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How do you pronounce “four”?
Jun. 27th, 2022 09:38 amIn particular, is the number “four” pronounced the same as the preposition “for”?
I ask because the (BBC English) voice navigation system in our rental car consistently pronounces “four” (as in a highway number) as an unaccented “f&schwa;”.
In my experience, the number “four” usually carries substantial meaning and is at least equally long and accented as the syllables before and after it, while the preposition “for” is usually less important, shorter in duration, and less accented than the syllables before and after it.
The voice navigation system also gives numbers in full: “please turn left onto the A f&schwa; thousand eight hundred and nineteen”, as though 4819 were a magnitude. It’s not: four-digit roads are generally smaller then three-digit roads, which are smaller than two-digit roads, but there’s no particular connection between the A4819 and the A4818, which for all I know could be at the other end of the island. A highway number is a point in a discrete topological space; two such numbers are either the same or different, but their digits don’t tell you much more than that, and each digit is equally important.
Google Maps (in US English), by contrast, pronounces the same thing either “four eight one nine” or “forty eight nineteen”.
I ask because the (BBC English) voice navigation system in our rental car consistently pronounces “four” (as in a highway number) as an unaccented “f&schwa;”.
In my experience, the number “four” usually carries substantial meaning and is at least equally long and accented as the syllables before and after it, while the preposition “for” is usually less important, shorter in duration, and less accented than the syllables before and after it.
The voice navigation system also gives numbers in full: “please turn left onto the A f&schwa; thousand eight hundred and nineteen”, as though 4819 were a magnitude. It’s not: four-digit roads are generally smaller then three-digit roads, which are smaller than two-digit roads, but there’s no particular connection between the A4819 and the A4818, which for all I know could be at the other end of the island. A highway number is a point in a discrete topological space; two such numbers are either the same or different, but their digits don’t tell you much more than that, and each digit is equally important.
Google Maps (in US English), by contrast, pronounces the same thing either “four eight one nine” or “forty eight nineteen”.
