h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think the 'rule' has more to do with whether the syllable containing '-ie-' is stressed than with the number of syllables in the word.

Probably right. Doggies vs Magpies.

Brie!

-Martin (looking all smug)

Another way of saying the same thing so far, as monosyllables tend to be stressed on the first syllable. Can anyone think of a word with -ie- in a syllable other than first being pronounced like 'by'?

Aha - thanks for that Gnomon. 'Magpie' is a compund noun, but the stress is on the first syllable. So... we're both wrong.

Magpie is a spondee - it bears stress on both syllables.

But 'doggies' is yet another pronounciation of 'ie': it's not the same as the 'ie' in 'pixie'.

doggie... pixie... pixie... doggie...

They sound the same to me (non-specific American accent - sounds either Midwestern or Canadian to most).

It is the way I say it! What's the difference for you?

Magpie contains two full syllables (i.e. the vowel quality is not reduced to schwa or short 'i') but only the first one is stressed. That's what a spondee is, methinks.

The 'ie' in 'doggies' for me is slightly shorter but of the same quality (sound) as that in 'pixie'. I would say this is because the -s closes the syllable.

For me, doggies is pronounced to rhyme with 'his' 'whizz' and suchlike. 'doggy' would rhyme with 'he', 'pixie', and 'see'.

Now, wasn't someone saying how words that have a variable pronounciation are unusable?

Lucinda, that pronounciation's not variable, you're just saying it wrong.

This is all very interesting, but your job, Lucinda, is to report. Unless you have made up "sie" yourself, all you have to do is tell us that it is the normal word that is used for the non-gender-specific pronoun.

After all, people were totally mystified with the "abbreviation" Ms and how to pronounce it when it came out first. We'll just have to learn how to pronounce "sie".

That doesn't include dialectal / idiomatic (you're saying it wrong) variation, since these are both well-established. But when you invent a word it's customary to have just one pronunciation. Imagine if the inventor of nylon said you can pronounce it (in English!) nighlon, neelon, nillon, nillone etc. depending on how you feel.

I've just wandered through deja.com searching for 'sie hir pronounciation' - from a sample of 24, I got:

'hir' - as 'here': ~80%
'hir' - as 'her' : ~20%
'sie' - as 'see' : ~70%
'sie' - as 'zee' : ~30%

I'm ignoring small differences, such as 'sie' as the spanish 'si', or 'hir' as a cross between 'here' and 'hier'. Whether UseNet is a representative sample is debatable, but it's the best available to me.

Feel free to hit on me for doing the writing before doing the research...

Gnomon - you might have said you'd written an entry on Old English!

{A695478 for those who don't know}

Just because I wrote an entry on it doesn't make an expert. You'd be surprised how far you can get by bluffing. Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised.

> "On the plus side, this means no new words or meanings, and everyone will understand what is being said. The disadvantage is that by the time the speaker has actually finished hir sentence, they may wish they didn't."

I got criticised for the last sentence of these two earlier, by someone who claimed it showed how unnatural sie and hir are. I meekly agreed without looking at the context - and upon redrafting, I discover that I'm right and whoever the critic was wrong, after all.

'hir' matches with 'the speaker', as the speaker is a hypothetical person of unknown gender. Meanwhile, 'they' matches with 'everyone', which is correct because 'everyone' is plural. In the second sentence, everyone is wishing that they(as a group) didn't understand.

This is actually a good example of how 'they' *doesn't* work - if I had said instead "by the time the speaker has actually finished THEIR sentence, they may wish they didn't." then this would be massively ambiguous, and cause no end of headache. Use of 'hir' avoids this problem.

Note the difference between "everyone loves their mother" and "everyone loves hir mother". The first means either:

A) the group has a shared mother, and they all love her. (plural they)
B) each member of the group has a mother, and each member loves that member's mother. (singular they)

Whereas the second is unambiguous, and can only mean (B).

You see - listening to people in Peer Review - always a mistake Nevertheless, I'll be rephrasing that bit - it's always going to be dangerous to use words/meanings in the very entry that's supposed to define those words.
-Martin

"Everyone will understand what is being said, but they may wish they didn't."

"Everyone" is singular, despite the fact that it looks like it should be plural. You say "Everyone understands", "everyone is going", not "everyone understand" and "everyone are going". The word everyone is treated like a singular pronoun. So using "they" with it, is a singular they meaning he or she. Lucinda, you used it without even noticing you were using it, because it is completely natural and normal English, unlike "hir".