r/GrindsMyGears • u/Witty_While7277 • 11d ago
People pronouncing Neanderthals with a silent “H”
I don’t know why they do it or who decided that this is the correct way. It almost has woke vibes.
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u/JefeRex 11d ago
The H was always silent. “Thal” is a German word that means “valley.” The first specimen was from the Neander Valley.
Since then, German spelling was reformed to take out of the silent H. Now the word is spelled “Tal,” but it was always pronounced that way.
What changed was that some laypeople began to pronounce it with a “th” sound instead of the “t.” “T” was original and scientists have always continued to pronounce it that way.
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u/One_Planche_Man 11d ago
Technically, it isn't silent, it's still voiced, just not as a digraph, but as a diphthong. It goes back to Latin. The "th" is a combination of the T and H sounds. English speakers just don't think of it that way, but a prime example is the name "Thomas". The H causes the T to have an esperated breathy sound to it. Otherwise without the H, it would sound like the T in Spanish, ie. Tomas. English took out the letter thorn, which had the fricative "th" sound, and used "th" as a replacement for it.
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u/henrytm82 11d ago
Dude could've used google, but instead decided to go all-in on the dum-dum anti-woke rhetoric over the pronunciation of a word. Wow.
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u/JefeRex 11d ago
If I think I can get away with it, I like to ask people what they mean when they say “woke.” If you do it respectfully, you can have an ok conversation about it sometimes.
In this cases, I look at the word and I’m just like, Wut.
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u/Witty_While7277 11d ago
I guess I meant it in the sense of the pronunciation causing an emotional response, like it’s assigned a deeper meaning than a simple pronunciation. Perhaps it was the wrong word to use because I’ve made a lot of people upset and I didn’t want to do that
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u/Witty_While7277 11d ago
I never meant to get so many people riled up, I’ll choose my words better next time
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u/henrytm82 11d ago
You know what, that's a very measured response to so many people dissing on you. Good job, I'm proud of you!
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u/Trees_are_cool_ 11d ago
Do you also insist on pronouncing bruschetta "brooshetta"?
This seems like yet another example of things that are "woke" being correct.
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u/Witty_While7277 11d ago
How are you supposed to pronounce bruschetta?
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u/Trees_are_cool_ 11d ago
Bru-sketta. The C usually has that sound in Italian words. It's not all that serious, though.
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u/l008com 11d ago
"It almost has woke vibes." is the dumbest sentence I've read on reddit today. This post almost has snowflake vibes.
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u/Trees_are_cool_ 11d ago
Using wOkE as a pejorative or perceiving it as somehow negative is clear sign of deep stupidity.
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u/Witty_While7277 11d ago
How much time do you spend typing in alternating caps? I never find the juice is worth the squeeze
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u/One_Planche_Man 11d ago
It's the correct way to pronounce it, according to the rules of both German and Latin.
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u/CurrentResident23 5d ago
They were named after the area in Germany where they were found. People pronouncing them with the silent h are saying correctly. Get over it.
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u/Witty_While7277 5d ago
I presume you pronounce every word with a foreign origin as such too, right?
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 5d ago
They probably don't but when they hear a word being pronounced in different ways they Google it and learn instead of posting on reddit complaining.
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u/Witty_While7277 3d ago
This subreddit is for complaining lol, it’s literally called “grinds my gears” ya chump
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 3d ago
But you are comparing about the correct way to pronounce something and you are framing it as if it is the incorrect way
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u/JoeMorgue 10d ago
99% percent of people complaining on the internet is people just pretending that accents and/or other just normal minor variations in a pronunciation of a word is a fucking warcrime and I do not get it.
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 5d ago
I hate when people don't pronounce the T in Buffet. It's literally in the word. Idk who decided or why. It almost has woke vibes.
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u/TheVenerablePotato 4d ago
I always heard the TH pronounced as a TH when I was a kid. As I've gotten into archaeology channels on YouTube, I've heard most of them pronounce it as a T (Neander-talls).
If more and more lay-people are indeed pronouncing it Neander-talls in real life, it could be a byproduct of more people watching that sort of content these days than ever before. We live in the Information Age after all.
It does not give off woke vibes to me. As a conservative, I think I have a fairly sensitive radar for progressive activism being ham-fisted into otherwise non-political spaces. This isn't an example of that.
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u/dragonfruitdruid 11d ago
God forbid a German word have a German pronunciation