Why not “sen”? If not for written language, seven would likely already be pronounced this way. The process was under way. Weeks were once called sennights. And even people who don’t usually say it this way often do when drunk. True, there tends to be a glottal stop after the e before the n when the v is elided, but not always.
What to do about zero? Just reduce it to oh, like in casual speech or when reciting telephone numbers.
Sincere response: Could work, but I weep for the lost clarity caused by sen and ten rhyming. Our current digits are beautifully unambiguous this way, whereas our alphabet is a horrible lost cause which had to be completely replaced over low-fidelity audio channels.
Yeah that seems right to me too … I asked Claude for analogous cases and it brought up the historical dropping of sounds in the middle of the words “Wednesday”, “half”, and “chalk”.
That’s the wise thing to do, but people routinely use oh. Five-oh-six-three-four-oh-one. In fact, zero might sound overly formal to me depending on the context. If I am reading my credit card number, I would say zero.
I do sort of the same thing, except I’m pretty sure I’m pronouncing the “e” in “sen” as a long “e” in the literal linguistic vowel-length sense. I wonder if this is how English gets phonemic vowel length back?
Why not “sen”? If not for written language, seven would likely already be pronounced this way. The process was under way. Weeks were once called sennights. And even people who don’t usually say it this way often do when drunk. True, there tends to be a glottal stop after the e before the n when the v is elided, but not always.
What to do about zero? Just reduce it to oh, like in casual speech or when reciting telephone numbers.
oh, one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, eight, nine, ten.
There! All single syllables.
Sincere response: Could work, but I weep for the lost clarity caused by sen and ten rhyming. Our current digits are beautifully unambiguous this way, whereas our alphabet is a horrible lost cause which had to be completely replaced over low-fidelity audio channels.
Sarcastic response: I’ll agree iff 10 becomes teven.
Yeah that seems right to me too … I asked Claude for analogous cases and it brought up the historical dropping of sounds in the middle of the words “Wednesday”, “half”, and “chalk”.
I say “zero” when reciting phone numbers. Harder to miss that way.
That’s the wise thing to do, but people routinely use oh. Five-oh-six-three-four-oh-one. In fact, zero might sound overly formal to me depending on the context. If I am reading my credit card number, I would say zero.
I do sort of the same thing, except I’m pretty sure I’m pronouncing the “e” in “sen” as a long “e” in the literal linguistic vowel-length sense. I wonder if this is how English gets phonemic vowel length back?