It's "sodder", not "soLder", damnit! (for us USAians)

[Analog Kid]

'Buoy' is pronounced 'boy', innit?

Nope; "boo-ee" here in N. America.

[golden_labels]

This must be the second dumbest thread I ever posted to. And yet, here I am.

Just curious if any native Polish speakers out there could weigh in on an alternate theory. Taking the "L" in question as a "dark" or "velarized" L (in Polish printed "Ł", like a Latin "L" with a hash mark) could explain all. This is conventionally pronounced as a "W" sound.*  Of course this is missing from anglo-Latin typewriters, so a Pole reading the word in English-language correspondence could well presume it's pronounced "saw-der." 

*as in "War"; whereas the "W" in Polish is pronounced as an English "V," as in "Victory."  So, for example, a Polish friend of mine who signs his email "Slawek" pronounces it as I'd pronounce "Swavek."

As a Polish speaker I’d pronounce that ‘L’ even clearer than most English speakers I heard.

As for the ‘Ł’ hypothesis, we have something to compare pronunciation with: sołdat. The entry contains an audio sample.

[paulca]

'Buoy' is pronounced 'boy', innit?

Nope; "boo-ee" here in N. America.

It Boy.  Get your own language. 

dinghy - are we going to have "Ding he"?

The Ding-he was pulled behind the yakked!

[Analog Kid]

dinghy - are we going to have "Ding he"?

The Ding-he was pulled behind the yakked!

Yep, that's the way we say it here in Yankland. Ding-he. (Ackshooly more like "ding-ee", no aspirated sound.)

Wut, are you seriously arguing that everybody should pronounce things the way you do? Really?

And "yakked" for yacht? No, just no: "yat" here.

[paulca]

dinghy - are we going to have "Ding he"?

The Ding-he was pulled behind the yakked!

Yep, that's the way we say it here in Yankland. Ding-he. (Ackshooly more like "ding-ee", no aspirated sound.)

Wut, are you seriously arguing that everybody should pronounce things the way you do? Really?

And "yakked" for yacht? No, just no: "yat" here.

Honestly Im fine as long as you call it "American English". 

Yacht has a "class" note in it's pronunciation. A very British thing.   In a similar way to people "rolling their Rs" and speaking like the royals, "yacht" often has a much deeper prolonged descending in pitch "Yaw" "I own a luxury yawwt don't you know!"

A bit like "nought" "0" or "Naught"Y.  Yaughty types.  Distinct from "Horsey types."  British folks will understand.  Buxom women in "Barber" green wax coats, always blonde, always talk like they have marbles in their mouth.

[zike]

This must be the second dumbest thread I ever posted to. And yet, here I am.

Just curious if any native Polish speakers out there could weigh in on an alternate theory. Taking the "L" in question as a "dark" or "velarized" L (in Polish printed "Ł", like a Latin "L" with a hash mark) could explain all. This is conventionally pronounced as a "W" sound.*  Of course this is missing from anglo-Latin typewriters, so a Pole reading the word in English-language correspondence could well presume it's pronounced "saw-der." 

*as in "War"; whereas the "W" in Polish is pronounced as an English "V," as in "Victory."  So, for example, a Polish friend of mine who signs his email "Slawek" pronounces it as I'd pronounce "Swavek."

As a Polish speaker I’d pronounce that ‘L’ even clearer than most English speakers I heard.

As for the ‘Ł’ hypothesis, we have something to compare pronunciation with: sołdat. The entry contains an audio sample.

Thanks for the sanity check. Last native speaker in my bloodline was my grandfather from Płock, but he passed away before I was born.  He deserted in basic training, threw his rifle in the Bug and hitchhiked to Germany, thence to Canada and finally New York, where the sight of grandma finally stopped him. 

[SteveThackery]

Yacht has a "class" note in it's pronunciation. A very British thing.   In a similar way to people "rolling their Rs" and speaking like the royals, "yacht" often has a much deeper prolonged descending in pitch "Yaw" "I own a luxury yawwt don't you know!"

Again, this must be a Northern Irish thing. In all my years living in England I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that - never. It is always pronounced "yott".

[paulca]

Again, this must be a Northern Irish thing. In all my years living in England I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that - never. It is always pronounced "yott".

Yes.  Yott or yaught.  The elongated yawt is how "posh" people try and make it sound posh at least to me.  You know the sort I mean.

I couldn't find an example, but this was interesting.
https://youtu.be/Nj0Rh__1kDw

On where I live.  I live in a little sea side railway->beach town that had it's hay days in the 1960s.  Today it's full of "Have nots" and "Have yachts".  Millions of pounds of yachts in the marina and multi-million pound houses with a big swath of council estates through it.

[Monkeh]

Again, this must be a Northern Irish thing. In all my years living in England I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that - never. It is always pronounced "yott".

Yes.  Yott or yaught.  The elongated yawt is how "posh" people try and make it sound posh.  You know the sort I mean.

With their Jaaaaag.

[IanB]

Yacht has a "class" note in it's pronunciation. A very British thing.   In a similar way to people "rolling their Rs" and speaking like the royals, "yacht" often has a much deeper prolonged descending in pitch "Yaw" "I own a luxury yawwt don't you know!"

A bit like "nought" "0" or "Naught"Y.  Yaughty types.  Distinct from "Horsey types."  British folks will understand.  Buxom women in "Barber" green wax coats, always blonde, always talk like they have marbles in their mouth.

WTF? You must move in very strange circles if you've ever heard someone say yacht like that!

[IanB]

On where I live.  I live in a little sea side railway->beach town that had it's hay days in the 1960s.  Today it's full of "Have nots" and "Have yachts".  Millions of pounds of yachts in the marina and multi-million pound houses with a big swath of council estates through it.

Does it begin with "T"?

Or maybe "B"/"E"?

[TimFox]

For cheapskates unwilling to buy the real book, here is a pirate copy of the abridged standard reference to the English language in its wide variety:
https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_d4y9/mode/2up
No complaints allowed from British subjects, since it is from the Oxford University Press.

[IanB]

Speaking as someone who was once a PhD student in Linguistics:  the question is really "why do people in the UK pronounce it "soLder?" 

It's very common to have a "silent l" (so to speak) before oral stops (b, p, t, d, g, k) in English.  Think about words like "would, could, walk, talk, yolk, etc."  The "l" in all of these words is not normally pronounced.  By analogy, no one should be surprised that "solder" is pronounced as "sodder"

This is the bit that puzzles me. In my (British) accent, I pronounce solder in a way somewhat similar to words like walk and talk that you mention. The main difference from the USA is that I use the soul vowel sound rather than the hot vowel sound. So my pronunciation of solder is somewhat akin to sou(l)der (where the L glides into the D and mostly disappears). In fact, the same vowel sound I would us in the word "fold", which also has a similarly silent L. For me, folder and solder both rhyme, and both have something between a dark L and a silent L.

I think a lot of people imagine the L sound to be present, when it isn't really there.

[TimFox]

Speaking as someone who was once a PhD student in Linguistics:  the question is really "why do people in the UK pronounce it "soLder?" 

It's very common to have a "silent l" (so to speak) before oral stops (b, p, t, d, g, k) in English.  Think about words like "would, could, walk, talk, yolk, etc."  The "l" in all of these words is not normally pronounced.  By analogy, no one should be surprised that "solder" is pronounced as "sodder"

The (mostly British) pronunciation of the "l" is basically a conscious "overcorrecting"  This overcorrecting would (haha) be hard to apply to extremely common words, which is why "would, could" are never pronounced with an "l" sound. 

But for semi-common words that you don't hear very often (and see mostly in written form), it's easy to start pronouncing them "phonetically' because you aren't entirely sure how they are pronounced. "Folk" and "yolk" (semi-uncommon words) are good examples - some people do pronounce the "l" . 

I would bet serious money that non-technical speakers on both side of the Atlantic (or Pacific) would say "soLder" when they first see that word for the first time.

So again, the question is really "Why do British people artificially pronounce the l?  Sometimes the answer is societal, not linguistic: if there were a famous song, a book, etc. in the UK where the person said "soLder" then that might have influenced other speakers to also pronounce it the same way.

And if you think that's a stretch - I can hear a clear inter-generational difference in the way Americans pronounce the word "frontier" - those who grew up with the original Star Trek and those who did not.  Thank you again William Shatner for permanently scarring my pronunciation of this word 

Boldly to split infinitives that have never been split before ...

[PlainName]

I think a lot of people imagine the L sound to be present, when it isn't really there.

Yes, I think you have condensed it succinctly: it is not the L per se, but whether the o is short (as in 'sod') or long (as in 'soud'). The actual spelling is just a red herring

[SteveThackery]

So again, the question is really "Why do British people artificially pronounce the l? 

It's not artificial! It's how everyone pronounces it. There are loads of similar words where we pronounce the 'l': boulder, folder, colder, holder, older, shoulder, smoulder.

[IanB]

It's not artificial! It's how everyone pronounces it. There are loads of similar words where we pronounce the 'l': boulder, folder, colder, holder, older, shoulder, smoulder.

Not everyone. And it's misleading when you say "pronounce the L". It's a dark L, and in the same way "dark matter" is so called because we can't see it, the "dark L" is so called because we can't hear it. It modifies the shape of the tongue which affects the sound of the vowel/consonant pair, but there is no actual L sound.

There may be some accents where people emphasise the L sound, but it is certainly not "everyone".

[Xena E]

Jonathan Swift would have written a novel about this thread had he still been alive.

[IanB]

I'm amazed no one has pointed out that it is dammit! not damnit!, dammit!

It really annoys me when people spell dammit wrongly   

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dammit

[themadhippy]

ok janet

[Xena E]

It's Brad, Dammit, not Janet.

[TimFox]

Faint praise…

[Xena E]

Faint praise…

(To damn with?)

[Zero999]

Speaking as someone who was once a PhD student in Linguistics:  the question is really "why do people in the UK pronounce it "soLder?" 

It's very common to have a "silent l" (so to speak) before oral stops (b, p, t, d, g, k) in English.  Think about words like "would, could, walk, talk, yolk, etc."  The "l" in all of these words is not normally pronounced.  By analogy, no one should be surprised that "solder" is pronounced as "sodder"

The (mostly British) pronunciation of the "l" is basically a conscious "overcorrecting"  This overcorrecting would (haha) be hard to apply to extremely common words, which is why "would, could" are never pronounced with an "l" sound. 

But for semi-common words that you don't hear very often (and see mostly in written form), it's easy to start pronouncing them "phonetically' because you aren't entirely sure how they are pronounced. "Folk" and "yolk" (semi-uncommon words) are good examples - some people do pronounce the "l" . 

I would bet serious money that non-technical speakers on both side of the Atlantic (or Pacific) would say "soLder" when they first see that word for the first time.

So again, the question is really "Why do British people artificially pronounce the l?  Sometimes the answer is societal, not linguistic: if there were a famous song, a book, etc. in the UK where the person said "soLder" then that might have influenced other speakers to also pronounce it the same way.

And if you think that's a stretch - I can hear a clear inter-generational difference in the way Americans pronounce the word "frontier" - those who grew up with the original Star Trek and those who did not.  Thank you again William Shatner for permanently scarring my pronunciation of this word 

On the contrary. Most people on both sides of the Atlantic and the commonwealth pronounce the L in sold, so it's a little surprising most Americans don't pronounce the L in solder.

I don't think overcorrection comes into this. Yes there are instances where people do overcorrect such as pronouncing the H sound in some place names twice, so Southampton is pronounced as South hampton, rather than South ampton or pronouncing the T in words where it has traditionally been silent i.e. restaurant.

[tooki]

On "mute" L's.  The Spanish.  The number of places I have been where there are clearly L's in the place name but none are pronounced in Spain tops most other "L's omissions".

LIterally went paragliding in "Montellano".   Pronounced.  "Monti-ano."

There was another one, I'll butcher the spelling, but Collolyte.  Pronounced like Coyote.

Yeah, that’s not a “mute” L.

It’s that the double-L (which historically was treated as a separate letter in the alphabet!) is the “y” sound (almost identical to the initial consonant of “yes”) in most dialects of Spanish. Spanish has both the letter ll and the letter y, and they sound the same because ll originally represented a different sound, but in most dialects they merged to the “y” sound.

Some regional dialects of Spanish retain the original pronunciation, and in others it changed to different sounds. (Among the sounds is something approximating the English “j” sound, as Aldo22 said.) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeísmo.

But what ll never was, nor is, is silent.


(I grew up bilingual Spanish-English as a kid, and my Guatemalan dialect puts me among the ~90% of Spanish speakers for whom ll and y are identical.)