Great quiz! Can you please accept more spellings for 'thank you' in Italian? I tried every phonetic combination I could think of but still didn't get it. Wah me. Grazie!
Wow that is very cool, I have never seen that script/alphabet before (and I thought I knew most, because I have often looked up stuff about origins of (written) language. Maybe I have seen it before, but only written and not as computer letters)
Gràcies per la bona prova! Només el 80 per cent de les persones sap que el català és la llengua de Barcelona i de tota Catalunya? Això no és suficient...
it's barely a sound, though. Just a schwa. Italians add the same sound to the end of English words that don't have any "e" on the end of them all the time, so it just sounds like an accent.
And actually here they don't pronounce it at all. /ˈɡrat.tsje/
Listen to that. Is it correct? There's only one vowel sound at the end of that word. And it's equivalent to an English long "a" sound as in the American pronunciation of "cake." (or "bed", in an Afrikaans accent, which sound bizarre to an American) Preceding this there is a "y" (j) sound. So... In Italian is the letter "i" used to represent the sound "y" and the letter "e" used to represent the sound "a" or "e"....? I assumed the "i" represented the vowel sound I was hearing at the end of the word, the "e" represented a schwa, and the "y" sound was simply a product of accent or placement of adjacent phonemes.
So what if he's Italian? Does he have a degree studying linguistics? A lot of Americans would insist that the consonant flap /ɾ/ in "water" is the same sound as the retroflex stop /t/ in "deter" the way that they pronounce it, but that doesn't mean that they know what they're talking about. Everything that most people know about letters and sounds they learned in Kindergarten.
@Kal - < tzi > = /tsj/ (the syllabic onset), < e > = /e/ (this is not a schwa). < tzi > is not pronounceable on its own as /tsj/ must have a coda to follow it, in the same way that the < tw > as in < twang > cannot appear at the end of a word in English as /tw/ is not permissible as a coda. So, yes, the < i > in Italian represents /j/ in this context, but it can be /i/ in others - < italia > = /italja/. (/j/, by the way, is just consonantal /i/ - try sustaining a /j/.) Italian doesn't reeaally have schwa, and the orthography is such that every letter (or combination of letters) does more or less represent a contrastive speech sound in a systematic way, unlike English. The /t/ in 'deter' is also not retroflex.
Thank you for trying to answer Robbie. I'm not familiar with Italian spelling convention so if the "i" doesn't represent the vowel sound, that's where my confusion stemmed from. I've also heard many different accents of Italian pronunciation now trying to get to the bottom of this, some (with rough English phonetic transcription) say it in a way I would write as "gratzi," others as "gratzie" (with the "e" very definitely a schwa), others "gratzyae" or "gratzyay" or "gratzya" or "gratzye". I found many speaking samples that sound different from one another.
It's been a long time since I took phonology but the stop in deter, time, etc in English is either retroflex or alveolar depending on dialect and accent, is it not? Anyway it's not the same sound as the flap in American English "water," even though the sound is represented by the same letter in written English, and most English speakers wouldn't know this without being told to pay attention. That was the point.
Pretty sure English remains an official language of Pakistan, although the Constitution specifies that steps should be taken to transition to Urdu-only. http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/constitution/part12.ch4.html
The most common language in Singapore is English, not Chinese. Chinese languages might have slightly more native speakers than English but English is more or less the common tongue of Singapore, spoken by most people.
Chinese is the most spoken if you combine dialects. 47.1% of the population speaks a Chinese dialect at home in comparison to 36.9% speaking English at home. This does not account for lingua franca in public/business, which would be quite hard to accurately quantify.
As a Singaporean, I find it quite hard to believe that Chinese is more commonly spoken than English...as a first language, maybe, but not if you look at the total number of speakers.
Data from Ethnologue seems to support this (Chinese wins for first language speakers, but English wins overall), though this article says that English is more commonly spoken at home too.
I'm a bit perplexed that more people know Arabic is an official language of Israel than Hebrew.
Listen to that. Is it correct? There's only one vowel sound at the end of that word. And it's equivalent to an English long "a" sound as in the American pronunciation of "cake." (or "bed", in an Afrikaans accent, which sound bizarre to an American) Preceding this there is a "y" (j) sound. So... In Italian is the letter "i" used to represent the sound "y" and the letter "e" used to represent the sound "a" or "e"....? I assumed the "i" represented the vowel sound I was hearing at the end of the word, the "e" represented a schwa, and the "y" sound was simply a product of accent or placement of adjacent phonemes.
It's been a long time since I took phonology but the stop in deter, time, etc in English is either retroflex or alveolar depending on dialect and accent, is it not? Anyway it's not the same sound as the flap in American English "water," even though the sound is represented by the same letter in written English, and most English speakers wouldn't know this without being told to pay attention. That was the point.
Tried Albania; Libya' eritrea before svizzera
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sn.html
Data from Ethnologue seems to support this (Chinese wins for first language speakers, but English wins overall), though this article says that English is more commonly spoken at home too.