What are the English 1750s umbrellas of today?
Folding umbrellas.
The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#122What are the English 1750s umbrellas of today?
Google Glass. Even without the camera controversy, wearing anything on your head is hard to pull off. Bluetooth headsets approached acceptance at one point but have gone back to serious fashion faux pas.
Or to take the other angle of it, anything remotely "feminine" is still violently opposed for the modern man at least in the U.S. Although the way I read it, umbrellas were rejected as "feminine" but weren't really allowed for women either.
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#123What are the English 1750s umbrellas of today?
Declaring yourself a conservative in online tech circles, or in Hollywood.
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love listening to the English butcher (assimilate?) loanwords. Sure, other English-speaking peoples do as well, but the English in particular do it with gusto. Even McDonalds gets 'filet' mostly right.
It's kind of strange how the US pronounces French words more correctly than us Brits - I assume it's partly due to our historical disdain for those on the other side of The Channel. In the UK it's called a 'fillit of fish' and a car with 2 doors (coupe) is called a 'koop-ay' as if there was an accent on the e
> fillet. Origin: Middle English (denoting a band worn round the head): from Old French filet ‘thread’, based on Latin filum ‘thread’.
If this is correct then it's not a French word, it's an English word that was long ago inspired by a different French word. So the US pronunciation is a hypercorrection.
I mean, even Americans don't pronounce gullet as "gullay".
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love listening to the English butcher (assimilate?) loanwords. Sure, other English-speaking peoples do as well, but the English in particular do it with gusto. Even McDonalds gets 'filet' mostly right.
It's kind of strange how the US pronounces French words more correctly than us Brits - I assume it's partly due to our historical disdain for those on the other side of The Channel. In the UK it's called a 'fillit of fish' and a car with 2 doors (coupe) is called a 'koop-ay' as if there was an accent on the e
There was an interesting piece on the local public radio station a few months back about the pronunciation (in the US) of "pecan". One of the things they talked about is that in English, words with 2 syllables generally have an emphasis on the first, while French is the other way. When we borrow a French word into English, it starts with the emphasis on the second syllable and over time it migrates to the first.
For some reason, this process tends to happen faster in UK than in US, and this explains pronunciation differences in words like "garage".
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an accent on the "e": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup%C3%A9#English
The accent is a reflection of the British pronunciation; note the original French never had an accent either. It is absolutely incorrect in America and implies a different pronunciation than anywhere but Britain. EDIT: I am wrong.
> The accent is a reflection of the British pronunciation; note the original French never had an accent either.
The French (which is referenced in that wiktionary article) does, in fact, have the same accent.
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an accent on the "e": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup%C3%A9#English
The accent is a reflection of the British pronunciation; note the original French never had an accent either. It is absolutely incorrect in America and implies a different pronunciation than anywhere but Britain. EDIT: I am wrong.
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, for example, Mark Rosenfelder's attempt to algorithmically describe the pronunciation of English [0]. In his introduction, he takes ghoti to task: > Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up all the words in -ough , or George Bernard Shaw's ghoti -- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can…
ghoti actually can't be pronounced like "goatee", since the only way to pronounce the former is by stressing the initial syllable.
Well, start like "ghost". And end like "veni, vedi, vici". So I'd say more like "goati" than "goatee".
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love listening to the English butcher (assimilate?) loanwords. Sure, other English-speaking peoples do as well, but the English in particular do it with gusto. Even McDonalds gets 'filet' mostly right.
It's kind of strange how the US pronounces French words more correctly than us Brits - I assume it's partly due to our historical disdain for those on the other side of The Channel. In the UK it's called a 'fillit of fish' and a car with 2 doors (coupe) is called a 'koop-ay' as if there was an accent on the e
I guess a silly joke I like won't work in the UK.
What do you a chicken coop with four doors? A chicken sedan.
Re: The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, this got downvoted into the ground by people who aren't familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti The point is that the "letters used in the word" are a really bad guide to pronunciation of English. They're not consistent across words or the place of the letter within the word. It's just consistent enough to make people think that might be the case. Then you get placenames like "Loughborough", "Worceste…
I recently had to put up with a satellite navigation system mispronouncing around 90% of place names. The (mis)pronunciations were clearly based on spelling, but the system developers weren't trying very hard, or didn't know the spelling-sound correspondences or how to encode them. A rule-based approach would get it right most of the time, and exceptions can be handled by table look-up. (Obviously you check whether i…
Google maps giving turn by turn and trying to say Maori words is downright hilarious. Personal favourite was Oratia (pronounced Oratee a)which got an Orwellian sounding Orasia.