Explain
Yeah but the word fridge gets a D for no reason so I figure dumpster should lose a useless letter to balance it all out.
The word hamster has just as much of a P-sound as the word dumpster IMO.
Edit: Try to pronounce it without a trace of a P-sound. Can't do it! [/Bill O'Reilly]
I'm arguing for the acceptance of my alternate spelling.
spoiler
Good point though
That's just an artifact of how English spells /dʒ/. Word finally that sound is usually spelled <dge> or <ge> as in "edge" and "gauge" and word initially it's usually spelled <j> or <g> as in "just" and "gentle". The word "judge" doesn't have two distinct consonant sounds in it. It's the same one spelled differently.s
Yeah it would be pretty bad if people accidentally thought we used hamsters to hump.
Actual explanation incoming:
Both words are typically pronounced with a /p/ sound, but only "dumpster" has a /p/ sound in the word it was derived from, which is obviously "dump".
English borrowed the word "hamster" from German, where it used to be "hamastra". The fact that the /m/ and the /s/ weren't touching back then is important, because the existence of the /p/ in the first place is a result of them touching after the vowel between them was deleted. The sound /m/ is voiced (your vocal cords vibrate while you make it) and bilabial (your lips come together to make it), while the sound /s/ is voiceless (your vocal cords don't vibrate while you make it) and coronal (your tongue touches the front part of your mouth to make it). Saying these two sounds next to each other requires complicated changes in the positioning of parts of your mouth, so /p/ serves as a bridge sound between them, because it maintains the bilabial shape of /p/ but is voiceless like the /s/ following it. You can absolutely say "hamster" without a /p/ sound if you really try, and it probably was when "hamastra" first became something like "hamstra". However most English speaking people nowadays do say it with a /p/ because it is easier to make a relatively slow transition through /mps/ than it is to go straight from /m/ to /s/.
This applies to the transition between other voiced and voiceless sounds in English as well. A lot of people say "prince" and "prints" both with a /t/, "months" often has a dental /t/ sound before the /θ/ (spelled <th> in English), and "strengths" often has a /k/ before the /θ/.
TL;DR: The /p/ sound in dumpster was always there and the /p/ in hamster wasn't and still isn't for everyone. It exists because it's physiologically a little easier to say "hampster" than "hamster".
"Hampster"? Really?
I pronounce each of them as they're written so I didn't realize there was an issue.
Yeah well in the episode of Doug where Doug goes to the dentist, his dentist has a degree from the college of New Hampster, how about that
I know that's a play on New Hampshire, but I see people misspell hamster with a P all the time. If dumpster has a P then so should hamster. The people need it. I will die on this hill.
You dump things in a dumpster, but you don't hamp (or hamper) anything in a hamster; a hamster is unhampered.
(〇_ｏ) this is why I am afraid to speak English aloud.
Should these sound the same?
See my other comment for an explanation. The /p/ is optional in "hamster", but it's probably the most common pronunciation.
I would wager that you have heard it, but it didn't register in your brain. People often perceive others' speech as subconsciously more similar to their own than it actually is. I've been rewatching a lot of movies that I watched as a kid and people who I used to perceive as speaking in similar accents to mine but with unique voices actually turn out to have accents that are very different to mine. I didn't used to know pronouncing words like "cot" differently from "caught" was a thing at all, and now it's all I could hear when I rewatched Oliver and Company for the first time in like fifteen years.
I'm a descriptivist, but I haven't been able to kill the prescriptivist in my head :sadness:
Imagine if executable code followed descriptive frameworks instead of prescriptive ones
All computer code related stuff is extremely not my field. Can you explain more?
If you make a typo in your code it may not run.
If you make a small error in transcribing DNA you might get something vastly different.
Only in human language do we have the luxury of dedicating tons of speculative resources to it and saying "you can express it however you want; if it's important enough in the marketplace of ideas then the receiver will develop or evolve a way of interpreting it".
Eh, language is constantly evolving--that's just a historical fact. Yes, with enough small changes over enough time, you'll get something unintelligible--like old English vs modern English, but that's beautiful to me. In fact, I took a course in old English once, and it was a lot of fun. Well, the translations got a little tedious, but studying what changed and what stayed the same was very interesting.
