[thaumasiotes]

Disclaimer: don't speak Dutch; no training in Dutch; going solely off of wikipedia.

Wikipedia tells us that Dutch "ui" is the diphthong /œy/ and "ou" is the diphthong /ɑu/. The English MOUTH vowel is conventionally /aʊ/ in American pronunciation, and the CHOICE vowel is conventionally /ɔɪ/. I will analyze them as if they were /au/ and /ɔi/.

It's clear that the MOUTH vowel is the best available English match for Dutch "ou". The difference between [a] and [ɑ] is minimal.

Dutch "ui" is trickier. /œy/ starts with a front vowel, which isn't true of /au/ or /ɔi/. /ɔ/ is a better match in terms of vowel height. (According to the notation. This is a case where you're probably better off just listening to samples; vowel notation is quite sloppy.)

/y/ is the high front rounded vowel, a sound which, like /œ/ (mid-low front rounded), does not exist in English. It has two obvious approximants: FLEECE (/i/), the high front unrounded vowel, and GOOSE (/u/), the high back rounded vowel. If you choose FLEECE, prioritizing the vowel's frontness, you'll end up thinking that "ui" should correspond to the English CHOICE vowel -- the first part of the diphthong has been moved back, and the second part has been unrounded, but compromises have to be made. If you pick GOOSE, then you'll end up on the MOUTH vowel -- in this case, the first part gets moved back and lowered somewhat, and the second part also gets moved back but preserves its lip rounding.

Is either of those choices objectively right? No. You might prefer thinking of "ui" as CHOICE on the grounds that that makes it different from "ou", but that runs into the problem that (according to wikipedia again) Dutch also includes an "oi" diphthong which is a close match to English CHOICE.

You could think of the root of the problem as being that Dutch has three high vowels /i/, /y/, /u/ (spelled "ie", "uu", "oe" among other ways, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography ), where English has only /i/ and /u/. You're going to end up with collisions somewhere.

[rapnie]

I guess the 'ui' and the 'g' are hardest to pronounce correctly for non-native Dutch speakers.

We have a tongue-twister for German and English people that goes like this "Ik eet uitsluitend gefruite uien in mijn geruite keuken" (you can have Google Translate read it out loud). Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".

[thaumasiotes]

> Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".

That sentence is more ambiguous in English than you might think! I'm curious which of these meanings are compatible with the Dutch:

1. The only thing I do in my checkered kitchen is eat fried onions. (Other activities don't take place in the checkered kitchen.)

2. Fried onions are the only thing I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Other foods must be eaten elsewhere.)

3. Fried onions are the only type of onion I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Raw onions must be eaten elsewhere, but eating steak in the kitchen is OK.)

4. My checkered kitchen is the only place in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak anywhere, but I won't eat fried onions outside the kitchen.)

5. My checkered kitchen is the only one of my kitchens in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak in any kitchen, but I won't eat fried onions in my plain white kitchen.)

6. My checkered kitchen is the only checkered kitchen in which I will eat fried onions. (I won't eat fried onions in your checkered kitchen, but I will eat them in the bedroom.)

[tripzilch]

I believe it's more accurate as "I exclusively eat sauteed onions in my checkered kitchen".

The only one it's not compatible with is 4, in that case the word "uitsluitend" ("exclusively") would appear elsewhere in the sentence.

Each of the others are ambiguous when written, but should be clear given pronunciation (emphasis), or the tiniest bit of context.

[rapnie]

Ha, that's cool. You found a lot of different interpretations. These also exist in Dutch. No. 3 comes closest to how most people would understand the meaning in Dutch, but some others like no. 4 would fit too.

[lucb1e]

I read it as having meaning #2 but it depends on the intonation and context. If you emphasize fried then it's #3. If we're talking about having fried onions and not in your kitchen I'd probably assume #4.

As for which ones work in Dutch, all of them.

[tripzilch]

Number 4 would be "Ik eet gefruite uien uitsluitend in mijn geruite keuken", though.

It mostly gets confusing for me because of moving back and forth between English and Dutch grammar, but any bit of context would make it a lot less ambiguous :)

[lucb1e]

Most things germans try to pronounce are just way off in general (living in germany, the topic comes up regularly), but by far the worst seems to be the sch as in Scheveningen or schatje. It usually turns into skatje and since that isn't a soft sound they morph it into an angry word to make fun of how our word for sweetie sounds after morphing.

[lucb1e]

I must admit that this is a little beyond me and I don't really understand what you're trying to say. Do I understand correctly that you're saying the vowel in choice is the best match for the Dutch "ui" when going off of the IPA notation, but that there exists no good match in English like there is for "ou"?

[thaumasiotes]

I'm saying that (1) there is no perfect or near-perfect match; (2) it isn't clear which available option is the "best" match, because the three obvious options each sacrifice something different.

If you're interested in the theory:

Vowels are generally thought of as being points in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are:

1. Whether the vowel is high or low -- if your mouth opens wide (chin closer to feet), it's a lower vowel; if your mouth doesn't open far (chin closer to eyes), it's a higher vowel.

2. Whether the vowel is front or back. The traditional way to explain this to linguistics students is to give them all lollipops. You put the lollipop on the middle of your tongue with the stick jutting out of your mouth. You can observe that the stick juts farther forward when you're pronouncing the FLEECE vowel than it does when you're pronouncing the GOOSE vowel.

3. Whether, as you pronounce the vowel, your lips are rounded or not.

Dutch "ui" is a diphthong, a transition from one vowel to another vowel. It appears to be a transition from (lowish, front, rounded) to (high, front, rounded). This is difficult for English because, in English, all front vowels are unrounded.

If you'd like to preserve the lip-rounding aspect of "ui", you need to use back vowels, at which point the MOUTH vowel is a near-perfect (low, back, xx[1]) -> (high, back, rounded) match.

If you'd like to preserve the frontness of "ui", the English FACE vowel is available, which is a transition from (lowish, front, unrounded) to (high, front, unrounded). CHOICE is a different option; it's (lowish, back, rounded) -> (high, front, unrounded). With CHOICE, you're choosing to match the rounding (and not the frontness) of the beginning of "ui", but transition into an end that matches frontness instead of rounding.

Which part of a sound is more important for purposes of matching a foreign sound to a native sound is a very interesting question, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea why different languages make the choices they do. My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui", even though it's an even better match for Dutch "ou". But someone else might disagree.

For an example of "differential splitting", consider that in modern English, W, V, and F are three separate sounds. In Old English, W and F were "real" sounds ("phonemes"), and V was a variety ("allophone") of F. In modern Mandarin Chinese, W and F are also phonemes, and V is an allophone of... W. Clearly, if you speak modern Mandarin, what's important about the V sound is not the same thing that would be important if you spoke Old English.

[1] Rounding is less obvious for low vowels -- a certain amount of lip rounding is induced by opening your mouth so far.

[lucb1e]

That was actually very interesting! I understand what you are saying now (admittedly I first thought "more theory? Not sure", probably because I had a very hard time following your last comment). I actually get it now and feel like I learned something new. Thanks for that write-up!

As for

> My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui",

I personally stand by my choice of the CHOICE vowel also after reading your comparison of the different options, but it's definitely a close contest.

[gpvos]

W, V and F are also separate sounds in Dutch, but much closer to each other than in English. Wat, vat and fat are different words. The Dutch W is not bilabial like the English W, but just a "softer" version of the V. (In practice, V is often pronounced almost the same as F).

[tripzilch]

Can you make the ö in FÖHN? Because if you go from the "ah" in AFTER to the ö in FÖHN, right on the transition you'll do a good "ui" for AFSLUITDIJK.

Using the MOUTH vowel in that word would reveal an English speaker immediately ;-) (Germans mess it up differently ;-) )

[tripzilch]

Thinking about it some more, you can get more easily away with the "eh" in MEH (not the /ə/ but the /ɛ/). That way you'll sound like someone speaking with a The Hague accent, and if you're otherwise speaking English, this will most probably slip by completely unnoticed to most Dutch listeners (unlike OU or OI would).