The things you learn: pronouncing “thorough”

[pne]

In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o.

I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from.

The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have

Comments

[otana]

(And now, thorough sounds extremely odd to me. Typical result of listening to a word over and over!)

Do you know why this is? I get it all the time and it seems to be fairly universal, but I've got no idea why.

[pne]

No, I don’t know the details, either. But I’m sure there’s a scientific name for the phenomenon!

[dandelion]

semantic satiation, I believe :)

[pne]

The definition in the Wikipedia article certainly sounds as if it fits (and it lists a whole host of other terms that have cropped up in the scientific literature over the years).

Jamais vu seems to be a related phenomenon.

Thank you!

[lnbw]

My (American) pronunciation is definitely NURSE/GOAT. "th-e-r-o" still looks odd to me, but probably because I'm unfamiliar with shorthand in general!

[pne]

Teeline shorthand is even shorter-since they generally leave out all vowels inside words, it’s just t-h-r-o there!

I was going to say that it’s the same as throw, but that’s t-h-r-w….

(On the other hand, it’s a bit longer since they have two separate letters t-h rather than a single th stroke.)

[lnbw]

How does Teeline distinguish between (say) thorough/through/throw? (Depending on whether it's paying more attention to spelling or pronunciation.)

[pne]

Arg, I had a long comment here but then I inadvertently hit browser-forward and lost it.

Short version: sometimes it leaves it up to context, sometimes they put in “vowel indicators”, and sometimes they choose distinguishing outlines for words that would otherwise have the same outline and you have to learn arbitrarily that this word gets written this way and this word some other way. (And the various Teeline books don’t always agree, since there’s quite a bit of freedom for making your own outlines. For example, the two word lists I have, one has t-h-r-o and t-h-r-u for "through" while the other has t-h-r-o and t-h-r-w.)

In general, Teeline pays more attention to spelling. Gregg and Pitman go much more by pronunciation.