At least in my dialect (US northeast) clothes and close don’t quite share a pronunciation. They’re similar enough that you could probably fully elide the th sound, and I’m not sure anyone would notice.
When I pronounce clothes I can still feel my tongue move into the th position, and hear a small difference.
Hey we may have our language rules pulled from 30 different other languages and applied seemingly at random, but at least we don’t have to memorize the gender of every inanimate object in the world!
I’ve taken 5 years of German and self studied some Russian and Spanish, and goddamn that gendered noun shit is really, really hard for native English speakers.
Okay you got me there. Also for what it’s worth, gendered nouns are hard even when you natively speak a language with gendered nouns. Source: Am an Arabic speaker and will Jihad anyone who says a chair is female.
Okay as a non-native speaker who struggles with consonant clusters this is both the best and worst thing I learned today.
At least in my dialect (US northeast) clothes and close don’t quite share a pronunciation. They’re similar enough that you could probably fully elide the th sound, and I’m not sure anyone would notice.
When I pronounce clothes I can still feel my tongue move into the th position, and hear a small difference.
Hey we may have our language rules pulled from 30 different other languages and applied seemingly at random, but at least we don’t have to memorize the gender of every inanimate object in the world!
I’ve taken 5 years of German and self studied some Russian and Spanish, and goddamn that gendered noun shit is really, really hard for native English speakers.
Okay you got me there. Also for what it’s worth, gendered nouns are hard even when you natively speak a language with gendered nouns. Source: Am an Arabic speaker and will Jihad anyone who says a chair is female.
As a native English speaker, English is freaking weird like that.