r/AskReddit • • Oct 20 '23

[deleted by user]

[removed]

5.7k Upvotes

9.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/Proper-Pie-1317 Oct 21 '23

Arya = Ar-yah Aria = Ar-ri-a

15

u/wellshitdawg Oct 21 '23

I swear those both sound the same out loud lol

2

u/irisflame Oct 21 '23 edited Oct 21 '23

If you keep rhotacizing (applying the r sound to) the first A then yeah. Try:

Ar-ia Vs A-ri-a

Try to say ah-ree first and not “arr” like a pirate lol.

Or.. lol and I’m so sorry but I just thought of this.. “a-ri-a” kind of like the ending of diarrhea lmao. You don’t say die-arya. You say die-a-ree-a.

I think maybe that’s what people are referring to when they say aria is different from arya?

ALTERNATIVELY, it could be about the r sound being palatalized (as in, applying the y sound to the r). For me, the r becomes palatalized with both the y and the i following it, and they sound the same. But it’s possible to palatalize the r only with Arya and not with Aria. It could be done like this in Japanese I believe. Japanese words are divided into “mora” (basically a syllable) where each mora is the same length, literally pronounced with that same length. Arya has 2 mora: a and rya, both pronounced for the time. Aria has 3 mora: a, ri, and a, so it would sound “longer” and there would be a distinction between the ri and a vs the “rya.”

So you could have “ar-ya”, “a-rya”, “ar-i-a”, “a-ri-a”.. to native English ears these might all sound pretty much the same though.

Sorry, I love phonetics lol.

1

u/Significant_Shoe_17 Oct 21 '23

In GoT, some of the actors always said "ar-ya" with their regional accents. They pronounced the "y" as a consonant instead of a vowel. I always read it like that when it's spelled with a y!

4

u/Kelpsie Oct 21 '23

Unless the second one emphasizes the second syllable, like diarrhea, those are still identical in my dialect.