Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 August 20

= August 20 =

Pronunciation of Euro
The group Eu in 'Euro' (the currency) has several different pronunciations in Europe, I can think at least of the English, French, Italian, Greek, German and Russian ones, but Language_and_the_euro lists even a few more. My question: do you know any other letter group that would have let even more room for variation? 2003:F5:6F08:AF00:BD9C:D95E:7C63:1799 (talk) 19:47, 20 August 2020 (UTC) Marco PB


 * In English alone, "ough" has at least 8 different sounds that are generally accepted, and additional ones that depend on dialect or on what is counted as English. --184.146.89.141 (talk) 23:36, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * See Ough (orthography). Rmhermen (talk) 08:40, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, just add a few letters, making say eurozinage. That will surely drive the pronunciations that now are accidentally close, like those for Croation and Finnish, apart. The variation will be limited by the number of languages/dialects. --Lambiam 01:09, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Ch is well-known for its variation between European languages. Both eu and ch are digraphs for Greek-derived words. Other letter groups are more likely to be language-specific, and thus unlikely to form a consistent pattern between languages the way Greek vocab does. — kwami (talk) 22:57, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

If the OP is interested in single letters, they may try C, Q and X. Sometimes the "redundant" letters are assigned to sounds otherwise not covered by the conventional Latin alphabet, so these letters represent a wide variety of sounds cross-linguistically. This especially pertains to languages outside Europe with relatively new orthographies. --Theurgist (talk) 08:36, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

A few years ago in Sicily, a taxi driver said what sounded to me like tenneiro. Dad and I could see on each other's faces that we did not recognize that Italian word ... and then we grasped that he meant ten euro. —Tamfang (talk) 00:24, 24 August 2020 (UTC)