Learning Something

Jun. 29th, 2005 at 6:32 PM

weather	:	mostly cloudy
outside	:	20.9°C
mood	:	happy

For everyone who said they wanted "to learn something" from me (or some variant thereof), I offer this random bit:

zoethe*'s username is pronounced "ZOH-eth"... long 'o', short 'e', soft 'th'.

It is NOT pronounced like the German poet, novelist, playwright and scientist who got a few things dead wrong, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — ['gø tə] which is something like "GER-tuh".

It is a sight rhyme only.

I asked. =)

* Gini, law student, "increasingly radical pagan chyk" and quite an interesting read.

Comments

( 8 comments — Leave a comment )

pne

Jun. 30th, 2005 05:45 am (UTC)

By soft 'th' I presume you mean "voiced"... which is interesting, since voiced th seems to me to be a fair bit less common in English than voiceless th, so it's not the first pronunciation I'd guess when faced with the letter-sequence th.

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bride

Jun. 30th, 2005 06:23 am (UTC)

Soft 'th', to me, means 'th' as in "theta". So, unvoiced.

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pne

Jun. 30th, 2005 06:35 am (UTC)

Buh?

So "th" in "thy" (voiced) would be "hard" for you? Or what?

For me, "soft" = "voiced", if it means anything at all in relation to fricatives.

Different terminology can be interesting.

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bride

Jun. 30th, 2005 06:43 am (UTC)

So "th" in "thy" (voiced) would be "hard" for you?

Yes. The voiced is the "hard 'th'" to me.

For me, "soft" = "voiced"

Huh. Fascinating.

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bride

Jun. 30th, 2005 06:47 am (UTC)

Also, I was taught in school:

goose is a hard 'g'; gymnasium is a soft 'g'.
catamaran is a hard 'c'; civilization is a soft 'c'.

Are either of those different for you?

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pne

Jun. 30th, 2005 07:02 am (UTC)

hard and soft

For g, I've heard those terms, too. Not so sure about c. (While I hadn't thought about those, the possiblity of such was one reason why I hedged my bet with "fricatives" rather than "consonants".)

I suppose then "hard" means "stop/plosive" while "soft" means "fricative or affricate".

In which case, both versions of th would have to be "soft", and without a "hard" counterpart in English. (c might be the hard counterpart in Castilian Spanish, I suppose.)

I suppose I've heard "hard" most often in connection with g.

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