601–610 of 615 posts
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Could you please share your list? I have this discussion a few times per year and I'd love to hand that list to people that think written English makes sense. I was thinking of writing a blog article on it but I don't think I'd need to anymore!
I'll organize it a bit and I can (if I don't forget) share it tomorrow
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As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
Yes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because the correct pronunciation would require the word to be written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation rules to the written words…
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Yes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because the correct pronunciation would require the word to be written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation rules to the written words…
its just a soft c? other languages have that too. English has soft c's after i, e and y. They probably didn't teach you that rule. its true that most English speakers pronounce soft c's as a "sh" sound these days, but it wasn't always the case.
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Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways ? For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french…
I love French. Institutionalized mumbling. You might not hear the t in chat, but you need to know it's there to pronounce it properly. And especially if there's a vowel starting the next word.
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> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say. This is a very popular pro-reading sentiment. The trouble is that you can also read about how to pronounce words.
You can indeed. However, if I knew all of the words I would mispronounce, I would have already looked them up! The trouble with mispronouncing words is that often you’re unaware that you’re doing so. Respite got me recently.
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They are not diacritics since they don’t alter the sound of the letter.
I don't know what a headless `i` or `j` would sound like in English, since they aren't used. So it's not really a verifiable claim that the tittles don't alter the sound.
The dot evolved to make the letter more visually distinct in handwriting, not to indicate a sound change.
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I'll organize it a bit and I can (if I don't forget) share it tomorrow
Ping!
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Ping!
Believe me or not, I kept the list in a chat with my girlfriend on a certain social platform and got my account banned (just yesterday). I'll bother her to find it, check this thread in a week if I don't get it in the next hour. Although the list is not as extensive as you may think
Cheers
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> "is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks" > sh, th, ee, oo, ou That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people. Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents. In German one can write strasse and straße or müller and mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don…
> but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people Shrug. Yes, languages have different paths in their evolution. Film at 11. I still like what this linguistics PhD wrote about the specific history of one aspect of English language evolution. > English doesn't make sense That is of course an exaggeration. Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no…
That's exactly what "makes no sense" means, actually.
> demonstrated that English is compressible
of course it is
> which means there must be some patterns
Of course there are. Patterns are (almost) everywhere - even PI is normal, but not random - but patterns in English make little or no sense for a language born and developed among, in the same era and having close contact with, a lot of other much more regular languages. The two facts are orthogonal.
Even Sumerian is more regular than modern English...