Only for Americans. In British English, it's "MISS isle", and "MISSul" is
a church book. I'm not Christian and I am not sure of exactly what's in a
_missal_ but it's prayers or something.
I do not know if American English even has missals. They're old fashioned
things these days, I think. But in my dialect, "missile" and "missal" are
two different words with 2 different sounds, which means that when I hear
Americans talking about the fast moving weaponry what I hear is that they
are launching prayer books at someone. It's not a very common word and so
I keep forgetting.
A missal generally has bible passages organized by mass date (instead of in the usual order), as well as some hymns and a reference to the order of mass (the things that happen when you go to church)
I was very vaguely notionally Church of England until age 11, although still had to go to Chapel daily from 12-17. I have never been to Mass and I don't really know what goes on in a Mass. I'm not even sure if Anglicans have Mass.
My local Canon certainly had plenty of small-m mass: big lad. Nonetheless, when he scattered my father's ashes in the sea, he got caught by a wave, and proved that despite this he could run backwards up a shingle beach, wearing wet robes, at surprising speed.
You did not restrict which people you were talking about, and that's a critical omission. Nobody in my daily life, in real life where I live or on TV or radio, would ever say "missal" when they meant "missile".
They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". Since the "l" sound is last and preceded by a schwa, "truffle" (or "missle") obviously cannot be considered phonetic.
> They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel".
You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the standard phonetic analysis.
You might also notice that the IPA differs from your proposed spelling in several other ways. One, the difference between "ɹ" and "r", has no relevance in a discussion of English. But the difference between "f" and "ff" is more significant, and the difference between "u" (the vowel in GOOSE) and "ʌ" (the vowel in STRUT) is of critical importance.
And this is still just a phonemic transcription. Phonetically, you'd expect the word to be [tʃɹʌfl̩], with the initial consonant matching that of "chill" and not "till".
All of these are conventions of written English. Written "tr" is pronounced as if it were written "chr". Pronounced [tʃɹ] is always spelled "tr" and never spelled "chr". The difference in vowel quality between "moping" and "mopping" is indicated, as you probably already noticed, by the doubling of the consonant written after the vowel, and this is also the reason for the double "f" in "truffle". Why do we write an extra "f" when what we mean is that we're changing the pronunciation of the vowel before it? Not for phonetic reasons.
And what do you know, there's a standard spelling of syllabic L in English too, and that standard spelling is "-le", not "-el". That spelling is phonetic in exactly the same way that using "m" to spell the initial consonant of "mat" is phonetic - it is the established mapping between the orthography and the pronunciation.
Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French, or the silent "n"s in "pannenkoeken" are in Dutch. In common language though we call that "not phonetic". But that's not what the person you were responding to was talking about, and it also has nothing to do with IPA notation: we were obviously not writing IPA here.
However to come back to IPA and "truffle", Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l. The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa, which I would absolutely dispute, and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary[1] puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.
It's also written "truffel" in Dutch for what it's worth.
> Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French
No, that's not what I said at all. Stipulating that the -ent and the -p- are silent in the French word comptent, there is also a French word comte of identical pronunciation, which limits the amount of phonetic information that the silent -ent and -p- could be carrying. (In fact, I believe the verb ending may be realized in certain cases, as the "silent N" ending the English indefinite article is often realized.)
The doubling of the "f" in truffle is nothing like that. The hypothetical word trufle would be pronounced differently. That difference wouldn't have anything to do with the F, but nevertheless it is indicated by the spelling; the spelling is conveying phonetic information.
This is also the case for the spelling -le. It represents an English sound. It is the spelling you would expect a trained speaker to produce for a novel word featuring that sound. You can't get any more phonetic than that.
> Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l.
I'll return to this in a moment.
> The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa,
Just to be clear, the "syllable break" is the period between the f and the syllabic l. The symbol that tells you the l constitutes a syllable in itself is the small mark underneath it.
> which I would absolutely dispute
Why? That's how the word is pronounced.
> and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.
We're back to the first point!
First, let's observe that there is absolutely no dispute over the idea that "truffle" is two syllables long. The presence of a syllable break is universally agreed.
Second, the reason wiktionary gives a more accurate rendition of the pronunciation is that it's mostly maintained by enthusiasts.
The convention of dictionaries is cited by wikipedia:
> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as sudden [ˈsʌd.n̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈsʌd.ən/).
This is a convention, no less than the spelling "-le" is. It is advantageous in dictionaries, where you'd like each syllable to be more or less pronounceable on its own; the grapheme "-le" can't occur in isolation. The phonetic analysis is what I already told you it is, and what wikipedia repeats in that quote.
(In the case of sudden, the difference is crystal clear - if you pronounce it without detaching your tongue from the roof of your mouth between the /d/ and the /n/, you can only be producing a syllabic n. You can also do this test with subtle, but not with truffle, since /f/ doesn't share the same articulatory properties that /d/, /t/, and /l/ do.)
I think they pronounce them non-phonetically, and I'm not really sure what's confusing about that. Pronunciation differing from spelling is literally what it means to say something isn't phonetic; if I accepted the spelling of other non-phonetic words as proof that something is phonetic, then everything by definition would be phonetic, and the entire concept would be pointless.
In my mind, the natural phonetic spelling of "le" is an L sound followed by an E sound. Works like "truffle" and "turtle" have an E sound followed by an L sound. I don't think that's phonetic.
Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. The reason you think that "le" makes sense and the person you are responding to thinks otherwise is that in English, the pronunciation of "le" isn't phonetically consistent.
I imagine that GP's reasoning is that in writing "missile", the consonant is followed by a vowel, while phonetically the vowel is followed by a consonant.
The issue is further compounded by the fact that there's more than one common pronunciation of "missile".
> Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet.
I don't disagree with the latter point, but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? In my mind, the entire point of a conversation like this is hypothetical changes to the language to make it phonetically consistent; of course it isn't right now, or we wouldn't need to have a conversation.
You've correctly identified what my reasoning is, but you seem to be circularly saying that since English isn't currently phonetic, it's impossible to come up with a spelling for it using sounds that roughly resemble the common sounds letters are using today in order to make it phonetic. I guess I don't know that it's literally impossible, but I don't think it's self-evident that it's not possible, and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).
You're definitely right that I hadn't considered that some dialects pronounce "missile" in a way where it's pronounced differently, but I'd argue that the obvious example (British pronunciation) was already basically ignored by the comment I was responding to, so I didn't really introduce the inconsistency.
> and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).
I don't see why that argument is supposed to make sense on its own terms. The system we have now is that -le and le- are different. You want to reform -le to be spelled -el because its pronunciation is closer to that of (-)el- than to le-.
But making that spelling change will reduce the "inconsistency" you don't like that exists between -le and le- precisely by introducing a new inconsistency between -el and el-. Why is that supposed to be an improvement of any kind?
> but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words?
Then you're inventing a phonetic alphabet that happens to look like the English alphabet. That's what makes discussions like this are pointless. No one has established a phonetic definition of "le" or "el", which is the only basis according to which one can decide which is phonetically more appropriate.
