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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#241

Post by Balgair »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #231
petercooper wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…

Oh wow, it actually is 8:30 in English. How interesting! In dutch, half eight is 7:30 too. 7:40 is weird: "ten over half eight"

Spanish does the same thing with time, so it's not uncommon.

That said, the way the French count numbers is, I think, universally confusing. Knowing the French, this is intentional :P

Re: Ghoti

#242

Post by Balgair »

biztos wrote: post #186
petercooper wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…

I’m from California and I had an Irish colleague there who, despite otherwise being amazingly well integrated, stuck to a hard “t” for certain cases of “th.” So for instance if I might say “These three things,” he would say “these tree things.” He was clearly able to make the sounds but in some cases he couldn’t. I never felt comfortable asking about it because I thought it might be a class thing.

The 'th' in Irish is usually dropped to 't' if a consonant is followed or at the the tend of a word. Death become Deat, Teeth become Teet, Thrice becomes Trice, Other stays as Other because a vowel is the next sound.

Re: Ghoti

#243

Post by Balgair »

glenngillen wrote: post #113
dakiol wrote: post #50

As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British. I work with Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch and I understand them 99% of the time. We use "normal" words (we are not fancy regarding vocabulary) and pronounce them in a non-native way (the way all Europeans that speak English understand)... But the…

I grew up in Australia, so would have considered myself a native English speaker. We’re even a British colony! I moved to Scotland for a year, and London for a few years later. I’d regularly here phrasing I’d never heard before and would need the speaker to clarify or would look up later. In the vast majority of those cases it was most often an old word that appears to have fallen out of fashionable usage. “Ken” bein…

Robert Burns' songs and poetry are mostly in Scots. It's a hoot to read through, like Chaucer almost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_o%27_Shanter_(poem)

Re: Ghoti

#244

Post by dang »

D-Coder wrote: post #179
dang wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That attribution to Twain is bogus. I believe it started as a letter to the editor in some mid-20th century magazine. Let me see if I can dig up the citation. (Edit 2: the Economist came later! see downthread) Edit: the joke originated as a letter to the Economist in 1971: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof... . The classic internet version (referencing the European Commission) was a later r…

First published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1946 (Astounding later become Analog). Often recirculated with accumulated changes. As far as I know, this is the original. MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM by Dalton Edwards

You're right! You can tell for sure that this is an antecedent because the last line is almost the same: "his drims fainali keim tru" vs. "Ze drem [...] vil finali kum tru".

Somewhere out there is a web page tracing this joke. When I googled this yesterday, there was just a haystack of drecky results repeating the joke. But once you have two sources, you can search for them together, and that tends to bring up better results. I just did that, and probably the best one I found was this alt.usage.english thread from 1999: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.usage.english/iw...

Note the marvelous reply: "Thanks for your effort to clear up this ongoing mis-attribution. I remember well "Meihem in ce Klasrum" when John W Campbell Jr published it.

Btw, the author is apparently "Dolton Edwards", not Dalton, and is said to be a pseudonym (which explains the satirical "Dolt") of someone named W.K. Lessing (edit: or K.W.? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114), about whom I didn't find anything when I looked.

I thought we had discussed this on HN before, too, but all I could find was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263, which you posted 4 years ago. Perhaps the next time this comes up, several years from now, one of us will at least find the current thread.

Re: Ghoti

#246

Post by imglorp »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #231
petercooper wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…

Oh wow, it actually is 8:30 in English. How interesting! In dutch, half eight is 7:30 too. 7:40 is weird: "ten over half eight"

A little more formal would be "half past eight" which clears up the ambiguity, as does "quarter til eight". Not sure who uses that aside from occasionally in US.

Re: Ghoti

#247

Post by simonebrunozzi »

dakiol wrote: post #50

As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British. I work with Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch and I understand them 99% of the time. We use "normal" words (we are not fancy regarding vocabulary) and pronounce them in a non-native way (the way all Europeans that speak English understand)... But the…

This is fantastic, as it matches exactly my experience in several years of working for US companies, and dealing with both US/UK native and a lot of foreigners like me (I'm Italian).

The hard part is that most of said US/UK native speakers seem to fail to comprehend this simple wisdom of yours.

Re: Ghoti

#248

Post by titanomachy »

dhosek wrote: post #192
titanomachy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even Greek uses a single letter for the "f" sound. The fact that "φ" is transliterated as "ph" is a historical accident: in ancient Greek the letter was pronounced like p with an extra puff of air, like in "Phuket".

Which is reflected in some contractions where, e.g., ἀπὸ αἵματος becomes ἀφ’ αἵματος

Interesting! Never seen that phenomenon, do you know if it persists in Modern Greek?
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