Bill Kristol tells GOP to come back to the table.

The term "ying-yang" is particularly distorted from its original pronunciation.

Isn't it yin (pronounced similarly to the form of currancy), not ying?

Keithustus wrote:

You know what ticks me off? People who can't pronounce their a-vowels with a short sound, and tend toward short-e instead. Example: "Hand" is pronounced by some as "hend". This wouldn't be a problem except when they discuss music by George Frideric Handel and make me wonder who is this "Hendel" composer I've never heard of?

Edit: and if someone is going to argue "it's a German name. 'Hendel' is the correct pronunciation" then I refer you to the majority of foreign words and names that have been butchered by English speakers. The term "ying-yang" is particularly distorted from its original pronunciation.

Don't even get me started on people who don't know how to pronounce Goethe.

Gur-te

Well that's not really fair. that oe sound just doesn't really exist in American english language. I don't like to stop and think back to my German choir class to remember that my lips need to make an O face while my mouth says an E sound. It's awkward simply because I don't do it much. Or ever.

My name is Seth -- which means a huge portion of people -- notably Koreans -- can't pronounce my name without significant effort. The TH sound is just so completely foreign to their mouth muscles it's exceedingly difficult for them to make it, so I'm okay with being called Seff.

And that's not even going to examples of languages that use clicks or pops or strange collections of consonants. I will never be able to pronounce the name Nguyen properly.

This thread just got weird.

SallyNasty wrote:

This thread just got weird.

Definitely a little off-topic.

Demosthenes wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:

This thread just got weird.

Definitely a little off-topic. :D

This is most genteel trip to Cleveland I've ever been on.
Edit: Or, I guess we're leaving Cleveland on the way to Everything Else?

Seth wrote:

my lips need to make an O face

IMAGE(http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/o-face-275x300.jpg)

Demosthenes wrote:
The term "ying-yang" is particularly distorted from its original pronunciation.

Isn't it yin (pronounced similarly to the form of currancy), not ying?

Oops, typed an extra G in there, you're right.

Anyway, the English and Chinese pronunciations of 阴阳 "yin and yang" are incompatible. Chinese speakers will wonder whether English speakers saying "yin and yang" are even attempting to use a Chinese phrase, while our hearing 阴阳 does not seem any different from any other phrase that would need to be translated. We accent the Y sounds, use a short-A sound that is not possible in Chinese, and we hold onto the strong -NG sound much more prominently than any proper Mandarin speaker would. The Chinese pronunciation instead is most concerned with the tone or pitch of the vowels, and whether there is a tiny speck of consonants before and after each.

I tried looking for a website that would simply pronounce the characters (there are plenty of smartphone apps that do) but none seemed to like 阴阳, so instead I'll refer you to Google Translate.

Copy and paste 阴阳 there and you'll hear a strangely unnatural English pronunciation. If you enter "yin and yang" and tell it to translate to Simplified Chinese, it will pronounce 阴阳 for you, which you should agree is not how you expected it to sound.

boogle wrote:

Gur-te

There's no R in Goethe. Just say GUOO-tah, like the cheese, sort of.

Seth wrote:

My name is Seth -- which means a huge portion of people -- notably Koreans -- can't pronounce my name without significant effort. The TH sound is just so completely foreign to their mouth muscles it's exceedingly difficult for them to make it, so I'm okay with being called Seff.

Yup. I'm "Kees" often.

Seth wrote:

I will never be able to pronounce the name Nguyen properly.

I've always been told that it's just "Win". Maybe that's not accurate?

Keithustus wrote:

Anyway, the English and Chinese pronunciations of 阴阳 "yin and yang" are incompatible. Chinese speakers will wonder whether English speakers saying "yin and yang" are even attempting to use a Chinese phrase

風水 is good for a laugh too.

(feng shui)

Keithustus wrote:
Seth wrote:

I will never be able to pronounce the name Nguyen properly.

I've always been told that it's just "Win". Maybe that's not accurate?

I have been told both Win and Nguyen (pronouncing every letter).

Keithustus wrote:

We accent the Y sounds, use a short-A sound that is not possible in Chinese, and we hold onto the strong -NG sound much more prominently than any proper Mandarin speaker would.

SNL Season 14 episode 11 wrote:

The President: Perfessor, we got martians!

Einstein: Martians? You mean, like extra-tyrannicals?

Rudy: Yeah! We got dem comin' out da ol' yin-yang!

I bet Bill Kristol has terrible Mandarin.

Keithustus wrote:
boogle wrote:

Gur-te

There's no R in Goethe. Just say GUOO-tah, like the cheese, sort of.

The "oe" sound (IPA /ø/) is a rounded close-mid central vowel. In English, the sound of "ur" takes the "u" sound (/u/) which is rounded close back and "centralizes" it somewhat (moving towards /ə/) without losing the roundness. So trying to pronounce the same sound as in "ur" without the "r" is a reasonable approximation for a native English speaker. "uoo" makes me think of compressing the sounds of /uwo/ into a short space, which would approximate into something like a back close-mid vowel, but a diphthong. Which... really doesn't sound much like /ø/. So, I think boogle's suggestion is more likely to be helpful to English speakers.

An even easier approximation might be to try to pronounce the schwa /ə/ sound with rounding, but that's a little extra hard since we rarely think of that as a distinctive vowel in English. (We use it to express some unaccented vowel sounds, and dictionary pronunciations frequently include it, so we're at least aware it exists. But, that doesn't make trying to pronounce it on purpose in a special way super easy. Hence the "ur". :D)

When did this become a linguistics forum discussion?

You know what else the Fiscal Cliff reminds me of? Fonts! Lets start talking about fonts now!

Wingding font seems oddly accurate....

Wingding font seems oddly accurate....

Yonder wrote:

You know what else the Fiscal Cliff reminds me of? Fonts! Lets start talking about fonts now!

IMAGE(http://ttfonts.net/modules/waterfall.php?font=10299_Currency.ttf)

That image is [em]so[/em] money.

It would be nice if we could get companies to pay their fair share. Google avoided paying $2 billion of income taxes.

Don't be evil but do be jerks.

Leave the job creators alone. They need all that extra money to create jobs... oh wait...

Both parties have a mandate.

President Obama and his supporters argue that the November election gave him a mandate to raise taxes on the rich and take a "balanced" approach to cutting social programs. They have a point. Obama won re-election with a majority of the vote, and he can justifiably say that he does have national backing for these economic priorities, which he talked about day in and day out on the campaign trail.

But the Republicans have a powerful argument of their own. They say most of their members in the House of Representatives won re-election with bigger majorities than Obama had (though House Democrats won more votes overall than House Republicans), and those legislators campaigned against tax increases and in favor of more severe spending cuts. They also have a point.

...

Norquist told CNN that Obama's win did not give the president "the power to impose anything he wants," even though many Democrats and media pundits have been arguing that Obama has the upper hand because his national mandate trumps the district-by-district conservative mandate. But that's not how House Republicans see it. In their own little universes, defined by the borders of their districts, the local mandate is the most important one. If they didn't feel that way, they argue, they would be voted out of office by their constituents.

So both sides feel they have a mandate. Lovely setting for a compromise. I'm going to be shocked if a deal is reached by the end of the year.

Norquist told CNN that Obama's win did not give the president "the power to impose anything he wants," even though many Democrats and media pundits have been arguing that Obama has the upper hand because his national mandate trumps the district-by-district conservative mandate. But that's not how House Republicans see it.

I don't remember this being a problem for Republicans when Bush was reelected into his second term with a lower popular vote than Obama got for his reelection... what's that Grover? Oh you only think it's a mandate when the guy you want to win does. When the guy you don't like wins, it's not a mandate, then it's far more complex. Got it. How's that tax pledge working for you?

Note: Don't get me wrong, I think it's always more complex than what we generally hear, but I really hate when either side takes something as a given, then when things turn against them in the popular vote, act like it's a travesty that things are occuring this way.

Demosthenes wrote:

I think it's always more complex than what we generally hear, but I really hate when either side takes something as a given, then when things turn against them in the popular vote, act like it's a travesty that things are occuring this way.

Find me a Democratic or Republican party leader who isn't so duplicitous as to pick and choose whichever phony rationalization he or she has for his/her party's platform, no matter how at odds with reality and their own previous statements on said position, and I'll show you someone who can't win re-election time after again.

Ill be interested to see if the offer put forward by the republicans this afternoon has any tax increases in it. If there aren't any then they are just jerking everyone around, again.

Greg wrote:

It would be nice if we could get companies to pay their fair share. Google avoided paying $2 billion of income taxes.

So change the tax laws.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Greg wrote:

It would be nice if we could get companies to pay their fair share. Google avoided paying $2 billion of income taxes.

So change the tax laws.

Will do when I am dictator.

Keithustus wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

I think it's always more complex than what we generally hear, but I really hate when either side takes something as a given, then when things turn against them in the popular vote, act like it's a travesty that things are occuring this way.

Find me a Democratic or Republican party leader who isn't so duplicitous as to pick and choose whichever phony rationalization he or she has for his/her party's platform, no matter how at odds with reality and their own previous statements on said position, and I'll show you someone who can't win re-election time after again.

True enough, those Republicans who were going nuts about Obama lending military aid to the conflict in Syria were the same ones who said support our President and his war in Iraq or GTFO who were the same ones who said that Clinton in Bosnia was all on Clinton and if he f'ed up, it was all on him and he shouldn't rely on the support of the people, who...

Yeah, it's a cycle, and I know. Commander Shepard will eventually come to break us out of it.

But only if she picks the green energy beam...