this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
1169 points (98.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
5345 readers
3289 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
- !whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
- !best_of_mastodon@sh.itjust.works
- !curatedtwitter@sh.itjust.works
- !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not 'un-animous', it's 'you-nanimous'. Makes total sense.
Don't even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce 'ough'.
With words starting with "un" you can figure out pronunciation by removing the "un" and see if the rest of the word is it's own word which means the opposite. "animous" is not a word so you would use the long "u" sound in "unanimous". Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don't know unanimous, chances are I don't know if animous exists either.
Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no 'derstand'.
One could argue "understand" is more clearly two words stuck together than others mentioned.
Not that the two words combine meaningfully to create the new word!