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Yes it is if you understand that “phonetic” is derived from the Phoenician civilization/culture, and that phenoms and phenology naturally derives the ph- sound from the “ph” not the letter “f” just because the Romans were lazy.
Blame your lack of education, not the Phoenicians!
I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy.
Linguistics and not-bitchy… What are you trying to be, a descriptivist!!!
Someone knows history
Phexactly
Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.
The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.
The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.
So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.
Uh oh, it sounds like you’re
wtf? yes it is. you just don’t know enough about words
Thank you. OP just wants /r points. lol. We give lots of points here. THis is the place where the points don’t matter and nobody wins anything.
The word “Abbreviated” is actually quite long.
I don’t even know what “spelled phonetically” is supposed to mean in English. As far as I’m concerned that language is just a jumble of vowels that all sound the same but generate long arguments about how to pronounce things “correctly”.
Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetik”
funneddic (US)
funnettic (UK)That’s transposing it how we sound to them, though!
If the above were pronounced in a baseline kiwi accent the U would just get deeper. The vowel shift goes the other way if I’m to recreate their pronunciation using my own accent:
Fehr ned ik (US)
Foe net eck (UK)
So pronounced phone-tick?
Three syllables, so it would be fo-ne-tik.
This is why the IPA is useful.
IPA is also useful for cleaning and drinking.
Kind of. The IPA doesn’t show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.
Ah that’s interesting, I didn’t know that.
Still, the IPA is really helpful when trying to discuss pronunciation with someone who has a very different accent to ourselves.
As a New Zealander I find some US phonetic spellings baffling.
Sure it is. English just has multiple generations of “phonetic” that overlay, and are not consistent with, one another. It has, if you will, codebases that were forked, re-forked, and then occasionally merged back in after developing on their own for a few centuries, and no official steering committee was ever established. There is semi-official documentation, usually from self-appointed pedants, but even that adjusts as more features are merged in willy-nilly and workarounds emerge.
English spelling is hard not because it lacks any logic, but because this entire language is a case study in modularity and extensibility at all costs.
I mean, aren’t we using mostly Latin letters and sounds to spell non-Latin words?
There’s a phonetic English alphabet out there. Some Scottish poet commissioned it years ago.
It is named after him. But I am an uncultured swine and can’t remember who it is at the moment.
Of course not. It’s spelled “phonetic.” Phonetically is spelled “phonetically.” 😌
