Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by auxbuss » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

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.

panorama is similar.

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

#112

Post by auxbuss » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #86

smnrchrds wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a good example. I am amused by "record" being pronounced differently whether it's a verb or a noun.

They're called heteronyms, and there are a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

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

#113

Post by ByteJockey » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

saithound wrote: post #78

ByteJockey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English spelling being standardized so early is one of the problems with it. The language has changed since the spelling was standardized (minus a few debates on the letter u).

If only there was a society of learned people, writers, academics, and civil servants, united for the advancement of language, empowered to regularly update the standard so that it remained convenient even as the vernacular evolved! I wonder if the Royal Society had any plans to create such an organization in the 17th century... ;)

If the problem is that it's too standardized and inflexible, I don't see how adding a centralized bureaucracy around it will solve this problem.

We don't need any of that, we just have to stop making fun of people who spell things phonetically.

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

#114

Post by nulbyte » Sun, Aug 29, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

caddemon wrote: post #89

nulbyte wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.

Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm c…

I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.

I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.