'Read' and its past tense are spelled the same. How should they be spelled?
What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by [email protected]))
Edit: it's to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
543
Comments180
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”
I heard lead leads in weight.
Interesting if true.
And German has a word for it: Blei
That would explain why a pencil, which contains a "lead" (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift
Some call it differently because it doesn't contain lead anymore but Bleistift is still the common name
Bly in Swedish. But we add some weirdness to the Bly part so a "lead pencil" is blyertspenna ("penna" meaning pencil). I can't think of another word where that specific addiction is used, and I have no idea what it means.
I've looked it up and "blyerts" means "black lead, graphite" from German "Bleierz" (lead-ore).
source
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.
What's not clear? It's written right there!
It's all about led vs lēd.
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.
My wife and I had a good snicker one time when I brought home edamame peas in the shell.
They were shelled, but she wanted them shelled.
Flammable/imflammable is another one that comes to mind.
As carved into history by Dr. Nick:
English has many contronyms.
Also sanction and sanction, same word but completely opposite meanings.
And the alarm goes off means it actually starts ringing. Weird language indeed!
And this might just be a UK thing but if a person goes off it means they get really angry. And it can mean to leave for somewhere.
So a firework goes off which makes the fire alarm go off which makes the safety officer go off. Then he goes off to get a fireman. But he leaves the milk out, so it goes off.
It's "its," by the way.
This is the grammar thing I fuck up the most, and I don't call people on it because I'm pretty sure I don't know how it works. Autocorrect changes it & I just say "oh, whoops", and it still looks wrong...
it's means "it is". It is really not difficult, just pretend you are Data and swear off contractions.
I think the contraction vs possesive thing messes with me, and my brain can never settle on what goes where when, how, or why...
Just try changing it to "it is". If the sentence still makes sense, it's "it's". Otherwise it's "its".
Ah, thanks for the reminder to look through some TNG again. Data is such a great character and fills the role of the outsider looking in perfectly.
Plus he's a sex toy, which is cool. If peak Denise Crosby wanted to find out if I was fully functional, I might bust a hydraulic hose right there.
Here's a shortcut: test if you could drop "his" into the same spot and have it make sense. (And of course you'd never write hi's or his's.) If "his" would work, "its" would work.
My keyboard is very keen on completing "it's" regardless of context. I imagine this is the case for most people, since usually I see "it's" when "its" would be correct.
I also think it's difficult to know that "it's" is wrong to use because it feels like it follows the common apostrophe for possession rule:
"Australia's capital is Canberra" -> "Australia is the largest country in Oceania. It's capital is Canberra." (wrong, but intuitive)
Bought, caught, taught, fought, thought, sought, and wrought are all past tense verbs and all rhyme. The present tense forms are buy, catch, teach, fight, think, seek, and work, none of which rhyme.
Spanish is awesome. All its verbs in their regular form do end in "-ar", "-er" and "-ir".
The conjugations can get as weird as English sometimes, though. Case in point: Ser.
"Me voy a ir yendo" can translate into "I'm leaving", but it is funny because you are using three times, in spanish, the same verb.
Edit: I play with it and as a prank sometimes I translate it like if it were a chain of "going to". "I'm going to going to to"
"que sera sera" es un ejemplo.
How is that weird, as (nearly?) the only regular form of this verb?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/304867/the-wrought-wreaked-havoc-misunderstanding
Today I learned...
Me too, thanks!
And that's one of the sounds "ou" can make.
Inglish speling iz stoopid.
Fast can mean moving with great speed or fixed securely in place (among other things).
The alarm went off so i turned it off.
My ally turned on me and then I turned her on
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Very long. Highly recommended
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...
I missed that, my bad.
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.
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"
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's really not. Maybe if you pronounce an English 'u', but not a French one. Source: I'm French Canadian.
What I get from this is that if those English idiots had stuck to French, we wouldn't have this mess.
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.
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
Are you talking about Johannes Gutenberg?
One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:
And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.
The other English thing I find super interesting is how there's a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say "The big old red wooden door" it works as a description, but if I say "The wooden old red big door" it sounds weird even though it's the same information. People aren't usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.
Would be interested in more about the order - wondering if there is a name for that? I have been called out by teachers and friends and colleagues about strange sentences and it was often because I wouldn't write the 'normal' way. I've learned the conventions over the years and often find myself making edits to swap words and phrases around to meet expectations.
Apparently it's called the Royal Order of Adjectives, and it's essentially: determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, qualifier.
You don't have to use all of those in the description, but that's broadly the order to use them in to make it sound 'right'. So for example in the comment I made above, it fits because I used:
in that order. I'm sure I was never taught that in any organized way (I just had to look up what it was called lol) but I still got it in the right order anyway just by typing it out in the way that felt right, which I think is interesting.
The primary accent for 2-syllable words that are used as both a noun and a verb depends on the part of speech. The noun places the primary accent on the 1st syllable, the verb on the 2nd syllable.
Examples:
The musician records a record.
The farmer produces produce.
You're not permitted to fish without a permit.
Potential exception: "Adult." Arguably because it generally isn't a verb when emphasis is on the second syllable, some people do that even when it's a noun.
I'm an Adult vs. I'm an aDULT. *
Use as of "adult" as a verb is non-standard and where to emphasise that is even less clear-cut for those of us who put the emphasis on the first syllable of the noun. Interestingly, "adulterate" is less strange as a verb and the emphasis is definitely on the second syllable there.
We could tie ourselves in knots analysing the late emphasis form as a verbified noun, re-nounified. Ow.
* The underlying truth of said statement is irrelevant. Chronologically, I have been one for some time. Mentally... ehh.
Not an exception for me, I definitely use different accents for adulting / adulteration and adult. Maybe that's a British vs US English difference?
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
I before E, except after C!
As long as you don't count the word caffeine. Or protein. Or species. Or seize or heinous or leisure or weird or feign or their or reignite or any of the other 923 words that are exceptions to this rule lol.
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.
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.
99% agree with this. This is a native speaker issue, except where someone took up bad habits from the natives...
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.
That is still not a valid reason.
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
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
I pronounce these all differently though? [wɛɹ], [wəɹ] and [wiɹ]
Maybe, yes, but as someone who has seen tons of unedited writings, I can tell you those mixup as common as muck.
This one has also bothered me because I pronounce all three of these differently.
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.
There, their and they are...
English has way more vowel sounds than it has vowels.
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.
"Read" and "readed."
Present: read
Past: red (in the fediverse), redd (on the old site)
Obvious.
“It has been red”.
So was the text red or has the text been read?
Both. How do you know it was red when you have not red it? Someone must have red it to state it's red.
I can't reed
"Read" is spelled s-a-m-e? English is a weird language.
Wait until you hear about how we pronounce colonel!
We pronounce it the same as the linux colonel.
Good old Colonel Angus!
What about parmesan?
Well I say that like it's spelled. I don't make the zh sound at the end of that's what you're referencing. I know some do though.
You pronounce the middle syllable as "me"?
Par-meh-sawn
So, not how it's spelled.
I found it! https://www.exocomics.com/193/
Nice! Thank you
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.
It's pronounced "Redding" Railroad?? All those times I sang "Take a look, it's in a book, Reading Railroad!" were a lie!
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
The digraph oo is pronounced at least six different ways:
Are the first 2 lines really different?
Genuine question from a non native speaker.
first line is a long oo, second line is a short oo.
Oh I see it now. Thanks for the explanation
That's the fun part, depending on your dialect and regional accent, sometimes there is no discernable difference in some of these lines. But each line has distinct pronunciation from each other in some dialects.
Yeah I went through them again and see how it makes a slight difference but I am slavic and you can definitely hear it when I speak especially with my þ, ð and r sounds. The r especially after speaking for more than 15 minutees my tongue just gives up and I cannot make the weird soft english version of it. The probounciations I use are all over the place.
If you want to have some fun with US regional accents , Baltimore is a classic.
https://youtu.be/Esl_wOQDUeE (1min)
Oh the iohn ohn uhhrn irn. That's a classic
Ehh technically I think they are the same but in common pronunciation they differ subtly. Don't overthink it though.
Brooch and mooch.
But, aren't these the same sounds as boot / proof / boost etc.?
Brooch is pronounced like roach
It may be pronounced either way, and may also be spelled "broach", an alternate spelling which is very common although probably slightly less than this chart implies given multiple meanings of "broach".
I'm not really informed on this history of this word, but I think it's possible that the "brooch" spelling increased in frequency along with the pronunciation that rhymes with "mooch" while people who pronounce it to rhyme with "roach" are more likely to spell it as "broach".
Floor/door and poor might differ depending on dialect
And the whole point of zoology and cooperative is that they aren't digraphs (hence why some super posh people write coöperative)
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.
Reed, red. Homophones should be homographs too.
What dialect of English will we base the new spelling system on?
Transatlantic English
All of them. If you speak some weird rural UK accent you spell it differently. And certain people from New York, for example, spell curl as coil.
I think this would be the same in RP as it is in most American-ish accents, though.
Reed and Red
The English language is so retarded yet we use it for international communication, and it is too late to stop it.
The problem is the spelling, not the language. But the problem with spelling reform is that it necessarily favours certain dialects over others so you can never please everyone.
How about we go with reed and red... see, you already know how to pronounce them!
The comedic timing of this strip is actually really good.
Wind as in air moving and wind as in a pathway with twists and turns.
Read and readed
You should wrede a book they wrote, and after you've wred the book, write your own.
I've never been a fan of read/read/red They're too popular to all be comingled like that.
Just place read/read with Peruse/Perused
Words in which I can never remember h and g order:
Inconsistent pronunciation of "ae"
And many more...
We should be consistent and say "readed". While we're on the subject, why isn't the past tense of go "goed"?
But you should still pronounce it redded.
But then it would get confused with "redead" which could be detrimental when dealing with necromancers.
Although the past tense of write is wrote, so maybe for read it should be rode.... dammit!
Be the change you want to see. Making people cringe as bonus!
It's only cringy because you're not used to it. If someone says "I goed to work yesterday" you would know exactly what they meant.
Yes and then cringe.
Read and Reddit
Read should be said "read" and read read. Read, on the other hand, I would leave as is.
Looking up the etymology is often helpful in theoretical discussions about pronunciation and spelling :)
Façade is written using a letter that doesn't appear in English language keyboards (or in any other English word that I'm aware of).
Just like naïve
Using loan words is cheating, but also disqualifies half the English language
Thing is, reasonable languages adapt loan words to their own rules to make their speakers' lives easier.
English, though? Nah, English just stalks other languages in dark alleys, stabs them, rips some random words off, and runs away giggling like a maniac, bits of the original language dragging behind, leaving a trail of gore.
That's how you end up with things like façade, or naïve, or fiancé, or the plural of radius being radii, or château / châteaux, or referendum / referenda, and so on, turning what should be a matter of just applying some standard rules into a veritable minefield of non-standard forms which must be memorised by its speakers.
It does make learning other languages fun. Currently in the middle of French, and there's so many words i already know. Eg:
one would say that word is a
English has so much of this sort of nonsense. Like the fish can be spelled ghoti thing.
Except that "gh" is never pronounced "f" at the start of a word and "ti" is never "sh" at the end. The "o" is perfectly correct, though. Phosh.
Of course. But it does illustrate some of the confusing quirks of the language though.
"well" is a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an interjection
Are reed and red taken?
Words that produce the same sounds should have same spelling. Read in past tense and red is the same sound, so why isn't past tense of read - red?
Why most 'c' in words produce 'k' sounds?
Car and kar also produce the same sounds, so why C instead of K?
English pronunciation is weird. It can be mastered through tough thorough thought though.
what if we just change the past tense to red? simpler?
Make it
redd, to easily distinguish from the color.The irony with using Connect is that the text for "redd" being done in code format makes it red. 🤣
😄
People already struggle with 'led' being the past tense of "lead". It seems like quite a few people extend the "read/read" rule to "lead".
In other words, I don't know if that would actually solve anything 😅
its, not it's.
English a very difficult language
https://youtu.be/d6DfsBd3iSk
Put: "hold my beer"
Rob Words youtube channel is basically wtf english. And he has tons of content, and it keeps comming.
They should be left exactly the same as an example of context.
They should be spelled the way they currently are.
The meta aspect of 'shit' has to be up there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
Read.
Have read.
Maybe to reed (infinitive) and read (past tense), but you can usually infer which one it is from context so no need to change the spelling.
"I read a lot of books about English spelling!"
Is this past tense?
Depends on the context
"I read the magazines" isn't clear on its own, but with other text it probably is.
Spelt.
Wheat.