The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.
Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing.
English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Anglos...
Which is worse, being unable to correctly pronounce a word (but still being close enough to be understandable) or being completely unable to write a word?
One that still gets me personally is "hyperbole"--I know how it's pronounced but when I read it, I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not. I don't think I've ever made the mistake while reading out loud to someone yet, but it will likely happen some day and when it does I will feel very stupid.
Well, here you go: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niche#did-you-kno...
> I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not.
Same. This is where diacritics would fix the problem: Hyperbolé. Although hyperbolee would also work, of course.
TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.
Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs.
> TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.
You learn something new every day!
This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names.
Fantasy novels predate the widespread popularity of audiobooks, which is pretty recent. It used to be really expensive to distribute such a large volume of audio. The old "books on tape" used to cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.
https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818 (not there anymore; maybe the account holder ditched Twitter)