William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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russ wrote: aramis wrote: Tho' foreigners often mangle this to /blok/ or /bloʊk/ Which is why I wonder how much to take the word of the foreign publisher when they give written English words as the example of how to pronounce it. I certainly know plenty of non-native English speakers who don't pronounce it like English "block us".
Given the publisher's statement of like "block-us", 99% of native english speakers will be pronouncing it /blɒkʌs/.
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Colorcrayons
United States
Maplewood
Minnesota
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Phil Fleischmann wrote: We've been through this many times before.
In English, vowels followed by a single consonant usually have the "long" sound. As in words like:
joker
poker
locus
token
local
broke
And vowels followed by two consonants usually have the "short" sound. As in words like:
hockey
jockey
locker
soccer
occupy
knock
When we look at a word spelled "blokus", we see a single consonant after the 'o'. Therefore, being speakers of English, we conclude that it must be the long 'o' sound.
Agreed.
Phil Fleischmann wrote: Okey dokey?
Now you're just confusing the guy. He obviously will want to pronounce that as "Ahkee-Dahkee"
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Russ Williams
Poland
Wrocław
Dolny Śląsk
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aramis wrote: russ wrote: aramis wrote: Tho' foreigners often mangle this to /blok/ or /bloʊk/ Which is why I wonder how much to take the word of the foreign publisher when they give written English words as the example of how to pronounce it. I certainly know plenty of non-native English speakers who don't pronounce it like English "block us". Given the publisher's statement of like "block-us", 99% of native english speakers will be pronouncing it /blɒkʌs/.
Yes, but my point wasn't whether native English speakers would be confused by that textual explanation of the pronunciation. 
My point was: does that textual explanation reflect what the non-native English speaker (AFAIK) designer or publisher actually intended?
I.e. did they give a clear (to native English speakers), but incorrect, description?
We agree, after all, that plenty of non-native English speakers do not pronounce "block" and "us" the same way as native English speakers. So if a non-native English speaker writes that some word sounds like "block us", I take it with a grain of salt.
E.g. a Pole might assure you that the pronunciation of the Polish word "gra" (= game) (which rhymes with English "ah", i.e. a vowel /a/ similar to "block") has the same vowel sound as the English word "us" with /ʌ/, but it doesn't - they just don't pronounce the English word "us" the same way as a native English speaker because Polish doesn't have the vowel /ʌ/ and many Poles find it hard to hear and say /ʌ/ differently from /a/.
(Tangent: Almost no Poles pronounce my name "Russ" correctly, and instead pronounce it like the Polish "raz" /ras/ which is unfortunately a very common word that comes up in speech often... so when hearing background conversation, I'm often thinking "Huh? Did someone just call my name or mention me?" It's a source of much inconvenience and confusion...)
So anyway, that's why I would be genuinely interested to hear the designer's pronunciation of the title. (Or the publisher's, if they were the one who named it.) And I'd regard that as more "valid" than their textual description using words from a foreign (to them) language, especially a language with unusually inconsistent orthography and wide dialectical variation.
Of course maybe they have no clear pronunciation in mind, and it's just some word they made up without really thinking of how it sounds, who knows. 
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PS: FWIW I actually doubt 99% of native speakers pronounce "block" truly identically, e.g. I believe some will use /a/ not /ɒ/.
E.g. see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift
and note that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel
gives "stock" as an example of /a/.
There are examples of regional dialect variation like whether "cot" and "father" have the same vowel sound or not, or "cot" and "caught". (cf. "pen" vs "pin"!)
But yeah, these are small subtle variations compared to a non-native speaker's English vs a native speaker's English.
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Andrew Maxwell
New Zealand
Christchurch
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aramis wrote:
Given the publisher's statement of like "block-us", 99% of native english speakers will be pronouncing it /blɒkʌs/.
99% of native English speakers will never see the publisher's statement.
While the publisher obviously had that specific pronunciation in mind, the word looks like it should have a long vowel sound in the first syllable. This impression is reinforced by its similarity to an existing word (bloke). Without clarification of the publisher's intention, I would never thing to pronounce the word "BLOCK-US" because it lacks the most important paet of the word block: the vowel-shortening "ck" consonant. Even knowing it is a short first vowel, most native English speakers are going to pronounce it "BLOCK-iss" rather than "BLOCK-US".
SommerMatt wrote: Yep... just like we pronounce:
Tough
Dough
Cough
...the same, right? And how "ghoti" is pronounced "fish"?
The -gh (silent) consonant needs to be understood in context of the fact that it is transmutation of the -ch consonant in older forms of German such as Mittelhochdeustch. Compare English "eight" with German "acht" for a surviving example. This is a hard ch similar to the Greek Chi (x). This sound softened in a native (British) population which had trouble making the sound, essentially.
Actually, a lot of English pronunciation can be more easily understood with reference to antique forms of German.
The "ghoti" example (which people think is a great example of how English "doesn't follow rules") is actually a good example of how it does- and it can't be pronounced as "fish" while following English pronunciation. Gh is never an "f" sound as an initial consonant, and -ti- needs to have a suffix of some sort to be pronounced "sh".
Quote: English has nearly as many irregular pronunciations as "regular" ones,
Myth. It has a consistent majority of regular pronunciation. It does have more "irregular" pronunciations than most other languages due to the number of borrowed words, but in the main it is consistent. That's actually what generally trips up non-native English speakers; they learn the majority pronunciation then are confused by the minority of exceptions.
Quote: and "we" don't "conclude" such a thing because it never once occurred to me to pronounce it "Blow-kis." If you did, more power to you. Again, with the main concept of the game being "blocking" your opponent, it just seems a natural leap of logic.
By "we" he presumably meant "native English speakers who pronounce words in a way consistent with the generally accepted rules of the language". Alternatively he may have meant "people who have posted so far indicating they pronounced the word BLOW-kiss". Either way, I don't think you specifically were included in the pronoun.
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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Andrew: of the two hundred most commonly used words in American English, over a third are non-standard pronunciations - so called "sight words" in the educational business.
Students in US schools have to learn approximately 200 sight-words by grade 6. Dolch's list is not entirely words that have to be rote learned, but many are. And they're the 220 most common words in educational literature.
Here's the pre-primer level list, with the nonstandard pronunciations bolded, and alteration-rule words (silent e, double vowel, vowel-r, trailing w, and trailing y) underlined:
Dolch Words List wrote: Pre-primer:
a, and, away, big, blue, can, come, down, find, for, funny, go, help, here, I, in, is, it, jump, little, look, make, me, my, not, one, play, red, run, said, see, the, three, to, two, up, we, where, yellow, you 24 of 40 of the first words taught are non-standard. 15 are simply not congruent with any of the pronunciation rules.
Dolch Words List wrote: Primer:
all, am, are, at, ate, be, black, brown, but, came, did, do, eat, four, get, good, have, he, into, like, must, new, no, now, on, our, out, please, pretty, ran, ride, saw, say, she, so, soon, that, there, they, this, too, under, want, was, well, went, what, white, who, will, with, yes
Primer level alone: 27 non-standard; 10 non-rule; 52 total words
Cumulative: 53 nonstandard, 25 non-rule, 92 total.
American English spelling and pronunciation is about 20 discrete rules, plus the basic phonemes, and a small fraction of words that don't follow any... but for practical purposes, many of them are effectively memorization words.
As example, the long u sound is spelled in a number of different ways: ue, u_e, oo, oe, ough.
But ough can be ŏf, ŭf or ū; oe can be ō or ū; oo can be either ū, ŭ or ə, depending upon word and region. Which makes the rules for those combinations really non-rules.
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Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
