Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Epenthesis 1786 days ago
* Spanish: "hacer"

* French: "pas"

* Italian: "casa"

* Mandarin (written using pinyin): "bàng"

* German: "katze"

* Japanes (written in romaji): "arigato"

* Bahasa Indonesia: "bahasa"

Note that the sounds in these various languages are not exactly the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest sound in the native phonological inventory of a General American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently).

1 comments

It's worth noting that "given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently" is a bit misleading qualifier - there are many who have some difference between "caught" and "cot" (with "caught" being similar to "cot" but longer/smoother, with a clear differentiation), but it's clearly not the sound you intended that would match Italian "casa" and IPA 'a'; so pronouncing "caught" and "cot" differently apparently does not necessarily imply pronouncing "caught" the same way you do.

Also, if I listen to the audio examples at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger then it's exactly the other way around, that the "merged" pronunciation seems like an appropriate representation of "a" in words like Italian "casa", with "non-merged" "cought" sounding very different from that?

Oh wow, my mistake!

I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood which direction the split went.