Spyke
sh.itjust.works

English is the LAST language that gets to complain about how you pronounce stuff. Ever read an english word that you haven't heard before? You're pronouncing it wrong.

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AstaKaskreply
lemmy.cafe

The UK should do a major spelling reform and troll the shit out of the U.S and their then "archaic" English.

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KSP Atlasreply
sopuli.xyz

Ðat wúd bē sō sili, hüever it wúd absolútli rúin ŪK-ŪS komūnikāshon

Sum myt sā ðat's a gúd þing ðō

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zerofkreply
lemmy.zip

That looks unironically great. Relatively easy to read and as far as I could tell, internally consistent. Two things current English spelling lacks.

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KSP Atlasreply
sopuli.xyz

I've worked on it as a personal writing system for probably like a year or so now

Y'v werkt on it az a personal ryting sistem for probabli lyk a jēr or sō nü

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Logireply
lemmy.world

One major issue is that it'll expose all regional differences in pronunciation in the spelling and now we'll disagree about the spelling instead.

2

We already do though, one's color is another's colour and one's spelled is another's spelt

Those would be kuler and spelt in my dialect and writing system

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lemmus.org

UK is the worst, US makes sense at least to some degree.

Gloucestershire - pronounced glostershire Warwick - pronounced warrick And there like hundreds of these weird ones.

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Place names are cheating. Almost all of them come from old/other languages that have very little resemblance to modern english.

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lemmy.hogru.ch

The UK accent is actually more modern than that of the US because the US imported the UK one around the time of colonization.

-11

The UK accent

Which one of the dozens if not hundreds of regional and culturally originated dialects and accents do you mean?

actually more modern than that of the US because the US imported the UK one around the time of colonization

That's not how it works.

Like the Spanish- French- and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Americas, American English may have developed from an earlier form of English, but It has since gone through its own parallel evolution, making it just as "modern" as British English.

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FishFacereply
piefed.social

The US one evolved as well, just preserved rhoticity which is a major feature. There's no "UK accent" (nor "us accent") either - West country accents for example are still rhotic

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Sure but even that isn't all encompassing. I'm from SoCal and my accent/dialect has so many archaicisms that I'm probably one of the only people under 50 with the damned thing. What I get for being around old people I guess.

Though I do suppress into something approaching the general accent when talking to others, mostly because for example Mountain Dew gets mangled into münten doo.

4

West country accents for example are still rhotic

Good thing, too, pirates would sound silly saying, "Ahhhhh, shivah me timbahs!"

2

No, that is garbled nonsense based on the misunderstanding of a factoid.

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But this is someone complaining about an English word and how it is pronounced compared to spelling. Yes, it comes from another language. That is the entire reason English has a lot of examples like this.

11

Seriously!

We have a third grader, and he's pretty good at reading. Recently he has been arguing with us about the pronunciation of some new words from his homework.

The problem is, his arguments are sound! He's accurately following the rules he learned for sounding out words.

When this has come up in the past, all I've been able to do is acknowledge his argument and explain to him how English has all kinds of weird rules and exceptions, and it's the kind of thing you remember with experience using the words. Like, there is no new rule to learn, and you don't have to freak out about remembering all these exceptions. It will just come with time. (Because we all know there's nothing that kids like more than olds telling them to just wait or give it time, lol)

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I imagine they'd rather go further back down the literacy tree to where only the priesthood and nobility could read.

Lucky us, they're one in the same now!

1

that was a fun fact! but I think it's ok if one word has multiple meanings

1

English is basically three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat

6

Even if you have heard an English word before, you're probably still pronouncing it wrong

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FishFacereply
piefed.social

But the point is that the person complaining isn't complaining about the French, but about some imagined English dude who picked the pronunciation of rendezvous for fun

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sh.itjust.works

Fair enough. Then it must have been the same dude who decided all the other words with random pronounciations. If you find them, tell them to go fuck themself.

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English is * the last language that should complain; unfortunately, 54% of the US population has a literacy level below that of a 6th-grade student.

edit: typo

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lemmy.blahaj.zone

What's worse, m*rdering kittens, or posting things that would offend advertisers?

And now, for our sponsors:

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things that would offend advertisers?

Won't someone think of the shareholders! 😭

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hey, VoteNixon just ran over it, Firefly is the one that brought it into the world and threw it into traffic :)

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This guy absolutely destroys pussy

EDIT: I don't know why I worded it like that but I stand by it.

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rumbareply
lemmy.zip

I love this

Because god forbid someone reposts an image here from Reddit that had been censored. what a travisty :)

Strangest fucking hill to die on.

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lemmy.world

The original uncensored version took three seconds on TinEye.com to find.

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rumbareply
lemmy.zip

Again, who cares enough to bother?

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rumbareply
lemmy.zip

ehh, let the votes sort em out :)

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I vote for "a big giant astroid to end it all"

........what? Are we not discussing how who we're going to vote for in 2028?

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Wait wait wait wait.........I'm pretty good at catching things. You're saying I could get a drive by kitten adoption? That sounds super fast, efficient, and then I'd have a kitten on my way home from work!

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We must self censor. To comply with the shitfeed updoots.

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X
piefed.world

Pretty sure it was the Swedish who decided the pronunciation of “rendezvous”. Kinda obvious, really.

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When some of them had one[1] with with some of the French?

[1: A rendezvous]

1
sh.itjust.works

Us Germans also use this word, but where I come from, we pronounce it RANG-deh-WUH.

Beautiful.

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english readers will reads this as räng de wah xD

rung de voo i would pronounce it ron de voo tho

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lemmy.today

To be fair, usually when a language adopts a new word from other languages, they start spelling it in there own fashion. English is unusual in that they use the original spelling.

14

French in particular gets a lot of words with original spellings because it used to be the language of the courts in England.

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thisreply
sh.itjust.works

Not always, the word skosh(meaning just a little bit or a tiny amount) comes from the Japanese word sukoshi(少し), but that can probably be attributed to the language not generally using romanized letters.

It's a very interesting word to me since its one of the very few words that migrated from Japanese to English and isn't a name of something. The way it came over is also rather interesting, as it was through collaboration between US and Japanese soldiers during the Korean war.

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lemmy.world

I think kawaii is in the process of being absorbed, though I've mostly seen it in more weeby areas of the internet, so hard to say for sure.

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Dozzi92reply
lemmy.world

My favorite are British English, who can't stand the French to the point that they say things like filet with a hard T.

This also reminds me of a recent trip to Colorado, where they do the same thing with Spanish words, anglicizing all of them. Salida (sa-LIE-da) is the first one that's coming to mind, but I know there are other cities in Colorado that are clearly Spanish words that they've just abused.

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People from Nevada make a point of pronouncing their state different than the Spanish word

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No no a Mongolian is a personal who lives in the Mongol region north of China. She called you a Mongoose

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No no a Mongoose is a small carnivorous animal. She called you a Monologue.

5

Not to long ago, I was mourning the loss of the Conversatron 3000. It was a forum site that was nothing but comedy writers, using the medium to tell a flavor of joke and observational humor that could only work on that medium. A lot of it had this formula of "dumb question/observation", "dumber retort", "setup", and finally "witty punchline." Sometimes, that would just thread on for multiple rounds. Rarely, threads were open to user comments too.

Now I understand why that hasn't come back. We don't need it anymore.

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lemmy.world

One of the funniest aspects of Detroit is how bastardized all the French street names are pronounced by locals. Gratiot, Dequindre, Livernois come to mind but there are too many examples.

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We got some fun ones by me too, like Ausable river, that comes from French. But we pronounce it Ah-sable(but sable like a sable hair brush)

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MF somehow can’t deal with this but probably pronounces “lieutenant” the French way.

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lemmy.world

I miss 1919. Just after the great war, not yet into prohibition or the great depression.

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