Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Today's Tweets

What I found interesting or amusing

2 comments:

John Cowan said...

That rule sounds like complete nonsense to me. The rule I learned forty years ago was: v is /v/ in foreign words, /f/ in native words. Note that this completely explains all her examples, whereas such an ordinary word as November, which she doesn't mention but has /v/, is mis-explained.

So the great bulk of all v words take /f/, but when a German sees a novel word in v, they'll tend to pronounce it /v/.

Arthaey Angosii said...

That sounds a lot more probable to me.

It's funny how you can't trust native-speaker intuition.