There was an old lady from Slough Who developed a terrible cough. She drank half a pint Of warm honey and mint, But, sadly, she didn’t pull through. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/06/03/limerick-10/
English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simplest way to use the alphabet is to do it like Spanish does: It is purely phonetic so you write the way you pronunce and you read the way it is written. Simple. That's how they end up with "fútbol" for "football": That's how it's pronunced in Spanish so that's how they spell it, and anyone can immediately read it as well. Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same be…
Have you ever heard of someone tying a cow onto a car's roof rack? Sadly, it doesn't go the other way 'round. Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.
It's not an 'abomination' at all, it's a phonetic transcription within the language. You could argue that writing "whisky" in a Spanish sentence would equally be an abomination.
The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#33Then you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"
That is less Hiberno-English and more Gaelic. Niamh and Siobhán are Irish names following Irish orthography.
You should have left out the first sentence! Someone once sent me a link to a tooth-grindingly annoying performance by an English "comedian", where he expressed irritation and disbelief at what he saw as a preposterous disconnect between the spelling of indigenous Irish names and the way they are pronounced. As if the Irish language was really merely a dialect of English, and we're all just being awkward over here.
Someone who knows English but not Irish will have no idea how to pronounce "Niamh", because it's not a word from the English language. As you say, it's an Irish name that follows Irish orthography.
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#34English is quite amazing in how people do not agree on either spelling nor pronounciation, and yet it exists as a language and people mostly comprehend each other, heavy accents nonwithstanding
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#35Hiccough is very out of date. Even my mother doesn't write it like that. She thought about a rough drought in Loughborough though...
Not only is hiccough old, it's also new... at least compared to hiccup. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccough > Hiccough is a later spelling, and an example of folk etymology. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccup#English > Alternative forms > hiccough (old-fashioned, hypercorrection) ...and see the etymology for more info.
Interesting, I’ve never seen that word spelt as ‘hiccough’ (native English speaker here). Do some people really claim that fake spelling is the correct one?
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#36There was an old lady from Slough Who developed a terrible cough. She drank half a pint Of warm honey and mint, But, sadly, she didn’t pull through. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/06/03/limerick-10/
Ah, Slough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By8PfyNQ060
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#37(non-native here) I've been saying this for as long as I remember. Non-Anglophones often get frustrated in attempt to (de)construct a word in English like they would in other European languages only to find that it doesn't work and they don't understand why. I often say you'll have a much easier time accepting English if you consider it to be more like Mandarin; a collection of images. The only difference is that unl…
That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.
Now GB has left the EU, maybe Europe should create an “international written English”?
It’s kinda a joke, but would be kinda cool. They’d only have to negotiate with Ireland, so hopefully wouldn’t get too bogged down.
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#38I’ve come to find this kind of thing pretty tedious… Having learnt other languages to various extents, they all have different things that are hard, because they have history, outside influence, etc. I’m learning French at the moment, struggling with pronunciation and comprehension but hey, that’s just how it is. In the past I’ve done some Spanish, that’s easy to pronounce but I still remember very few of the conjugations of irregular verbs…
It’s almost impossible to reform and I don’t think most people really care to have it reformed. And it’d eventually change in unexpected and irregular ways anyway!
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#39A good description Another amusing one is Mark Twain's plan: A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling,…
I can't decipher what "doderez" is in the passage "bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez"
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#40(non-native here) I've been saying this for as long as I remember. Non-Anglophones often get frustrated in attempt to (de)construct a word in English like they would in other European languages only to find that it doesn't work and they don't understand why. I often say you'll have a much easier time accepting English if you consider it to be more like Mandarin; a collection of images. The only difference is that unl…
That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.
> the discrepancy is smaller.
You mean like the French who don't pronounce the final consonant?
Anyway, fixing the orthography simply privileges the group whose pronunciation matches. And the pronunciation continues to drift anyway so you have to keep on adjusting the spelling.