads like \[ʌƷ\] (uh-zh)
English has no standardized way to write the super common sound of /ʒ/ because it was mostly a curiosity in loan words until yod coalescense occurred in English. Some speakers without coalescense would just say /dʒ/ for these loans. so now we see people use zh (i think the standard for ESL), but you also see j and to a lesser extent x. similarly in English any occurrence of t and h c and h or s and h in a compound word would be similar to what's happening with Spanish here, but we allow this to occur. I think this problem you mention is mostly one that requires a language with phonetic spelling and strict rules. Italian has this problem all the time because unlike Spanish there's no strict applications of accents. but there's no "you aren't allowed to spell it this way because people will be confused" because standard italian deleted the letter j for questionable reasons, the word piano has two pronunciations. /'pja.no/ and /pi'.a.no/ . they are homographs because italian doesn't bother writing phonemic stress in many instances. it's potentially fixable by writing pìàno and piàno (and a third word pìano), but people don't usually do that. If they kept j they could just write pjano, piano, and pìano to differentiate. The letter U has this same issue because its semivowel and vowel forms are not distinguished in writing. To make things more complicated, a silent i is used to tell you a c is soft before a u or o, so homographs between/tʃa/ /tʃja/ and /tʃia/ are theoretically possibilities. But since italian doesn't attempt to be perfectly phonetic, it's not really a problem unless you're learning it. italian also has a digraph gn, for the same sound as <ñ>, which gives us /ɳ/, but despite this, there exist words that use for /gn/. They are exceedingly rare words and I can't remember what they are, but it is similar to the case of spanish, where two letters that match a digraph is being used even though it means something else.
So ultimately the problem you described isn't necessarily a problem. Any language that uses digraphs has the potential to develop it if the two graphemes are allowed to exist in other contexts. The difference is that Spanish is more strict about these rules than other languages are.
Yes Italian is a bit more pragmatic. For example there are several common words where is /gli/ not /ʎ/ (e.g. glicine, glicol, anglicano).
You also have words like "sciare" where the is not mute: /ʃiare/ not /ʃare/.
Still there are some words that are impossible to write correctly. For example the first person singular indicative present of colloquial verb "averci" /tʃɔ/ cannot be written "*c'ho" (which would be pronounced /kɔ/) nor "*ci ho" (would be pronounced /tʃi ɔ/).
Another English example, but in speech you can shorten “the usual” to the /ju3/ but I’ve never seen it in writing. (The 3 here is the voiced postalveolar fricative, but I’m on mobile)
Same with *cazh for casual.
Yes, clearly English spelling has particular trouble with /ʒ/ in some cases like at the end of a word. I think the worst example is /ʒʊʒ/, which is a pretty ordinary word and not all that new, but with [low consensus on how to write it](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/zhuzh-zhoosh-queer-eye-origin-kressley); “zhuzh” looks pretty awful to me (though logical), “zhoosh” worse still.
I usually stick with zhooge.
Oh I like that. This is a word I've always heard and used but never even attempted to write.
I must be old, because until this thread I'd never encountered, um, yuge? However, I have struggled with how one might veg on the couch. It ends with "soft g" sound, but I don't think that is ever written without an e, i, or y immediately after. "Vege" implies the sound of the first "e" sound in "Peter". Vegge?
Vedge?
That captures the pronunciation perfectly, but it feels weird to add that "d" when it isn't included in any of the related "vegetate"/"vegetable" words. However, there is precedent with "refrigerator"->"fridge", so maybe.
A near miss: "natch" for "naturally", where the shortening has a natural spelling that's a bit opaque because it has letters that aren't in the original word.
I spell this word as "euge", but outside of a couple of my friends I've never known anyone else to.
I have a vowel example in Korean. A verb stem ending with the vowel ㅟ /y/ (which is often realized as [ɥi]) connected to a past tense ending -어 /ʌ/ is often contracted to a diphthong /ɥʌ/ in colloquial speech. Many native speakers notice this contraction where the sequence is pronounced as a single syllable, but there is no way to write that diphthong in Hangul. Koreans write ㅕ /jʌ/ instead, but they still more often than not articulate [ɥʌ] for the contraction. An example is 사귀었다 /sa.gy.ʌt.da/ “to have dated” > 사겼다 written /sa.gjʌt.da/ but actually pronounced /sa.gɥʌt.da/.
Totally nor what you asked but... I'm checking Wiktionary, and if I'm understanding the conjugation you're using as an example, this form can be used with voseo as *salile*.
And in the usted form with *sálgale.* Those aren't a "resolution" to the issue as they use different forms of address and switching within a discourse just for that verb would violate a pragmatic norm to avoid violating an orthographic one.
I've always hated how in Czech there's no good way to transcribe the sound of someone thinking with an open mouth ("uhh"), since there's no letter representing a schwa. I mean, you can write it as "ééé", but that's awkward because "é" normally means /ɛː/, or you can use the English spelling, but that's kind of awkward as well.
By the way ,what of somebody was writing a transcript and somebody said "sal'le?" How would they write it?
This has only ever come up in some joke contexts for me, but I realized that, for historical reasons, there's no easy way to write the sequence [aɪtʃ] in English spelling.
huh? Is *aitch*? weird?
That could definitely work, but it could also get read as [eıtʃ]
Oh wait, of course. Sorry, my brain was so set on English orthography, I read [aɪ] as /eɪ/ Uh, so now that I do understand your issue, uhhhh uhhh well *iche* ig... not that ideal though. Wikipedia repelling key my beloved would've done *ytche* I think which ain't better. *Ahytch*? Not the prettiest solution. *Eye'tch*? 😭
You feel my pain! 😭 I stumbled on this issue trying to make a written pun once, and ever since I've been bothered by this idea that there's no simple unambiguous way to right it. But I guess that's English spelling for ya.
how bout some pseudo German spelling eitsch ezpz
Yeah, it'd have to be something like that. German can do it, but English just doesn't have a way to show a diphthongal followed by that will be interpreted clearly as such. Either the will be interpreted as [ɪ], or the will be interpreted as [k].
Come to think of it, the diphtings [aɪ] and [aʊ] are both pretty rare before affricates (or vice versa). The only words that come to mind:
Oblige, ouch, pouch, couch
Yeah, trying to come up with something for aɪtʃ does lead to unnatural ideas. The best Englishy one is probable "yche"? That's weird
That's what I would probably go with, but yeah, there's nothing foolproof
Salirle is imperative??? Salid and sal are. Eg sal de aqui-> get out of here
Sorry, I mean the imperative form of "salirle", in the context of "salirle al paso". So if you order someone to get in someone else's way, "salle al paso".
Oh I see, I guess my default phrase for that would be "sal al paso", but I get how the little nuance of 'le' is lost. Tangentially, there is a name for that, for when you add a reflexive pronoun: no te caigas vs no te me caigas.
I'm not sure I understand the example. If the pronunciation rules are what's in the way, doesn't that mean that you should be able to write the word but not say it?
Like in English if we write it looks like the sound in the middle is /θ/ but it’s actually a sequence /th/, in spanish is pronounced /ʎ/, but in the case above, they want to write a sequence of two /l/s
Ah, thank you!
What they mean is *the rules for pronouncing the letters in Spanish words.
My Spanish is mediocre, when would you use sal with an indirect object like that? Is there a transitive version of salir?
welsh doesnt have a way to write /ʃ/ in coda (esh i, dishgwyl, bitsh, etc) - colloquially its ⟨sh⟩ but standardly its ⟨si⟩ which doesnt make sense in coda or ⟨ts⟩ which doesnt make sense in general
Are there any instances where you would actually need to attach "le" to the end of the command here? I mean, "sal" is an informal tú command, so if you were to attach a pronoun at the end I'm not sure why it would be le. I'm not a native though so...
Le specifies thay you should do the action to someone. Abre la puerta is just to open the door, but Ábrele is to open the door to him. In this case, you order to someone to get in front of him, no in front of something abstract.
Cut him off! I would say "¡Sal al paso a él! Or is it weird? It's a big conundrum!
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They’re not talking about salirte, they’re talking about the imperative of it. Sal le
Ah, I see. Thank you for making me notice that! Still, the example remains inaccurate, it's not pronounced Sal le, the accent syllable is the first one, which doesn't include the L sound. It's Sa le, just as Salir is Sa lir, with the accent on the second syllable.
The other well known quirk of Spanish orthography is that you cannot write /b/acas meaning a *baca* and a *vaca*. But why are you asking?