Mastering the meaning!
Christmas is almost here…. Christmas. That silent “T” in the word made me start to think about the pronunciation of English words and just how confusing it can be!
I’m not the only one to think about it either – in fact way back in 1922 a poem called The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité amusingly worked its way around 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. It begins like this:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
I won’t carry on, you get the jist (but if you’d like to read it in its full glory, you can do so here!) It makes for quite an amusing read.
We’ve said it before but English is such a confusing language. Making the connection between how words are spelled and how they’re pronounced can sometimes be difficult – especially for those for whom English isn’t their native language – and the “rules” aren’t rules at all, they seem to chop and change on what seems like a whim! The English language is so vast and has adopted so many words from other languages over the centuries that there are indeed a number of exceptions to the rules.
Did you know that English dictionaries don’t just tell you how a word is spelled and what it means, they also give an indication as to how the word should be pronounced?! Alongside the word you’ll notice a number of strange symbols – these in fact tell you how to pronounce the word phonetically.
Here’s an example – the word “dictionary” looks like this in its pronunciation form:
\ˈdik-shə-ˌner-ē\
It looks a bit like gobbledygook but in fact it’s a simplified version of the International Phonetic Association pronunciation guide that’s been developed by linguists to help communicate exactly how a word should be pronounced. There are American and UK versions of the guide which use slightly different symbols and interestingly the British guide contains more actual symbols (as opposed to letters) or old Greek letters, so it can be more difficult to master.
Throw all this pronunciation confusion into the mix with transcription and it’s a heady combination!
Trying to decipher what someone has said from a recording can be challenging, especially if the quality of the audio file isn’t the best. It may not seem like it but when we’re having a conversation we unconsciously make use of lip reading skills to be able to understand what’s being said, which clearly isn’t present when listening to a recording.
Mastering the meaning is a skill and one that we at FSTL take incredibly seriously. Our transcripts always need to accurately reflect what was said, which is why we only use out team of highly experienced, highly skilled transcribers to fulfill our clients’ needs.