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August 3

Gämlä stän

Once when I was in Stockholm, Sweden, I spotted a group of tourists and overhead one say to another, in English, "Let's go to Gamla stan." Only he pronounced the name more like "[ˈɡæːmːlæ ˈstæːn]" instead of the correct pronunciation "[ˈɡâmːla ˈstɑːn]" (I had to copy-paste the IPA symbols from the Swedish IPA help page). If this were the Finnish Wikipedia I'd write that he pronounced the name as "Gämlä stän". In an English-speaking context, how could I write the way he pronounced the name without resorting to IPA? JIP | Talk 15:30, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That confused me for a while, as in Swedish G before ä is soft. DuncanHill (talk) 12:51, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In English, /æ/ is invariably written as "a". It's the "cat-hat-mat" vowel. While many other vowel sounds could be written with different letters, under nearly all English dialects, /æ/ is just "a". Some other sounds associated with "a", such as /ɑ/, could also be "o", i.e. the homophones (in some dialects) "balm" and "bomb". --Jayron 32 18:15, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

But I wanted to know how to illustrate the difference between that tourist's pronunciation of "Gamla stan" and the correct one. If I just wrote "He pronounced it Gamla stan instead of Gamla stan", no one will understand me. If I wrote "He pronounced it Gamla stan instead of Gomlo Ston" (or something), people would think I had the wrong pronuciation. JIP | Talk 18:25, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think that many, if not most, native English speakers would understand "He pronounced Gamla stan with short a's rather than long a's." Deor (talk) 18:44, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Among ordinary English speakers without special linguistic training, "long a" almost always means [eɪ]. You can use the Lexical set keywords... AnonMoos (talk) 20:43, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just say he pronounced the vowels as if the name was in English, or to be more explicit, "He pronounced all three vowels as short A's, as if the name was in English." --184.144.99.72 (talk) 22:13, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the problem is that, for many dialects of English, several of those "a" vowels are not recognized or used. Except in some of the antipodean varieties, the /â/ and /a/ phonemes aren't used. See English phonology#Vowels. --Jayron 32 12:51, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You touch on a reason I have to regret calling myself Tamfang. —Tamfang (talk) 02:22, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand, can you clarify? JIP | Talk 03:28, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I assume he means that most English speakers will pronounce his user name like the English words "tram-fang" (but without the "r"), though he has a different pronunciation in mind... AnonMoos (talk) 08:06, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am ignorant of Tolkien's works, so I took it to be pronounced as tam to rhyme with bam, cam, dam, fam, gam, ham, jam, lam, ma'am, 'Nam, Pam, ram, Sam, Spam, wham or yam; and fang to rhyme with bang, dang, gang, hang, pang, rang, sang or tang. Now I'm curious as to what the right pronunciation is. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:27, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on the dialect; different varieties of English will divide up the various "a" vowels very differently. See, for example, the Trap–bath split, in some varieties of English those two words use the same vowel sound (/æ/) and in some, the "bath" class of words are pronounced with the /ɑ/ sound, as is found in words like "palm". --Jayron 32 12:38, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, obviously a language invented by a philologist, loosely modeled on Welsh, fictionally spoken thousands of years before the Great Vowel Shift, would use Modern English vowels. —Tamfang (talk) 01:42, 15 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Above: (i) "[ˈɡæːmːlæ ˈstæːn]"; (ii) the comment "I'd just say he pronounced the vowels as if the name was in English". Oh really? Englishes differ, but [æː] is odd at best, and both [mː] and word-final [æ] are very odd. Now, if the [perhaps anglophone] speaker had instead said [ˈgæmlə ˈstæn], I might say that he pronounced gamla to rhyme with the "Tamla" of Tamla Motown, and stan as in the boys' name. -- Hoary (talk) 12:47, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The most traditional ways to indicate these vowel quality distinctions in English seem to be to insert R, H, and W here and there, or to use the words "long", "short", "hard", and "soft". You can choose any of these at random; it doesn't really matter, because the reader is going to guess at random what you might have meant. The only way I know of that actually works reliably and is widely understood is to say what it rhymes with, like "panda's hand". --Amble (talk) 18:10, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rhymes with "wonderland"? --Lambiam 21:15, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I thought that was the unfortunate Ponda's hand. --Amble (talk) 19:59, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]