Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
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Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
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Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
Bonus panel:
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Is "hiccough" pronounced the same as "hiccup?" Because if it is, I'm gonna have to put that in the same category as "colonel."
and lieutenant in British English.
English is a creole gone feral.
Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes... and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. Most of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.
I'm in south Florida. Doctors' offices usually have multilingual signs. Haitian Creole always looks goofy, but you immediately realize - that's what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French's oodles of rules that all matter, and English's very simple rules we don't follow, and said "Sa trè estipid, nou ka fè pi byen."
that's what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French's oodles of rules that all matter
Can't we just use the Finnish rule of "each letter is only pronounced one way ever" and solve all the headaches?
If we ditch latin for IPA, maybe.
Maybe.
The more likely outcome is that some words would adopt those revised pronunciations, but most wouldn't, fracturing the rules by creating arbitrary exceptions. This has of course happened over and over and over. That is the shape of the hole we are in.
Yes English is tough, though through practice comes understanding.
My favorite version of what you just did is "English is tough; it can be understood through thorough thought, though."
You missed the opportunity to throw "thorough" in there after "through".
I actually ran into someone on Reddit who thought we should embrace it. They might be here too, I don't know.
How would one go about making a "font" that looks like the bonus panel? It's harder to learn all the logographs but you can fit a lot of information on a page that way.
just learn chinese
To answer your question: You'd have to have ligatures for every single word in existence so that is not possible.
Yes! I’ve made that comment a lot; French is easier to learn than English because you only need to learn how to pronounce syllables, while in English you have to learn every single word. It’s insane.
Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of ... English, but omfg did it not gel with me.
Yeah the general lack of gendered nouns is one of English's better traits, even if most of our words are bastardized words from other languages.
This reminds me of a poem called "The Chaos" which highlights how dumb English can be as a language
Which is why grammar nazi's need to be banished to hell
Grammar nazi's what, though?
Opponents, obviously.