w(uh)man to w(ih)men
Except by your own pronunciation guide:
w(uh)man to w(ih)men
Yeah that’s the spelling part OP is referring to
But the pronunciation changes there too*, contrary to what OP says.
* Maybe there are regional pronunciation differences I’ve never heard of before?
nah i say wuh-man and wih-min
It must only be in some places because where I live in the UK both parts change pronunciation.
Does in Midwest USA too.
Where’s that?
That’s a darn good shower thought.
it’s normal for unstressed short vowels in English to all come out as a “schwa”, which the most common phoneme of the language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel
What kind of weirdo says chick-uhn?
English speakers globally
I don’t pronunce any of those words like that. Maybe stadium I pronounce the same. Maybe.
Wait until you try to figure out how to pronounce “ough”, like in rough or through or dough.
Isn’t it just pronounced how it looks?
English phonetics suck more than any other language ever spoke or tried to learn
That’s cuz English is a bully that beats up all the other languages and steals their words
Nah fam… the leader took the lead, then he lead while wearing lead. This is pure English, no loanwords.
Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
Best I can tell from quick internet searches: Old English: wīfmann/menn (“female person/s”). The w rounded the following vowel giving a wo- pronunciation, which for some reason (umlaut?) stuck for the singular but not the plural. The spelling of the plural changed to match that of the singular in spite of the pronunciation.
* Everything here carries the caveat “in some dialects, …” because English
It’s strangely kind of either/or for the pronunciation if you take a look at the IPA pronunciation of the words.
I wonder, though, if this lack of difference in pronunciation is behind a question that’s confounded me for years: “why do so many people spell the singular as ‘women’ by accident (e.g. ‘a women’), but I’ve never seen something like ‘a men’)?” I always chalked it up to “a men” looking weird as basically “amen”, but this could be it instead.
Op, you just aren’t saying them correctly, I guess.
