What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by BunScientist@lemmy.zip))
Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
Just remember
Pretty sure the past tense of “lead” is actually “led.”
Unless of course you’re referring to the type of metal, lead, which I guess the meme isn’t clear on.
Pretty sure there’s a chemical element named “lead”
It’s not saying anything about past tenses in that meme, it’s just saying that each word has two different pronunciations that rhyme with the other.
It’s all about led vs lēd.
What’s not clear? It’s written right there!
I had to look this up.
And today I learned ALL my brit friends are spelling it wrong. That’s more than two!
Brits aren’t “spelling it wrong” any more than those in the US are. It’s just cultural differences. Do you also claim Germans spell things wrong? Or the Chinese?
Also the language is called English. By default, the English are doing it right and anything else is wrong. Maybe better, the argument can go for decades longer, but if anyones wrong its everyone else.
My point is no one is wrong. Well, you are, but not for the way you spell things.
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
…Very long. Highly recommended
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
Lead and lead as well. I got a lead on those lead undergarments you wanted. I’ll lead you there later.
How did I get to the lead merchant? I was led here. But in the price negotiation, I took the lead.
That works for your way of saying it but there is nothing wrong with the way I said it. You don’t say I’ll led you there later. My statement wasn’t past tense at all.
Actually I don’t think this one is true. Past tense of “to lead” is led. But also lead can be pronounced like led when referring to the metal or the element.
It’s because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England’s first one didn’t know how it worked and neither did any English speaker
So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.
And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.
Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn’t speak English made choices to change it
No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.
But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.
Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.
Anyways, that’s why English doesn’t make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.
This also occurred in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, a period when spoken English pronunciation was changing significantly.
Yep…
There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.
I missed that, my bad.
A French. The language where you have 5 wovels, use 3 for the word goose and the other 2 to pronounce it.
What? The e is just silent.
The French word for goose is Oie, pronounced “ua”
It’s really not. Maybe if you pronounce an English ‘u’, but not a French one. Source: I’m French Canadian.
If you look at an IPA chart, you can see how going from /i/ to /e/ to /a/ is a process of the vowel becoming more and more “open” over time (said with the mouth wider and wider).
In Quebec, the vowel shift that caused “oi” to have a /wa/ sound didn’t fully happen. So, the word “moi” is often pronounced more like /mwe/ or /mwɛ/. But “oiseau” (bird) is still pronounced with a /wa/.
The modern French pronunciation of the Loire river /lwaʁ/ influences the English pronunciation /lwɑːr/. But, other languages use a spelling that matches the French but have a different pronunciation. In Italian and Spanish it’s Loira. The Latin name was Liger. So, it used to have a /i/ pronunciation before the vowel shift.
tl;dr: modern French pronunciation vs spelling is just about as bad as English.
Ils sont fous, ces Français.
It certainly doesn’t help that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
What I get from this is that if those English idiots had stuck to French, we wouldn’t have this mess.
More like if the French royalty hadn’t conquered England…
England hasn’t been ruled by the English for centuries bro
Yup. Blame the Normans.
When people shit on the English, it’s usually for stuff a small group of French royalty/oligarchs were doing. And they were doing bad shit to the actual English too.
Like the joke about “robbed the world for spices, used zero”.
The royalty 100% used all the fancy spices and sold them to their cousins in mainland Europe. But the common Englishman sure as fuck couldn’t afford them.
The most shit we should be giving the common English, is for not following the common French’s example
Oh god, we’d be stuck with all those silent letters
On the other hand, you seldom have the issue of having no clue how something is pronounced because you’ve only ever seen it written. So it balances out.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch
Are you talking about Johannes Gutenberg?
Where, were, we’re. Even native speakers have problems with this. I don’t know how many times I had to correct such cases, especially with American authors.
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this, I see this type of mistake far less frequently with those who learned English as an additional language.
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this
99% agree with this. This is a native speaker issue, except where someone took up bad habits from the natives…
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this
That makes no sense since they would use it more, however native speakers from the US do have problems with it, and other words (they’re/their).
Rarely encounter it with others.
Their spelling is embarrassing, same as their very limited vocabulary. IDK what they do in schools.Native speakers acquire the language before learning to read. Remember, writing is a representation of spoken language not the other way round.
No it is. People were speaking for tens of thousands of years before they started writing. Modern people see the written word as more valid than spoken, but it’s a historical quirk that words pronounced identically should be spelled differently in English. Words that are spelled differently in English were once pronounced differently as well, but languages change and our spelling system is frozen in the 1600s.
Modern people are the written word as more valid than spoken
Now there’s a sentence I can’t make sense of.
There is no influence of history in when kids learn to write their language or if they used it orally, they learn to write it then how it’s supposed to be written.
If your reasons were valid every Anglo would have problems, they don’t.
Since it’s noticably the US specifically I can only assume it’s sub standard education.
As confirmed by their poor vocabulary compared to other Anglo’s
That is still not a valid reason.
It’s true that I see it more rarely with the British. I suppose they read more or something.
Possibly, education is my main guess
Exactly. People with English as a second language go from meaning to writing. Native speakers go from sound to writing.
There, their, they’re is something native speakers confuse as well. I have only ever observed native speaker write should of instead of should‘ve or should have.
This one has also bothered me because I pronounce all three of these differently.
Where, were, we’re.
I never had a problem with those, until I started with stuff like Reddit.
Now, I find myself making the mistake and catching it in proofreading.
Guess my brain is starting to age too.
On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced “Redding”. This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).
Little details, picked up along the way.
Reading is a place itself, the football club is the club for that place
Next you’re going to tell me there are places in the UK named Manchester and Liverpool and Notts County and St Johnstone and Celtic and Rangers and Port Vale.
Indeed, I just blurted out the biggest association in my mind to the place
It’s pronounced “Redding” Railroad?? All those times I sang “Take a look, it’s in a book, Reading Railroad!” were a lie!
English has way more vowel sounds than it has vowels.
- jack
- barn
- arena
- ball
- able
- rare
Those are just words where the primary vowel letter is “a”.
The terrible attempt to solve this is by using double letters, but then consistency goes out the window. There’s times when “ea” is a single vowel sound like /rid/ (reed) or /rɛd/ (red). But it can also be /ɛrn/ as in earn, which rhymes with urn and burn. It can be /ˈɡɹeɪt/ as in great, where the “ea” is a diphthong and pronounced like the “a” in grate or vague. Or, for more fun, the two letters can each fully get their own pronunciation like “react” or “theatre”.
We’re really at the “bearn it all down and start over” stage with English. Let’s just all agree to switch to español.
The comedic timing of this strip is actually really good.
“Read” and “readed.”
Reed and Red
Read and readed
Wind as in air moving and wind as in a pathway with twists and turns.
Read should be said “read” and read read. Read, on the other hand, I would leave as is.
its, not it’s.
