TransWikia.com

Does ‹ih› sound change to ‹ee› sound after certain sounds like schwa?

English Language & Usage Asked by Gothom WR on October 28, 2020

Recently I’ve stumbled on a word "Kharazim" (a character from game Diablo), and I pronounced it prior to listening to its "official" pronunciation as cara-‘zim, and zim as in z-ih-m, however from multiple sources it becomes clear that doesn’t matter if the emphasis is on "zim" or not it’s pronounced as cara-zeem. I would assume if the emphasis is "khara" and not "zim" "i" would become a schwa, if "zim" is emphasized "i" would be ih, so it’s really baffling to me that in both cases, especially when "zim" the latter part of the word "kharazim" is emphasized, it’s ee and not ih. Since it’s I’m gussing a made up word and I can’t think of any similar ones right off the back of my head, I resolved to using a built-in AI pronunciation tool of Google Translator(I think the Google pronunciation AI reflects English phenologies or is trained to pronounce correctly based off true pronunciation patterns), and it pronounced the word "kharazim" the same way the others did as in zeem, but when I seperated the word into "khara zim" the zim becomes your regular ih sound. Again I apologize if I can’t come up with any immediate sensical similarly structured words, so I input the made-up word "caratim" in the app and it was indeed the "ee" sound that came out and "cara tim" would be the regular ih sound.

English is not my first language and I have not previously noticed any such phenomenon and would purposefully enunciate ih in words with "im" or "in"(unless it’s unemphasized then it would be a schwa), is this a common phenological phenomenon like "ih" would be smoothed into "ee" after certain sounds like perhaps a schwa? Sorry I don’t have any academic background in linguistics and jargons of phenology but I’m really curious and this is the first time I’ve post on the site so I apologize if it’s not tagged with the right category.

Many thanks!

Edit: For clarification purposes with the helps of IPA, by ih I mean /ɪ/ and ee /i:/ and schwa /ə/

Edit 2: Thanks for the feedbacks answering "Kharazim" as a name can have whatever pronunciation the name owner pleases, but what’s confusing me is "kharazim" as a word, or you can change it to a more English looking word "carazim" and the "i" syllable still remains ee which is what puzzles me. (I used the Google Translator in built pronunciation AI to confirm my thought. Sorry if I’m using it as a standard but again I think its machine learning reflects true speech word pronunciation rules/patterns and if these rules/pattern that say "zim" would be z-ee-m after khara do exist that’s what I would like to confirm)

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question

Get help from others!

© 2024 TransWikia.com. All rights reserved. Sites we Love: PCI Database, UKBizDB, Menu Kuliner, Sharing RPP