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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I'm a native English speaker (UK) and I'd pronounce some of those words differently. Certainly "air" and "are" sound very different. "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.

I'd also take issue with "sick" and "Sikh" as Sikh has a slightly different vowel sound - somewhat longer than the short "i" in sic/sick. I'd say that "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms.

Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.

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I also would have said "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms until recently when I found out that Sikhs' preferred pronunciation is generally to sound closer to "sick" (aspirate the H if you like)

To be fair I don't know any Sikhs, though there is a Sikh community where I live (there's a Sikh temple at the bottom of my road).

I'm going to listen out for how Sikhs pronounce it.

And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it? I moved from California to Louisiana, and while my pronunciation / idioms used to get poked at in good cheer, I never deigned to correct the natives - "its the ten freeway, get it right, I should know, it starts in my state!"

> And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it?

I've heard "Sikh" pronounced many times by native english speakers and that invariably sounds like "seek". Now that I've heard that it's pronounced differently by the Sikhs themselves, I'll aim to use the correct pronunciation. This is an unusual situation in that I am a "native" (i.e. a native of England) and arguably Sikhs are non-native though I'd expect most of them near us were born here.

Also, the English have a long history of turning up in other countries and pushing their own religion/language/culture onto the natives, so maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing?

Also from the UK and have just learnt that I've likely been pronouncing it incorrectly. Here is a video where a Sikh uses the word several times and it sounds like "sick": https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kM1-DUTgTC4

It feels similar to the situation with "Muslim" or "islam", which have a proper "s" sound in Arabic (as in "messy") rather than a "z" sound (as in "music").

Or Škoda cars that most people call "Skoda" when it should be pronounced more like "Shkoda"

It's an interesting question as to whether an adopted word gets to be overridden by the preferences of the target!

Suppose the people of Edinburgh didn't happen to like Ee-dan-borghh as the French say it, that doesn't make the French pronunciation "wrong".

> "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.

I'm a native English speaker (US). Sometimes when I say "ever"/"never", the 'v' sound drops out. So I end up saying "e'er"/"ne'er" but it sounds like "air"/"nair".

> Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.

I pronounce all of these the same

I'd say that "taught" and "taut" rhyme with "sport", whereas "tot" rhymes with "spot"

Right, you said you're from the UK so that's in line with what I would have expected. My unstated point was that multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms

> multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms

Definitely. I find it fascinating how pronunciations can change so much geographically and the UK certainly has some variety in that regard.

I remember being a kid on a German school exchange and being surprised that they couldn't distinguish between "salary" and "celery". I've also heard that Germans find it almost impossible to pronounce "squirrel".

I also had difficulty on a holiday to the U.S. and trying to ask someone in a shop where the "batteries" were. He just couldn't understand me until I described them and he said "Oh! Badderies". My wife also had a problem asking for "Winston's" cigarettes until the lady at the counter exclaimed "Wenston's"

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