471–480 of 615 posts
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As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?
‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons. God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.
You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say. Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.
I was first exposed to written English, so after trying conversational English, I learned why its pronunciation/writing is a national competition. It might as well be random.
English would have benefited a great deal from an equivalent to the Royal Spanish Academy.
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- English - /ˈɪŋ(ɡ)lɪʃ/ - engage - /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/, /ɛnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ - engorge - /ɪnˈɡɔːdʒ/ - engross - /ɪnˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɪŋˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɛnˈɡɹoʊs/, /ɛŋˈɡɹoʊs/ - engulf - /ɪŋˈɡʌlf/ According to Wiktionary only engulf and engross also use /ŋ/.
I've never heard engulf pronounced similarly to English
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All languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue these days to single out english and use it as a punching bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are logical. They all have irregularities and illogical aspects. It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn b…
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> Why do you describe it as dialect of French? Did I? I mentioned dialects in France, not of French, IIRC. I'm nitpicking because, TBH, I quite likely just read too much into your use of "astounded" in your original comment. It seemed to me that you were overestimating how prevalent or significant these languages were. By the mid-20th century, they were already quite less popular and even less so by the time Malevil…
When is something a dialect in France and when is it a language in France? > It seemed to me that you were overestimating how prevalent or significant these languages were. I said I was in sixth grade , a kid living in the US. I didn't even know then there was more than one Romance language in Italy - as I alluded to in my original comment. Yes, I now, decades later, know more. But I was sharing my childhood misappre…
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Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to the non-use of diacritics in English? I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra l…
> "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…
You don't need an "excuse" for not having accents. Digraphs and diacritical marks are simply two different ways to mark a letter as being pronounced as "somewhat similar but different". Whether one is better than the other is a matter of subjective perception, and it's very common for languages to not do it consistently. For example, Spanish has "ll" but also "ñ" (ironically the latter used to be "nn"!), and Czech has "č" but also "ch".
What's criminal about English is not the lack of diacritics, but rather the extremely convoluted and hard to predict rules for interpreting digraphs and trigraphs. If "ch" always meant the same thing, it would be just fine.
Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing: e ' Which was called "overstriking".
French.. you people have no idea how Italy is. I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region. The whole Italy…
You think that's bad, visit your friends to the East in Slovenia. You'd think they're doing it on purpose! How do so few people in such a small area make so many variations in the "same" language?
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In 6th grade, so back in 1982, I read the French SF novel "Malevil". I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language. Here is an example, from https://archive.org/details/malevilmerl00merl/page/150/mode/... : > And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by hi…
IIRC in the early 1900s, coercive methods were used to stop children speaking their native regional languages, a lot of it in school. In my region of Brittany (France) the most famous example that was on posters detailing good manners would say : "Il est interdit de parler breton et de cracher par terre" meaning "It's forbidden to speak Breton and to spit on the ground", placing both on the same level.
The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
Oh interesting, I've never seen those cases. I'd say it's more common (although maybe still a little old-school?) to use it in words like Noël or Chloë.