How Do You Pronounce Thiel?

Nonoise is correct, and certainly no artist, whether musician (singer) or actor, would disagree. In fact, they wouldn't even consider this hairsplitting. Thiel, teel, and teal are indeed pronounced slightly differently. Perhaps inflected might be a better term?

I also wonder that if someone does not agree that there is a difference, and an important one, between the sounds of these three pronunciations, then should that person be trusted on their opinions about audio reproduction system subtleties, which are quite a bit harder to hear in many cases? This is reminding me a little of a guy who thought he could hear very subtle differences between two different tone arms used with the same exact equipment, yet could not distinguish the difference between a violin and a viola, or a French horn and a trombone.

Hi Mitch - actually, I really don't believe that this is hair splitting at all. Stage actors work very hard on their diction to make such differences, and I am sure that a phonetics expert would sound Thiel, teal, and teel all differently. To start with, those are three different dipthongs.

To change this to a musical example, take articulation (think transients, with respect to audio reproduction). We musicians work countless hours on this and many other technical things that the audience is expected to catch.

I submit that these are exactly the kinds of subtle differences that our high end audiophile systems are supposed to accurately resolve. If you are not listening for these kinds of subtle differences, why exactly do you own a hi-fi system?

Granted, the human voice is capable of even more expression and subtlety than other instruments. One of the recordings I always use when testing equipment is John Gielgud's Ages of Man recording (his one man Shakespeare show).

Hi Meinhard - just because three words would be spelled the same in a phonetic alphabet (which I do not dispute, by the way), does not mean that they are not pronounced differently. A phonetic alphabet is just a starting point, not an end result. I refer you to one of Bernard Shaw's most popular plays, Pygmalion, for a great discussion of this, both in the work itself and in Shaw's preface to it, where he advocates a phonetic alphabet (he actually left money in his will for this express purpose!). Any professional speaker such as an actor would make a difference between those three words, if they were spoken in close proximity, to aid understanding. And this discussion doesn't take into account accents, or other changes in pronunciation. In Shakespeare's time, for instance, "meat" was often pronounced "mayt."