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.
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“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is 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.” - James D. Nicoll
My mind was blown when my favorite 90s band “Live” was actually the live from “Alive” and not live from " Living".
Stupid question but what’s the difference?
Being alive is just not being dead. Living an income sufficient to live on or the means of earning it.
And alive is a diphtong < i > (/ai/) and living a short i, right? (I’m not a native speaker if not obvious)
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
