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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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.
“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
Yes English is tough, though through practice comes understanding.
Is “hiccough” pronounced the same as “hiccup?” Because if it is, I’m gonna have to put that in the same category as “colonel.”
There’s an interesting history behind why colonel is spelled and pronounced how it is…
https://www.deseret.com/1996/8/4/19258272/french-italian-roots-explain-why-colonel-has-an-r-sound
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word’s history. The French word “coronel” is derived from the Italian word “colonnello.” When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first “l” sound to an “r” sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two “l” sounds or two “r” sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration “dissimilation.”
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter “r” was changed back to an “l,” making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
Spanish in Mexico gets weird with the X:
Mexico - Mejico
Xochimilco - Sochimilco
Mexica - Mechica
Necaxa - Necaksa
