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Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

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Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#61

Post by dllthomas »

gerdesj wrote: post #37
bsder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.

Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.

Polish grammar is terrifying.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#62

Post by BalinKing »

smnrchrds wrote: post #59
pavlov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written. English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.) Even French beats English in this…

My favourite example: "banana" has three a's, no two of which are pronounced the same.

I think I pronounce the first and last a's the same (specifically, as /ə/)... it must be a dialectical difference (mine is General American English).

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#63

Post by smnrchrds »

BalinKing wrote: post #62
smnrchrds wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite example: "banana" has three a's, no two of which are pronounced the same.

I think I pronounce the first and last a's the same (specifically, as /ə/)... it must be a dialectical difference (mine is General American English).

I think you are right.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#64

Post by [deleted] »

fanf2 wrote: post #60
js2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk (Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.) So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF? Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I…

In my version of English, a router that passes packets rhymes with root, and a router that carves wood rhymes with out.

[deleted]

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#65

Post by scythe »

gerdesj wrote: post #37
bsder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#66

Post by jhgb »

vagrantJin wrote: post #40
jraph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this. Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

> I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

Easily, by the language making it an obligatory grammatical category for nouns. Grammar says there's concord in the language and some words have gender? Suddenly all nouns require gender for concord, regardless of whether it seems reasonable to you or not.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#67

Post by chrisseaton »

Jtsummers wrote: post #48
vagrantJin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this. Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. G…

> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns.

‘She’s a fine ship.’

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#68

Post by chrisseaton »

leephillips wrote: post #31
BitwiseFool wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast. They don't like loan words in general, and have a particular grudge against English loanwords. https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/27/france-invents-new-words...

I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.

Why are they fighting it? What’s the problem has to be fought against? What will happen if they don’t fight? Is it just a weird xenophobic thing?

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#69

Post by Jtsummers »

chrisseaton wrote: post #67
Jtsummers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. G…

> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. ‘She’s a fine ship.’

I actually did have that in my original comment but it didn't survive an edit. Vehicles, vessels, countries and a few others seem to get a gender, but it's not actually a part of the language in the same sense as in Spanish, Italian, German, French, and others. It more seems to reflect a kind of personification (the nation as an entity becomes a she, same with a ship). That's distinct from the grammatical gender in other languages.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#70

Post by leephillips »

chrisseaton wrote: post #68
leephillips wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.

Why are they fighting it? What’s the problem has to be fought against? What will happen if they don’t fight? Is it just a weird xenophobic thing?

Linguistic hegemony can be felt as related to cultural and political hegemony. Just as something would be lost if the world only had one language, it’s natural for people to ask why, if our language has a fine word for something already, we have to throw it out and use a foreign word instead. Language is bound up with history and culture. People have affection for these things, and don’t always want to toss them away willy-nilly. There also is the aesthetic dimension.

It may be harder for us US people to understand. Ours is a dominant society, and English dominance is only gaining ground. We are not the ones losing our traditions. Preserving something of your heritage is not xenophobia.

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