w(uh)man to w(ih)men
How come it’s Germans and not Germen
How come it’s humans, not humen
That’s a darn good shower thought.
it’s normal for unstressed short vowels in English to all come out as a “schwa”, which the most common phoneme of the language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel
I don’t pronunce any of those words like that. Maybe stadium I pronounce the same. Maybe.
What kind of weirdo says chick-uhn?
English speakers globally
It must only be in some places because where I live in the UK both parts change pronunciation.
Does in Midwest USA too.
Where’s that?
In UK it goes from
Woman – Wu mun
Women - Wi men
Op, you just aren’t saying them correctly, I guess.
nah i say wuh-man and wih-min
I remember a discussion on reddit saying there was a US dialect (perhaps PNW?) that changed the pronunciation of the -man/-men part of the word rather than the o, but I couldn’t get many further details at the time.
Anyone heard anything about this?
I know when I pronounce it, it’s different on the a/e - NZ English.
We do also tend to change the o at the same time, at least I do. Although I spent 10 years in the uk in my 20’s so that has had some effect on how I speak.
As someone who learned English as a second language. Yes, that pronunciation exists, I’ve heard it used on films. I don’t know if it is a formally defined or linguistically studied thing. But I can hear the different ways the exact same word is vocalized wildly different by different native English speakers. And they always claim theirs is the only correct way of saying it, even though they still somehow understood what was said.
It’s strangely kind of either/or for the pronunciation if you take a look at the IPA pronunciation of the words.
I wonder, though, if this lack of difference in pronunciation is behind a question that’s confounded me for years: “why do so many people spell the singular as ‘women’ by accident (e.g. ‘a women’), but I’ve never seen something like ‘a men’)?” I always chalked it up to “a men” looking weird as basically “amen”, but this could be it instead.
English phonetics suck more than any other language ever spoke or tried to learn
Wait until you try to figure out how to pronounce “ough”, like in rough or through or dough.
Except by your own pronunciation guide:
w(uh)man to w(ih)men
Yeah that’s the spelling part OP is referring to
But the pronunciation changes there too*, contrary to what OP says.
* Maybe there are regional pronunciation differences I’ve never heard of before?
