I've always wondered. Is it FAWM? Or FAWM? Then again, there's also FAWM. Personally, I've always preferred FAWM, it just seems the most logical. As for FAWM, pfft, pleeeeease, now you're just making things up.

I haven't had coffee yet.

Pretty sure it's FAWM

In Finnish it's foom

I pronounce it like Worcestershire, but I pronounce Worcestershire very wrongly.

I am not sure if I can be bothered FAWMing an opinion.

Fawm.- sounds like somewhere between 'Form' and 'Farm' but with more aw.

Fooming an opinion sounds cool though! (What is the temperature in Finland right now?) Fluffy like foam and like anger (fuming) at the same time! Maybe like a thermal vent!? Biosynthesis is a good metaphor for FAWM. (Sorry trying too hard here)

[fɔːm]

F-AWE-M - because FAWM is AWE-some.

Ffff....ffff.fff............ffffffff....come again??

F- ... wait for it ... -awesome!

4M.

IPA - I don't care if it's a real ale or the symbolic representation of all the sounds made in human language, it's bloody fantastic!
(But I wish I could could automatically understand it! Except oh, I think the vowel symbol might have been the schwa - which is indeed featured on Lingthusiasm merch: Lingthusiam is a podcast getting enthusiastic about linguistics as the portmanteau suggests. I wanted to mention them!)

@br0th3rh00d Nobody really understands the International Phonetic Alphabet. There are just too many sounds from too many different languages. Even if you manage to navigate the vowels section, something like the details of the clicks /!/ will bring you down...

[fɔːm] is closest to "fawn" [fɔːn], and governed by "awe" [ɔː]. The vowel is called "open-mid back rounded vowel".

"Schwa", /ə/, is something different. That's for example the short "er" end in words like "singer" /ˈsɪŋə/.

My wife's an English teacher and I helped her learn this for her exams. I'm not really good at this...

I don't. I just visualise it as the taste of a colour..

Oh I was wrong! Not a schwa in what @florianhoffmann put. Schwa (unstressed uh sound represented by nearly any vowel in English) is shown with miniscule e. We're talking an open-mid back rounded vowel! Like the words 'or' 'ore' or 'awe' in English. A longer version like in awe. That does make more sense. Pity it looks like a sad face. ɔː
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel

@florianhoffmann cross-posting - sorry!

@br0th3rh00d Ha, no trouble! Only thought I'd add some detail for those who are as nerdily fascinated by the IPA as myself. 😄

IPA is far from perfect or complete, by the way. It doesn't cover pitch variations nicely, which is why Chinese transliteration prefers Pinyin with its tone variations ā á ǎ à. It also doesn't cover all the different non-standardized sounds humans are capable of. Growls, grunts, sighs, breaths, screams - none of these can be encoded.

@cblack that's perfect in a South African accent.

probably "foam" if you're from Glasgow

@br0th3rh00d it's nice 3 degrees of Celsius so looooots warmer than usual February.
Foom is just like you pronounce fawm in finglish.
Our language is funny like that, every word is pronounced exactly like they are spelled.

In some areas of America, ‘wash’ is pronounced ‘warsh’. No idea why, but maybe when they FAWM, they FAWRM.

Finnish pronounce example:
Let's take S.O.A.D. song
I‐E‐A‐I‐A‐I‐O
and turn it to Finnish, it would be
A-I-E-A-E-A-O
So O would be pretty much the same, rest would switch places.
Mind blowing.

@seppo - so, extrapolating this out, Finnish might be the origin of E-I-E-I-O?

There was a farmer…

It's spelled "FAWM," but it's pronounced "throatwobbler mangrove."

Finnish explanation by@seppo is hard to understand by the rest of you because he used the spelling with a Finnish speaker's logic. [ʃo̞:m] would be the IPA equivalent of what he tried to deliver.

In Norway we always pronounce things with a lot of AWE.

PS! Finnish doesn't really exist. It's like Klingon or Elvish. Don't be fooled, people!

I spent some time in Finland for work in 2016 (loved it) and was completely transfixed by the sheer volume of letters on the signs.

The pronunciation of "aw" varies a lot regionally. I pronounce "lawn" and "Lon" (as in Chaney) the same; others don't. I pronounce "fawm" as "fom."

@bithprod yes, we really doesn't exist.

@zecoop did you use the word epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän while you were here?

This spiralled 😂

@scarletswalk You asked for it! 🤣

@seppo - that translates to FAWM, correct?
😂🤣🤪

FOM. Always has been, always will be!

How much time has anybody non-scandi here dedicated to pronouncing that Icelandic volcano? More than I care to admit myself, I remember. But I can't remember.

And having now looked it up again, in English approximation it would be EYE-yer-FIAT-clur YO-gutsch (I do apologize). But the wikipage is hard to copy paste here because of special characters,

Perhaps someone needs to upload some sound files here!! I actually would be interested in hearing the variety!

@br0th3rh00d there's a song idea brewing there ;)

@florianhoffmann touche 😂

Always thought it was like "form" - the "aw" part sounding like "awe-some".

FAWM is the pronunciation thou shalt say. Thou shalt not say FAWM, neither shall thou say FAWM, excepting on the way to FAWM. FAWM is right out.

Welsh in theory says every letter rather than having shibboleths and it counts both y and w as vowels - w has a short oo sound *if* I remember. This, imo, is true for English a lot of the time but it's not conceptualised that way.

a colleague once suggested we pronounce it "FARM"

because the "W" is for "wRiting"

Language is a complex anarchic collective artform. It's dynamic, historied and political. Many-lobed diversity, endlessly dividing, recombining, improvising, incorporating mistakes. Is there any language that's been written down for a long while that is free from oddities or different ways of writing the same thing, and differently pronounced/differently derived things written the same way? I don't think so.

@scarletswalk A kind of sequel to this!? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BXKsQ2nbno

@burrsettles IDK but FARM might be a way to say it in a Welsh or Cornish or Ulster accent anyway!?

In Oregon, IPA means beer and that rhymes with fear which rhymes with far, farm... FAWM... whew did it!!!

@zecoop you can transfer that straight to paradiddle

@florianhoffmann Huh, not to derail, but I understand IPA pretty well (taught Phonetics/Phonology at the university level) and I'm not aware of any problems representing tone. As far as I know, there's no sound attested in a human language that's not representable by IPA.

@zecoop that farmer would be I-A-I-A-O in Finnish :)
But fin version they sing HIIALA HIIALA HOO!
That mean's absolutely nothing.

As a mod, I can give the official pronunciation!

F as in halfpenny
A as the second A in marriage
W as in wrong
M as in mnemonic

So it's pronounced: ""

@elesimo FasAasWasMas
Couldn't read further, I'm a Finn and foreign language is hard and anyway there really is no Finland so we don't exist.
So I'm not here.

Hi, my name is Bot

@downburst Cool, wasn't aware of these. 👍

I think you’ll find it’s:
Gh (as in enough)
au (as in taught)
mb (as in thumb)…
Ghaumb.

in Norwegian and Swedish, FAWM is simply «mort mort mort»

@burrsettles does your friend pronounce "JPEG" as "JFEG"? Since the P is for "photographic"? 😝

I feel I can't comment as a New Zealander - we're famous for our unhealthy vowel movements.