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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#61

Post by ajuc »

gxqoz wrote: post #44
anticristi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know John McWhorter, but is this the "second languages are hard" argument? I tend to get annoyed when people compare the relative difficulty of learning a language they spoke 16 365 18 hours vs ... 18 hours.

McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to mas…

> especially its very large vocabulary

Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO.

The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to write it and how to say it) - is.

I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still pronounce any German word I see.

I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36 now. I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#62

Post by mason55 »

KineticLensman wrote: post #39
gxqoz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...

Yes. In British English, one problem with any sort of spelling reform is that the pronunciations of many words have significant regional variations. For example, in a Southern English accent, words like Bath and Castle are pronounced with a long vowel (almost as if they were spelt 'Barth and 'Carstle') compared with the much shorter Northern English versions ('baf', 'cassl'). To pick a particular pronunciation-based…

There are a few changes that I believe are universal. I'm thinking hard/soft "c" becoming "k"/"s" and soft "g" becoming "j". I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a word as hard or soft.

But then again, those rules are pretty standard (c/g before e/i [the "skinny vowels"]) are almost always soft and they are hard otherwise. If you need a soft "c" sound before an "a" then you just use the letter "s". So maybe it's not even worth the effort.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#63

Post by mbroncano »

smnrchrds wrote: post #14

Canadian English is going through a vowel shift right now. The shift is much smaller than the great vowel shift, but still notable. https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-can...

Thanks for the link, it was fascinating!

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#64

Post by fbellag »

fbellag wrote: post #60
ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

I've half-jokingly, proposed a similar change to Spanish, basically: z, c (as in "ce", "ci"): use "s" (non european spanish speakers do not distinguish these sounds anyway) v: always use "b" c (as in "ca", "co", "cu"), q(u) (as in "que", "quiso"): replaced with "k" w: why do we have this letter?! use "u" y (as vowel): use "i" (basically only used as "and" in Spanish) y (as consonant): stays like it is now (important…

Adding to my post, with regards to "y": In school we are teached there are 5 vowels "aeiou" yet the "y" sound when used alone is a vowel!

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#65

Post by gecko »

dmoy wrote: post #53
sltkr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than English?

No. German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English. It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?) There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.

The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#66

Post by Kranar »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #51
Kranar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any lingua franca will end up deviating in pronunciation from how it's written. For example, Finnish is said to have very shallow orthographic depth (the technical term for this phenomenon), but you can imagine if people from across the world began speaking and writing Finnish that over 100 years you'd end up with different accents and different variations of the original Finnish. The language would branch and merge…

I don't think Finnish (or any language in a state of diglossia) is the best example here. That is, Finnish is already essentially two separate languages. Written Finnish ( kirjakieli ) is a somewhat artificial language that was a compromise between different dialects, because at the birth of Finnish literacy there was no longer an "original Finnish" on which to base writing. Written Finnish is mainly a written thing,…

I am referring strictly to the correspondence between a written language and its pronunciation. The fact that people speak differently from how they read/write is an altogether separate matter.

When reading Finnish, one pronounces the words very closely to how the word is spelled, regardless of whether when they speak they do so in an altogether different manner.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#67

Post by hannasanarion »

anticristi wrote: post #42
mywittyname wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language. The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra…

So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.

That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are other situations where spelling could be changed with no ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho" and "thru".

Another easy example is just fixing "island". The was never pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin "insula".

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#69

Post by mywittyname »

fbellag wrote: post #60
ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

I've half-jokingly, proposed a similar change to Spanish, basically: z, c (as in "ce", "ci"): use "s" (non european spanish speakers do not distinguish these sounds anyway) v: always use "b" c (as in "ca", "co", "cu"), q(u) (as in "que", "quiso"): replaced with "k" w: why do we have this letter?! use "u" y (as vowel): use "i" (basically only used as "and" in Spanish) y (as consonant): stays like it is now (important…

> ñ: this stays. it gives the language personality!

We can remove it and call the entire transition the Convergencia año-ano.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#70

Post by hannasanarion »

mywittyname wrote: post #43
gxqoz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...

People also fucking haaaate changes in language. Especially older people. I had a 85 year old (yes) technical writing professor in college who insisted that we do our papers using the "Queen's English" that he learned growing up in Catholic school. He even went so far as to write a damn book outlining his rules for English writing because none of the existing style guides out there matched his view of the language. Y…

That's not universal at all. Many languages have spelling reform every couple of decades. French spelling was updated in 1991 and German in 1996. Dutch was reformed in 1996 and 2006.
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