I am not sure about that at all, but I always thought that all the words ended in -ae, where pronounced with a hard A and distinct E at the end.
Minutia-e
sunda-e
larva-e
alga-e
and so forth…
Maybe it’s this song’s fault :
I am not sure about that at all, but I always thought that all the words ended in -ae, where pronounced with a hard A and distinct E at the end.
Minutia-e
sunda-e
larva-e
alga-e
and so forth…
Maybe it’s this song’s fault :
Here’s how I would pronounce those:
Word | Rhyme |
---|---|
minutiae | /ɪaɪ/ |
sundae | /eɪ/ |
larvae | /i:/ |
algae | /i:/ |
reggae | /eɪ/ |
I’m not sure I could even produce the sound you’re describing.
Oho, this is going to be “funny accent time” for all of you then
I would pronounce all of them ending with the sound of “Tevere” (Rome’s river).
It has three “e” and all of them have the same sound.
0 voters
I heard a song: 100 digits of Pi, and I was surprised by the pronunciation
It definitely rhymes with sky. Consider that the other pronunciation would get confused with P / p, common symbols in maths, science, and programming.
Well… in Italy we say “pee” just like P/p.
Often we say “pi greco” which means “Greek p” and I believed that it would sound that way in Greece too.
@Gia or @JethOrensin, could you confirm that?
I was really astonished hearing “pie”.
It’s just a short pi, it doesn’t have a long ee sound.
π has the same sound of a short p like in “EpiPen”.
0 voters
I always said “me” (like pi) but at the university many pronounced it like a short “moo”.
I had found that exact same idea in a TIE fighter game actually … where the squadrons T, M and N where named Mu and Nu and Tau … so it wasn’t just a weird idea they had. It really is a thing!?!
Mü.
Not kidding, that’s how German’s say it. ^ ^ In English, I would probably say something like “Myoo”.
Italian wikipedia says “diffusa come mu in ambito scientifico e tecnico”.
It’s an engineer thing!
It seems like it is a matter of “accepted math pronounciation” somehow:
O_O
You can compare it to this:
That first video… I guess they pronounce everything like they do sororities.
What does it mean to stress part of a word?
Also woulda pronounced that me/moo word like “you” or “ooo” cause I didn’t know it had an m sound in it
There is a song that would have killed that kind of non-sense
For the foreigners that might click on it, yes, as you can see in the description, almost all the lyrics are acronyms of Greek public services or private organizations
Italian pronunciation of Greek letters is more similar but isn’t really accurate.
That was nice to hear. The g-w thing is puzzling me though
I’m not sure I agree with the video that it is the correct pronunciation. It’s the Greek pronunciation, but as these letters are indeed ubiquitous in maths, physics, science and engineering, there is also a more or less standardised international pronunciation of those same letters (or local pronunciation, like the Dutch pronunciation that I learnt in high school). I could pronounce the τ like “tav” or the μ like “mi”, but if the people I’m talking to wouldn’t understand me, it makes no sense to do so.
When I discuss math in English, I pronounce the Greek alphabet in English, when I discuss it in Dutch, I pronounce the letters in Dutch. Unless I’m using them to discuss modern Greek, then there is a case to be made to use the modern Greek pronunciation.
After all, we don’t have any problems with the Latin alphabet being pronounced differently in different languages, either.
I’d argue that different languages adopted the same alphabet to express their own, pre-existing sounds.
Same way Chinese characters are pronounced completely differently in Korean.
In the Greek alphabet case, it’s the Greek letters that are mispronounced (and I can understand why, but it’s still the wrong one, technically).
EDIT: Yes, we probably borrowed from the Phoenicians, too.