5 Jun
2006
5 Jun
'06
8:14 p.m.
John Cowan napisał(a):
Well, I cannot "reproduce it" in my mind this funny feeling I suspect,
as not natively Enlish speaking.
Hopefully it helped the Unix .Does it cause the smile every time You
hear it ?
Even now knowing it I will probably ,hearing or reading the word "Unix",
not associate it with "eunuch".Probably because I have coded Polish
pronounciation in my mind, or in other words I mostly think in Polish.
Your opinion is sufficient.I appreciate.
Andrzej
Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit:
OK, so I have learned something about English.
eunuch is "'yunek"
unit is "'yunet"
unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik"
You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be
pronounced differently(?).
English is a vowel-reduction language, like Russian or Portuguese;
vowels in unstressed syllables tend to be reduced either to schwa or to
lax short i. Because the anglophone countries broke up politically before
language standardization could take effect, there is no single standard
pronunciation worldwide, nor any fixed hierarchy of standards.
Therefore, one must consider both dialects in which the unstressed short
i and the unstressed schwa both become schwa, and ones where they do not.
In the former dialects, "Unix" and "eunuchs" sound exactly alike; in
the latter dialects, there is a small difference.
(As Tim Bradshaw notes, "unique" is stressed
on the second syllable,
so there is no vowel reduction on that syllable.)
It is and it was quite obvious for me before, I agree with You both,I
found only words with similar pronounciation(neglecting stress).
I suspect ,
that if the pronounciation were be same many people would
have noticed it before.
I am quite certain that many people have. It was perfectly obvious to me
the first time I saw the word "Unix" written, and that was in 1976 or so.
It is clear ,
that opinion of American/English linguistic/language
specialist would be neccesarry.
I am not a specialist, but I am a generalist with a good understanding
of the domain.