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counterpoint:
man and men, just like woman and women sound the same when speaking
male and males, female and females is clearer
Just say menses and womenses when in the plural
Gollum speak nice
Lol, menses.
I love this. I might actually start doing this unironically.
I'm sorry, but I did the thing where I write a comment and then delete it because I assume no one cares about my opinion
since you replied though, I should make it clear what I said to give context
I said that man and men, as well as woman and women, sound the same when speaking. male and males, female and females, make a clearer distinction
You pronounce the words man and men the same way? And this is also the case for woman and women?
Am I understanding you correctly?
I discovered through this thread that women is pronounced as wimen
the english language is fucked
Ugh, this conversation has reminded me of how much I hate that woman is pronounce wo-men and women is pronounced like wimmen.
Why can't we just spell words as they are pronounced or pronounce words as they are spelled? It would make the language much easier to learn for future generations
Because English is a Germanic language that has half of it's vocabulary as borrowed words from a Romance language (French) that then got chewed up and mangled for a few centuries.
Not like Gaelic, which has to own the fact that most of it's words are pronounced in the least sensible way one might think that series of letters is said.
counterpoint:
I don't want you to call me female or male. Creeps call me female and bigots call me male.
how do you pronounce man/men/woman/women? man and men might be confusable but woman and women are very different pronunciations
It probably depends on slight differences in regional dialect. Where I am from I would say woman and women are often pronounced pretty similarly, while man and men are easier to tell apart.
In my region, woman is often pronounced with an 'uh' sound, like womuhn. It's pretty easy to confuse with women. I have noticed that people in my area will sometimes vary up the 'wo' part of women and woman depending on which one they are using. So women becomes 'wimen', and woman becomes 'wumuhn'.
Enunciate.
So does sheep and sheep
It doesn't really matter
counterpoints:
This would only hold up if the person is using male/female and not man/female
And assuming this still holds up, why not go with male/woman? The type of people to use this shouldn't be bothered, i mean thry throw the term "alpha male" all the time
Oh wait, i think the solution is to just use man/woman unless you're in a very biological discussion
Isn't it /mæn/ and /mɛn/, /ˈwʊm ən/ and /ˈwɪm ɪn/? Can be a bit hard to differenciate in the first case, but the second pair is very different.