We have a 2yo we're trying to teach both Finnish (which has near-perfect letter/sound correspondence) and English (barf). But many English words are learned purely by sight ("one", "two", and myriad others), so I want to teach English spelling by using the correct letters but with visual cues (i.e. letter-level CSS styling) about which letters are not pronounced, or pronounced not as they look. Has anyone else tried this ? Would love to trade notes.
Weird English
101–110 of 110 posts
Re: Weird English
#102Would like to “fix” the issue with the first few numbers after 10. They make it much harder to teach a young child the concept of base ten counting. Would be much easier if we would replace “ten” by “teny” then “eleven” -> “teny-one” etc.
One ten one, one ten two, etc is my preferred pronunciation for 11, 12...
Here trams are numbered 1 to 10, and the latter I tell my kid is "one oh", not "ten". No need to jump into place notation just yet (he's not yet two).
Re: Weird English
#103My biggest English language peeve of the moment is the rise in prevalence of "have a nice rest of your day", which appears to be a mashup of "have a nice day" and "enjoy the rest of your day". No matter how much I hear it, it sounds disfluent due to the mismatched particle ("a rest of"). What seems like it started as an honest flub has taken root and is now used intentionally and extensively, especially by grocery ch…
"Have a nice day."
"No thanks. I have other plans."
Re: Weird English
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous} Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospec…
> Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospective, prospective} × {non-perfect, perfect} × {simple, continuous} × {past, present}. (The irrealis is more difficult, and overla…
Other commenters have noted that French verbs are messy. But there are a couple of shortcuts for new learners. Future can be expressed by aller (present tense) + inf. (e.g. "I am going to [verb]"), and past can be expressed by venir (present tense) de + inf. (e.g. "I just [verb]ed").
Re: Weird English
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The flip-side of that pronunciation thing is that we're flexible on how things are pronounced. Just listen to the differences between British and American English or even regional differences in those countries. Us native English speakers know all the different ways our letters can sound, so differing pronunciations tend to remain recognizable as long as you don't form a homophone with another word that would work in…
Nah, that's no flip-side. Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_. And this just doesn't exist in…
And in that sense, English to some degree resembles written Chinese. Not only do spellings often not indicate pronunciation, but also pronunciations of words can vary drastically from area to area.
Re: Weird English
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say, on the phonological level at least, French, German, and even Polish are easy . Their phonetics, both the consonants and the vowels, are straightforward. English, in contrast, is out of this world. (Its origin lies in the language of an island nation, after all.) So much so that it looks like their neighbors, the French, have huge difficulty with English pronunciation (and native English speakers, especially th…
It doesn't help that we screw with the pronunciation of loan words and then label anyone who pronounces them properly pretentious. One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way sinc…
In the same vein, "Formula One" has come to replace "Grand Prix", which probably got mangled a lot.
Re: Weird English
#107English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…
I think English is actually not that hard to master. What's difficult is writing it down . For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can…
-ea- has a third pronunciation. It's time for the Great Steak Break!
Re: Weird English
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/. Compare English "iron" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg German "eiern" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg French "ailler" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-... None of the s is anything like [r].
Maybe I just pronounce it weird, but I tend to pronounce "iron" the same way as the phrase "I earn", just with less space between them. Obviously the "r" is closer to the "n" in my pronunciation, but it feels like a stretch to say that it's the "r" with the weird pronunciation. If anything, the vowels are what seem weird to me; the "i" is long, which does not seem obvious it would be the case from the spelling alone,…
"iron" probably underwent a process called r-metathesis after the spelling was standardized (or the spelling was based on a different dialect). If the spelling had been based on the later version, it would've been "iorn". I was going to give a lengthy explanation, but someone on StackExchange already did: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662
Re: Weird English
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have heard, I think from a user on here, that crimes are often listed as a pair of synonyms (e.g. "aiding and abetting") because one word was Norman French and the other was English, and the law required both to be understood.
On a similar note, I've heard that the words for animals, like cow or pig, tend to be Germanic while the words for their meat, like beef or pork tend to be Latin.
The food/meat words are actually from French because that was what the aristocratic classes would have spoken in England in the late middle ages/early Rennaisance and they were the people eating the meat for the most part.
Beef Pork Poultry Salmon Venison Mutton The latin words are in some cases the root of the French but it's not as clear or consistent.
Re: Weird English
#110Two of my favourites: - Why do we have guarantee and warrantee that mean essentially the same thing? (Because one word was imported into English from French at two different periods in history) - Why do we have child -> children, brother -> bretheren (obv archaic but still would be understood by most people) but no other plurals that work that way? You can't say one sister many sistren for example. Even though that w…
What about ox -> oxen?
Interesting. Yes that's similer, although I was talking about "ren" as a suffice specifically.
But still we say ox and oxen and yet we don't say one axe many "axen". Yes I know people say "emacsen", but that's not really a word.