Since I think we haven't been having enough fun lately on OSNews, I decided it's time we do something fun for a change. We all have our little pet annoyances when it comes to other people's comments. Fixed expressions or comment styles that annoy the living daylights out of you. Here are mine.
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Member since:2006-01-02
The links you sent me showed that they are pronounced the same. You perhaps noticed that two pronunciations were given for "than", a strong one and a weak one. The weak one is by far the more common since the word is rarely stressed. The weak one is the same as the pronunciation for "then". Therefore, most of the time they are pronounced the same. I argue additionally that the pronunciation of "than" in the strong case is artificial. But don't worry, this isn't abnormal. Most people now pronounce a strongly stressed "an" to rhyme with "tan" since it is spelled like "tan" and "fan" and so forth, but there is no etymological basis for that. Had a strongly stressed form survived* directly from Old English and not arisen from people's analysis of the spelling, it would rhyme with "tone", not "tan".
*The stressed form *did* actually survive in the numeral "one".
Member since:
2005-10-19
No. Actually what you said is that using sound analysis you would show that they are pronounced the same. The links I sent you prove that they are not.