71–80 of 98 posts
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I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?
Borscht is also the name that I know (though as an American, I can't speak to the UK). "Borshch" is the orthographical equivalent to Russian Борщ and Dutch borsjtsj.
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There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…
I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?
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> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on whe…
Of course there are regional variations, but when speaking Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) they are relatively small and consistent, nothing like Norwegian. With consistent meaning that the same syllable will almost always be pronounced the same way within that region. Not like English, where "bread" and "great" have completely different ways of pronouncing the "(r)ea" sound, despite being written the same way.…
For example, the word "lijk" is pronounced different from the suffix "-lijk". And then there's the difference between "een" and "een".
I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)
There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?
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There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…
To add even more confusion, in my sort-of Philly accent, street is pronounced [ˈʃtɹit]. My uneducated guess on /ʒ/ is that /dʒ/ is the most common way of encountering it, so people aren't comfortable separating it out, even though it's still common. It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.
Depends what you mean by "the usual transcription". The usual spelling in English is "s" followed by i or u. (As in "usual" / "measure" / "vision" / etc. etc. etc. etc.) "Zh" is the standard transcription for Russian. The same sound in Chinese is today normally transcribed "r", because that is the letter assigned to it by China's official Romanized orthography, Hanyu pinyin[1]. In Wade-Giles, it was transcribed "j".
[1] The pinyin "r" (and the Wade-Giles "j") can represent a sound anywhere along the continuum between what an English speaker would perceive as the two distinct sounds /ʒ/ and /ɹ/. (The "s" and the "r" in "measure".)
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There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?
Switzerland has Romansh as one of its four national languages, though I'm not sure if that's the context you were intending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language
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I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into originally (russian) it was Борщ And coincidentally Borš in estonian. And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem? No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos. Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy
Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages. Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example, Romanian: borş. Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"): - "sh" and "ch", - "sh" and "t", or - all three, "sh", "t" and "ch". Or an approximation thereof. In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "…
> - all three, "sh", "t" and "ch".
This is not because we're confused! Just borrowing from the historical Russian pronunciation of Щ as ШЧ
I always find it strange how language materials insist on presenting agglutination as cases. I was lucky enough to not have it when I studied Turkish, so for me the - -da is "in", not "locative case" - -(y)a is "towards", not "locative case" etc. I personally find that insisting that students learn proper case names greatly hinders the learning process. Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative, and I feel abject h…
Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages now. While the Proto-Uralic language ancestral to them both was more agglutinative, the system of consonant gradation (and subsequent loss of consonants) as it developed in these languages means they are no longer very agglutinative.
In a purely agglutinative language you only have to memorize one stem for a word and then you can add all case endings to that one stem. In Finnish, you have to memorize at least two stems (strong and weak stems). In Estonian, things are even more complicated.
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I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into originally (russian) it was Борщ And coincidentally Borš in estonian. And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem? No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos. Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy
Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages. Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example, Romanian: borş. Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"): - "sh" and "ch", - "sh" and "t", or - all three, "sh", "t" and "ch". Or an approximation thereof. In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "…
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'sproeiauto' is still legal, one of the few Dutch words using all vowels in a row. One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spellin…
Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.
I guess the problem is the momentum of such a large population of speakers means this risks breaking British English off in such a way that it may eventually become too non-standard and British people become disadvantaged somehow.