Are you British/speak British English? In standard American English, Mario is rendered like MAR-io [‘mɑː.ɹi.joʊ̯]. British English is more like MARRY-o,, which I've seen rendered as [‘ma.ɹi.jɘʊ̯] (which looks like the traditional version of what you included?), but it's still less flat of an "a" sound than when Americans tend to do the "marry-o" pronunciation.
I'll take the L on the Mario/Maria thing. I appreciate the well-researched post. I was just objecting to the idea that the American way is the only way. FWIW from what little I could find, Italians seem to say it with a sound between the British and American way, which could explain why different people hear it differently.
International Phonetic Alphabet. It was designed to provide a language-agnostic way to transcribe words. If you know a character's approximation in your specific language/accent, you know what the word is supposed to sound like
It's the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), and I dislike it, mainly because I don't know it well. I grew up using the simpler pronunciation key/symbols that Merriam-Webster uses (their formal discussion is here). They say they use it because the IPA is confusing for native English speakers ( their example on an X post: in the IPA a long-e ("ee") is written as /i/; in the MW pronunciation scheme, the long-e/"ee" sound is represented by an "e" with a horizontal line over it, which is standard elementary school stuff, at least used to be.
This has the IPA symbols, with the sounds. But though it's the most common alphabet for pronunciation translation to symbols, there's a lot of variation in what you'll find:
First, with dialects and regional accents within same-language-speaking countries, etc., which can be subtle, there isn't perfect agreement on correct pronunciation for some words (some Southern accents say hill like heel, for example) (and that's even if, for English, you separate British English and American English).
Second, even using the IPA, which has 166 or so symbols to call attention to things like an aspirated consonant, or where the presence of one letter causes the pronunciation of the one before it to stop short, or where in the mouth you articulate the sound, you can often combine all those symbols in multiple ways to get to more or less the same outcome.
Example:
I stuck our Mario and Maria into a phonetics translator and got these:
American:
Marioˈmɑrioʊ (MAR-io)
Maria məˈriə
British:
Marioˈmæriəʊ (MARRY-o*)
Maria məˈriːə
But in another one I got:
mæɹjoʊ
or
ˈmɑrjoʊ
for Mario (I think top is supposed to be Brit and bottom American; close to the first example but using j ("y" sound) rather than "i" ("ee" sound) - so basically both giving you the same pronunciation, but using different symbols)
and
ˈmɑriə
for Maria
*that æ in the Mario Brit versions is aligned to "cat" in IPA's key, but if you listen to British vs American pronunciations of cat in that link above with the sound, you can hear that American cat has a flatter, broader short-a sound.
As far as the brackets and slashes, those represent either "broad" or "narrow" translation. Broad translation is phonemic - representing speech using just a unique symbol for each phoneme (sound) of a language - representing not actual sounds, but abstract mental constructs, categories of sound that speakers understand to be sounds of their own language. Generally there are thought to be 44 phonemes for English. Broad translation is indicated by the forward-slash brackets (/ /).
Narrow translation is phonetic - it includes additional details about the contextual variations in pronunciation that occur in normal speech. This uses the square brackets ([ ]) and all the other funky symbols the IPA has developed.
Pic is a British rendering of 3 words in standard accent: word, phonetic, and phonetic; last column is phonetic of some regional British accent.
Example:
"clean" is /klin/ or [kl̥i:n] (*this is from an Australian site) .
The first (phonemic) version gives you the basic sounds we say in English, but not the specifics of how we say them - a native speaker would know how to put those sounds together. The phonetic version tells you a lot more: "'clean’ has a long vowel, represented by the diacritic [:]; and a voiceless [l̥], represented by the small subscript circle diacritic, because the normal voiced quality of [l] is suppressed by the aspiration of the [k] before it." The phonetic version would tell a non-native speaker the "gloss" they need to put on the pronunciation. Example from here.
I looked up US/UK transcriptions to compare to the Aus one. Online translators and dictionaries mostly stick to broad translations due to all the variation, but wikitionary often does both, and I got:
UK (Received Pronunciation): /kliːn/, [kʰl̥iːn]
(US) (General American): /klin/, [kʰl̥ĩn]
So are the differences in symbols reflective of different standard pronunciations in the 3 countries, different defaults or versions of the IPA being used by the sources, overlap of sounds or symbols in general, and/or subjective ear of whoever did the translation? Idk.
And now that I'm digging into it, I want a copy of this book, because I'm a reference book junkie.
This man, Dale Wilson aka Low Tier God, often misuses words with his rants. One example is "everything he says is rebuttal," is he using that correctly? Context: he talks shit against anybody in his crosshairs, any kickback he receives falls under "rebuttal" by his logic.
I'll be charitable. Normally you'd use an article before "rebuttal," but "rebuttal" is sometimes used both/either to refer to the rebuttal argument (a thing you can do), and/or the act/mode of rebutting, so I think it works if he means, "that guy just rebuts other people and never offers his own original points" - basically letting " rebuttal" as a concept stand in for a bunch of other words. It's also kind of a colloquial way now to express something, especially now - it's along the lines of criticizing someone by saying, "everything she does is performance." It would be more correct/standard to say "a performance" or "just performing" or "performative," and it would be clearer as an insult to say, "pure performance" but as with "rebuttal," it's kind of using the word as a concept and shorthanding the point, almost as if the word were in quotes.
I found an example! A guy who made a film about Bowie said in an interview:
As I mentioned earlier, the film is not about David Jones. And it’s not about David Bowie. It’s about ‘Bowie’ in quotations. The way I approached it was, everything is performance. I don’t mean that means it’s not authentic. If David’s onstage – he’s performing. If David’s in a movie – he’s performing. If David’s doing an interview – it’s a performance. If David’s being captured in a documentary like Cracked Actor – that’s a performance. If David’s being captured in a documentary like Ricochet – that’s a performance. So when you accept that it’s all in quotations, and it’s all performance, then The Man Who Fell To Earth is a documentary, and I’m going to extract and appropriate those images not as if David is shooting a film with Nic Roeg in Albuquerque but to visualise and articulate whatever sentiment that I’m trying to evoke.
Not really from other people but sometimes I will have somebody put a reaction sticker on a post I made a long time ago, when I was half asleep and nearly incoherent or just getting a point across extremely poorly and even if the response is positive, why, reading my own post just makes me want to slap myself upside the back of the head. I think the fact that you can't edit posts after a certain timeframe is hilarious and goes a long way toward preserving these embarrassing moments written by idiots, even if the idiots is me
The latter may look that way, but it is correct. I won't ding anyone for using the former form, but I appreciate anyone who understands that the entire name should be encapsulated before the possessive is applied. If it makes you feel any better, they are meant to be pronounced the same way. No need to say "Robertz-z-z-z," but writing out the full "James" or "Travis" before adding the 's removes all doubt that you're discussing multiple people named Jame or Travi.
I prefer consistency over someone's style guide. Picture the possessive with a 's. If the word then ends in -s's then drop the final s to leave -s'. So, for example:
men →men's (we're done)
ladies → ladies's → ladies' (we're done)
James →James's →James' (this one is more controversial)
Incidentally, when I was typing that out, XenForo flags "ladies's" as incorrect, but both "James's" and "James'" as correct. Like with Mario, I think "correct" is extremely subjective here. More so than anything else in English.
And you say Maria with the same "a" sound as is mat, bat, cat? That delays and hardens the r sound, which - in American English - isn't a typical pronunciation, which is closer to muh-'ree-uh or mer-'ee-uh ( /məˈriːə/).
It's pronounced differently than Mario because the stress is on a different syllable, and stressed syllables in English are higher, longer, and louder, so the "a" in Mario is "bigger" than the "a" in Maria.
All this talk about the pronunciation of Mario is just reminding me the last good paper Mario game literally had a joke about that. One of the recurring bosses was literally a wrestler guy with a heavy accent that pronounced "mario" as "maria"
I'm embarrassed to say I sometimes misspell embarrass and its derivatives by forgetting an r.
IPA is so helpful as it's helped me pronounce foreign words as they're meant to be pronounced, though some vowels like /ø/ and /œ/ still sound almost similar to me.
Another pet peeve I have is people saying ya'll instead of y'all. I'd read the former to be a contraction of ya will.
Won’t versus wont was brought up a few pages ago & reminded me of something awkward though not exactly grammatically incorrect. The phrase, “…as he is wont to do,” is very old fashioned. People who use that phrase in conjunction with current popular stylings sound like poseurs, as they are wont to do. Doesn’t that sound gay? A few years ago this phrase made a comeback amongst try hard trend followers. It sounds odd to write with a modern voice, veer off into Victorian England, & then continue on as if you aren’t striking a pose. Using the term poseur in a literal sense, not as a moral judgment.
Won’t versus wont was brought up a few pages ago & reminded me of something awkward though not exactly grammatically incorrect. The phrase, “…as he is wont to do,” is very old fashioned.
Using the objective form of "who" at all is annoying to me. It's an archaism with no practical use. It's like the generic masculine. I've said it before and got negrated so I'll say it again - I don't like the generic masculine. I've never heard someone (family, friend, or otherwise) use it in real life, it will never be President's English to me. It makes no sense as half the time the hypothetical person could easily be female (or in fiction a non-human being), and English has no grammatical gender - a unique trait to take pride in. It's only use is annoying leftists and mimicking old fashioned prose (noble things I do all the time).
Won’t versus wont was brought up a few pages ago & reminded me of something awkward though not exactly grammatically incorrect. The phrase, “…as he is wont to do,” is very old fashioned. People who use that phrase in conjunction with current popular stylings sound like poseurs, as they are wont to do. Doesn’t that sound gay? A few years ago this phrase made a comeback amongst try hard trend followers. It sounds odd to write with a modern voice, veer off into Victorian England, & then continue on as if you aren’t striking a pose. Using the term poseur in a literal sense, not as a moral judgment.
Yes, ungrammatical phrases like he whom opens the gate are nowadays written only by right-wing tryhards who instinctively thought they who open the gate but changed it to seem BACED 'N TRYADD. Ironic because they as the neuter has been used since the 1300s.
Singular they is a weird one for me. In principle I don't have a problem with it as long as it's used informally and it's made clear whom (lol) it is referring to, but knowing how lazy people are, the moment you say "they" is fine, it'll be abused and make understanding one another even more difficult than it already is.
You were making a generalized statement, and your grammar was incorrect. I, and presumably none of the other readers of this thread, are currently involved in a court case.
I grew up using the 
