Thread: Help with English pronounciation

Hi,
French is my first language and English my second altough I was never really seriously teached about grammar and pronounciation. I can understand fine, read and mostly write without too much effort but there is something I can be helped with.

The pronounciation of the letter I. I remember someone saying that an I is pronounced diffently wether there a voyel after the I like Pine and pin. Or like visor and victim...

I searched the Internet throughly and can't come up with an answer. Can someone here help me with this ?

Thanks !

English is not my native language, but I am pretty good at it.
My understanding is that there is no simple set of rules to determine pronunciation. I'm sure there are rules, but there are at least as much exceptions as rules.

For example, the name Ian is pronounced ee-an, but Brian is pronounced br-eye-an.
Or scone is pronounced skone (or skon) and scythe is pronounced sythe (the c is silent).

It could be that there are rules governing some of these things (it's at least 15 years ago since I had to learn them), but there are also lots of exceptions.

Originally Posted by yboivin

The pronounciation of the letter I. I remember someone saying that an I is pronounced diffently wether there a voyel after the I like Pine and pin. Or like visor and victim...

I searched the Internet throughly and can't come up with an answer. Can someone here help me with this ?

Thanks !

I too have not been able to find a good ruleset that describes exactly when I should be pronounced one way or another for any given word. But here is what I have experienced most frequently in my American English lifetime:

In American English, a general rule is that an I followed by a consonant and then an E will be pronounced as the I in Pine (fine, brine, sine, mine, tine, line, etc.) Otherwise, it is most commonly pronounced as I in Pin (bin, win, fin, tin, etc) although there are exceptions especially when an I is directly followed by two consonants.

But if an I is followed immediately by another vowel, it is nearly always pronounced as E in Meet (such as pier, trio, skiing, piece, etc) unless that vowel is an E and is the last letter of a one syllable word (such as in tie, pie, die, etc in which cases also their plurals or verb tense partner words like ties, pies, died, etc will share their same I pronunciations)

So many strange conventions! You may find that Received Pronunciation has some variances from these, and as even RP changes over time you may not always find a hard and fast rule that works for every English word you come across

Originally Posted by Bruno

Or scone is pronounced skone (or skon)

That's it, now you've gone and done it. You just had to open up that can of worms! Entire generations have fought bloodthirsty battles over this issue.

Turns out it's all the fault of the Dutch, though as usual the Scots played their part. See paragraph 4 of: Scone (bread) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

There are some rules, but because of a lot of things that have happened in the history of English--including the Great Vowel Shift, which radically changed the pronunciation of the long vowels around Shakespeare's time; the many language groups that English has taken vocabulary from; and the fact that there has never been a central agency to impose spelling reforms--they are more like rough guidelines.

I wonder if this page from the Sounds of English Web site would be useful, or possibly this one from the English Club. (I found them by Googling english pronunciation.) In addition, I'll add the low-tech suggestion that you find a good English dictionary (the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is good if you want to concentrate on American English, but I'm sure there are equally good ones for British English) that has the pronunciation of each entry in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

You may have to put in a certain amount of time just learning the pronunciations of words by rote. (Especially since, as you've probably noticed, the stress is kind of irregular in English too.) But as you gain more experience, you will probably find that you get a kind of intuitive sense for how a new word should be pronounced. It won't always work--I'm a native speaker and still have to look up new words from time to time--but it will get more familiar and less burdensome with time. Also, of course, the more you hear English spoken, the more its sounds and rhythms will work into your mind, even when you are not consciously trying to learn them. Even having a BBC radio broadcast on in the background while you are doing something else will move you closer to being comfortable with the pronunciation.

I hope this helps. Bonne chance!

~Rich

Originally Posted by yboivin

The pronounciation of the letter I. I remember someone saying that an I is pronounced diffently wether there a voyel after the I like Pine and pin. Or like visor and victim...

'Pronounciation' is NOT a word. The second 'o' is dropped and the correct word is 'pronunciation'.

Originally Posted by Bruno

My understanding is that there is no simple set of rules to determine pronunciation. I'm sure there are rules, but there are at least as much exceptions as rules.

There ARE rules for English spelling and pronunciation, but almost nobody can keep them all straight so they are rarely taught. We will sometimes hear things like " 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' ", but little more. This is because English is a bit of a bastard language with many influences from Latin, Nordic, German, French and more. The way to know how to spell and pronounce English properly is to know which tradition each word comes from and employ the rules associated with those subsets. This is clearly too much work for a public school English teacher to tackle and so children are expected to learn most of it by rote. In the case of vowels, an easy rule which is often neglected is that a vowel followed by a single consonant will have a long sound (eg. rifle, super) where one followed by a double consonant is shorter (eg. raffle, supper).

THE BEST DICTIONARY to use is the Oxford English dictionary. It is the standard by which all other dictionaries must be measured. It primarily uses the international conventions (which most American dictionaries try to ignore), but will include Americanisms. The 'Concise' edition even contains wonderful etymological information and many instances of first and early usage for all words.

X

Originally Posted by xman

The 'Concise' edition even contains wonderful etymological information and many instances of first and early usage for all words.

And comes with a magnifying glass as well!

I don't mean to nitpick, but I think X meant "rote" not "wrote" when referring to how people are forced to learn spelling and pronunciation.

Originally Posted by holli4pirating

I don't mean to nitpick, but I think X meant "rote" not "wrote" when referring to how people are forced to learn spelling and pronunciation.

I'm sure I don't know what you mean.

I also think he meant "hear" things like i before e except after c...

(We gotta keep the grammar police honest)

James.