powerburial:
i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word
if anyone is wondering why this is, it’s because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the “fuck grammar” era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-“class” dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you’re aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they’re teaching it.
there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a “de-snobbification” of english education where everyone’s regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don’t think it’s their job to fix your high school teacher’s fuckups. (it is, but that’s a different post)
this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn’t before
this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about “vibes based literacy”.
anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education “less formal” and that this will benefit “everyone”, because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.
specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)
