On dictionary.com, "relief" is pronounced "ri-leef" phonetically while "belief" is pronounced "bih-leef." So, there's an h-sound in "belief" that isn't in "relief," but is that actually true? I can't hear any sounds in "belief" I can't also hear in "relief," and I can't feel my mouth forming a different shape when I say them out loud. Can someone help me hear/feel/identify the difference?
5
-
15If you chose the IPA pronunciations on dictionary.com, it gives / rɪˈlif / and / bɪˈlif / in American and / rɪˈliːf / and / bɪˈliːf / in British, so identical apart from the initial consonants. Perhaps somebody thought bi-leef might be misread as something like bye-leaf but did not have the same worry with ri-leef.– HenryCommented Dec 6 at 16:31
-
3I’m voting to briefly close this question so that I can immediately reöpen it again in order to clear its undesirable migration votes.– tchrist ♦Commented Dec 7 at 12:59
-
2@Henry I agree there is no difference in American English. Many times the vowel in the first syllable is pronounced as a schwa. And either word can be emphasized (colloquially) by giving the first syllable a long "e" and drawing it out.– WastrelCommented Dec 7 at 14:17
-
1I suggest not to use dictionary.com, ever. It is terrible and is starting to grow to be more like urbandictionary.com, with random nonsensical internet slang words on it.– paddotkCommented 2 days ago
-
@paddotk I agree, reluctantly. I used to love it as a resource, but recent changes seem to be making it harder to use and less reliable-feeling. A pity.– BajczCommented 23 hours ago
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
dictionary.com uses two different methods to show pronunciation. One is the IPA which is unambiguous, the other they call Phonetic (standard). I have been unable to find what the latter is, either on their website or on an initial search with Google.
I note that today's "Word of the day" is "scuttle" which they transliterate into Phonetic (standard) as "skuht-l ". So my guess is that they are using the vowel+h to indicate a short vowel, but they are not being consistent, as your example of belief and relief demonstrates. There is definitely no additional H sound in belief.
-
As someone who isn't particularly versed in IPA and who benefits from the phonetic pronunciations provided by sites like Dictionary.com, is there a better, more consistent resource to use for such phonetic pronunciations? I like to do wordplay that hinges on changing or not changing sounds consistently.– BajczCommented Dec 6 at 16:57
-
1@Bajcz I am learning German, and have come to the conclusion that I prefer to use online dictionaries which have an audio version of the pronunciation. However dictionary.com only gives the audio version for their American English pages, not the British English ones. The Cambridge Dictionaries at dictionary.cambridge.org give both. By the way, I've just found another weird dictionary.com transliteration - the word "fight" is apparently pronounced "fahyt".– RuthMcTCommented Dec 6 at 17:06
-
4@Bajcz The “better resource” is just to learn IPA. It is pretty straight-forward and really doesn’t require any less effort to learn than any other random method of jumbling letters together. The consequences are good: IPA is truly phonetic, ubiquitous, and works for (most) languages. Commented Dec 7 at 5:51
-
1@Bajcz I suspect that traditional dictionaries are more likely to have more rigorous consistency in their non-IPA phonetic transcriptions. My favorite two are Cambridge and Merriam Webster, one English, one American, because they're pretty good and free. I also use Wiktionary a lot, but because it can be edited by anyone you have to be careful; it will be easy to find inconsistencies.– phoogCommented Dec 7 at 10:39
Just so we're clear: No native English speaker would think there is a /h/ sound in that respelling of belief. The letter "h" is not pronounced in the codas of syllables and the placement of the syllabification break (the hyphen) in "bih-leef" puts the "h" in the syllable coda.
What it's doing instead is forcing the "i" to be "short" - /ɪ/ rather than /ai/. This is supported by the fact that the IPA respellings for the two words do match, and there is no spurious "h" in either. I think it's a side effect of the "official" Phonetic (Standard) being "i" for /ɪ/, but the (unrespelled) prefix "bi-" being pronounced with a "long" /ai/. Some cursory exploration shows that the prefixes be- and e- are respelled "bih-" and "ih-" but re-, in its unstressed form, is respelled "ri-", in accordance with the "official" standard.
This respelling system isn't the best, not least because of this specific inconsistency, which is not explained or even mentioned in the difficult to access key (I had to search for it from outside the site). The "short u" /ʌ/ is always respelled "uh", even in cases where the "silent h" would be unnecessary (which I checked individually), while "ah" and "oh" are used for long vowels, not short ones (although this is in accordance with English spelling). And I haven't looked for "short e" words where this might be a problem, but the "official" standard does not include an "h". Your best best is to learn IPA, or at least the dictionary.com IPA
-
1No, the "h" is not forcing the "i" to be /ɪ/ rather than /ai/. "ih" is (ludicrously) dictionary.com's undocumented way of indicating a sound somewhere between /ɪ/ and /ə/. (Also note that "uh" does indeed represent /ʌ/, as you say; but "uh" (in italics) represents /ə/. Some bozo thought this would be easier to interpret than IPA...)– TonyKCommented 2 days ago
Merriam-Webster gives the phonetic pronunciation of relief as /ri-ˈlēf/ — /rɪˈliːf/ in IPA. And the pronuncation of belief as /bə-ˈlēf/ — /bəˈliːf/ in IPA. So Merriam-Webster specifies two different weak vowels in the first syllable of these words.
Is Merriam-Webster correct in showing a difference between the first vowels in these words? Possibly not. English speakers pay very little attention to the exact pronunciation of weak vowels, and I am sure you can find native speakers of American English who pronounce the words either way. Probably a fraction of American English speakers pronounce belief with /ə/ and relief with /ɪ/ (see the comments), but this is not a difference most English speakers would even notice. However, this may be why dictionary.com has a difference between the pronunciation of these words.
-
2I'm more convinced by @Henry's comment suggesting that OP's cited "eye dialect" rendition bih-leef is entirely motivated by the fact that the standalone word bi (and almost all words starting with those two letters) feature a "long i". But I do have the feeling that Americans are more likely than Brits to use the neutral schwa for the first syllable of relief, belief, whereas Brits nearly always use the "short i". Not that many of us on either side of the pond normally distinguish the two sounds in words like that. Commented Dec 6 at 20:04
-
2@FumbleFingers I (more or less standard US accent) seem to use different vowels here; re- is more short I and be- more schwa. Who'd've thunk!?– phoogCommented Dec 7 at 10:42
-
3@FumbleFingers What you’re describing there is the weak vowel merger: “the loss of contrast between /ə/ (schwa) and unstressed /ɪ/, which occurs in certain dialects of English: notably many Southern Hemisphere, North American, Irish, and 21st-century (but not older) standard Southern British accents.”– tchrist ♦Commented Dec 7 at 12:48
-
1I (native Br Eng speaker) pronounce them the same way as @phoog. Ri-leaf and buh-leaf.– VickyCommented 2 days ago
In English, pretty much every unstressed vowel is pronounced /ə/. Thus although when one pronounces potato slowly and carefully the final o letter is pronounced something like a stressed /o/, in normal-speed, unselfconscious speech, both o’s in potato chip are pronounced /ə/.
Similarly, the first e in either belief or relief is, in normal-speed, unselfconscious speech, pronounced /ə/. Likewise for both a’s in pagoda and both i’s in fidelity.
