Important Philosophical Questions + POLLS

General Chat
731

these all reinforce the idea that it’s a long “o” sound, which it isn’t.

Go has a long O in natural English speech. It’s a homophone of go. It would only have a short O if you were imitating the Japanese pronunciation of igo.

That would be an “educated pronunciation” but not the natural one, since Go and igo are not the same word. Also, even intact loanwords from Japanese take a long final O in English – cf. Edo. English also lengthens final O when borrowing from other languages as well, eg. when taking tango from Spanish.

732

In technical articles about Japanese (and, more widely, Oriental) figures, do you prefer

  • forename, surname
  • surname, forename
  • switching from surname, forename to forename, surname at a certain date, eg. the start of the Meiji Era (1868)

0 voters

The switch option is Wikipedia’s policy.

733

And now for a more “Yebellz-style” question:

When does a “cave” become a “passage”?

  • When it could possibly be used as a passage
  • When it’s been used at least once as a passage
  • When it was, at some point, in regular use as a passage
  • When it’s currently in use as a passage
  • Other

0 voters

734

image

6 Likes
735

I use both short and long. Shorter in sentences, when go is a known subject between us or when I feel shy to insist.
From where should the o be long?

736

Sorry, I’m not sure what your question means. What do you mean “from where”?

737

What is the place telling us the O in go is a long one? Any statement, like a book or something else?
In my own experience by listening or telling the word myself, both ways, short and long are common.

738

If you mean the O in go the verb, here is a pronunciation citation from Wiktionary go - Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Received Pronunciation gō /gəʊ/, General American gō /goʊ/

I would consider these “long O” sounds. It’s the same sound as in, say, row or boat.

The vowel /ɒ/, the O in golf, certainly never appears.

739

Hum sorry I can’t check this wiki. Do they refer to the game? Yes it’s not an open o like in golf, but still can be a short one, not like in boat.
Besides, go the verb (the action) can have a difference with go the noun (the game) in it’s prononciation (long or short).

740

They don’t offer a pronunciation for the game Go.

Here’s the same citation for the verb go, this time from the Cambridge Dictionary. Again, no pronunciation offered for the name of the game.

741

So we don’t have statement. And to me the prononciation of a verb qualifying an action, may already be not the same as for a thing.

As I said, I hear both, long and short, maybe even more the short one now I think about it, when people talk about the game.

1 Like
742

You cite your own pronunciation, but am I right in thinking that you’re not a native speaker? Therefore you can’t really use that as a source for native English pronunciation.

743

Yep I am thinking on the international way to say go, not only the one in USA. Note that it’s still interesting to me to learn that in Texas go is pronounced like the Goooo of a wolf.

744

I’m actually English.

I don’t believe there is an “international pronunciation of go” that differs from what I’ve cited. If you mean a “Chinese-accented pronunciation of Go”, that tells us about the phonology of Chinese, not English.

745

Well, I met thousands players of the world and I am not specialized in the Chinese way to say go, I could tell you a bit more how we say weitchi or weike…

Just saying that how English people pronounce go as a verb don’t tell us much how they say go the game and that international English is still a thing to consider.

746

It’s not just go. The natural, native English pronunciation of any word-final O is ō (/əʊ/ or /oʊ/).

1 Like
747

So when you say let’s go! It’s a long o? I tend to use a short (sorry for my curiosity)

748

When I say long O, what I mean is that sound that is represented as ō, or /əʊ/ (RP), or /oʊ/ (American).

As opposed to /ɒ/ in bot, to /ɔ/ in bore, to /ɔɪ/ in boy, /aʊ/ in bough, and the /o/ at the end of Italian graffito. And, indeed, to /o̞/, the sound at the end of Japanese igo (which I’m not very familiar with).

I’m not really commenting on the length, which I’d have difficulty defining, but the nature.

I did suspect that this was the cause of the confusion. I wouldn’t notice a change in the length of ō unless I was looking for it. In English, its length is what’s called allophonic, which means that it doesn’t carry meaning.

So perhaps whilst a native speaker wouldn’t notice a change in the length of ō in words relative to the other words in the sentence, as dictated by the flow of speech, a non-native speaker might. So you could be correct that even in native speech the length of ō may change – I couldn’t confirm or deny that. But its nature, in how it would be represented in IPA, does not change.

A native pronunciation of any word-final O is ō, unless an attempt is being made by the speaker to pronounce the word similarly to its pronunciation in the language of origin. Take the word riviera, for example. Because this word was adopted from Italian, some speakers will imitate an Italian pronunciation of the word by trilling their R, but this is not how they would pronounce the R in a word like red or roof. The imitation of native speech is double-edged. It’s most appropriate when the context of the word is important, for instance if you were giving a talk about Italian history and wanted to add an “authentic tone”, but in casual speech it can appear pretentious.

This is what I said at the beginning, that “Go” can be pronounced with anything from /ɒ/ to /o/ to /o̞/. But this would be an attempt to imitate how igo is pronounced in the Japanese language and would not represent a native way of speech.

749

I didn’t mean to say we should pronounce it in the Japanese way, only to not make it more confusing what the original Japanese would be. With “go” we can just accept that it’s pronounced long because that’s how English works, but with gō, it looks like the standard Hepburn romanisation of ごう. Similarly, “oh” is often used by Japanese people in their names to make sure English speakers will pronounce it with a long vowel (e.g. “Ohtani”), it’s actually an official way to romanise long vowels in Japanese names, being used on passports and such by the Japanese government.

Finally, I get the reason why Ing wanted to make goe popular, but I’d see people who don’t know how to pronounce it, pronouncing it with two syllables, something like “gowie”, which only brings us farther from home.

In fact, these are just different vowels. About Japanese pronunciation, it’s just the same vowel, but pronounced longer. English doesn’t have such a thing, so it’s pretty impossible to explain it with English vocabulary.

Also, bugcat, I never get to vote in your polls if they close so soon! :stuck_out_tongue:

6 Likes
750

Hum I think the length is all what was considered here, because we all agree beside this about the nature of the sound.
And you disagreed with @Vsotvep telling us that it’s a long one like in “boat”.

Now to add to the confusion, English way of pronouncing the verb go is quite irrelevant for other reason, because go is a word now integrated in many languages (not Chinese lol) and coming from Japanese. What is english doing here in the middle?