It's pretty cruel, particularly for non-native English speakers, that 'lose' and 'loose' seemingly switched spellings, meanings and pronunciations with each other when no one was looking
'Choose' rhymes with 'lose'? I mean c'mon, someone did that shit on purpose đź‘€
I mean yeah 'loose' could probably be pronounced like 'choose' and it would still make sense, but it absolutely wouldnt make sense for 'lose' to be pronounced like 'moose' or 'goose'. Im not sure what you even mean when you say they switched meanings either because thats just false.
I don't know that they sound that different, but I definitely "pronounce" them differently in that my tongue is in a different party of my mouth for both of them. When I say clothes, my tongue is near touching my front teeth, where as close is more just below that ridge behind my teeth, so farther back.
It's a miracle I know it, and having to teach someone how to read and spell was an eye opener for me trying to explain "this is like this except for this one word because... Reasons and sometimes there's a variation like this because...reasons" so many times.
Having to explain to my spanish speaking friends why an english word is spelled one way but pronounced another entirely different way gave me the same experience. So many times i have to tell them: “i don’t know english is just weird.”
Usually the reason is either because some jerks intentionally changed certain spellings to look more French/Latin ("receipt" didn't have a "p" originally, for example), or just because English is such a mongrel language with words taken from various other languages with different spelling and pronunciation rules.
I once had a roommate from Chile and he asked what the difference in pronunciation was for "juice" versus "Jews". I'm still not sure I properly got the difference across...
Also the difference between "to rob" and "to steal" was an interesting thing to think through and then explain.
I can see why he'd have trouble with those two, because Spanish doesn't have the English "z" sound. They'll both sound the same using Spanish pronunciation .
I think he was Dutch - but they do tend to speak “better” English than the English.
The difference in UK/US (amongst other first language English nations) pronunciation is something I know effects hip-hop lyricism (i.e. rapping) as different pronunciations mean some words only rhyme in your own dialect.
Those three sound completely different to me, as far as how I’ve been pronouncing them goes. “Their” doesn’t have the extra lagging e sound (as in the e in err) in “there” where I curl my tongue upward at the end. “They’re” preserves the ey sound in “they”, just concatenated with an r as in err sound.
When I say, “They’re there,” people can make out what I’m saying, though as more people seem to tell me that these are just homophones, maybe they’ve just been relying on context.