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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_e

Cognitive dissonance on the more accurate name of “Ignored e”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

Record a record? Convict a convict? What an annoying concept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_leveling

At least irregular verbs are drifting away, that’s a pleasant surprise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisyllabic_laxing

fotograffy > fuhtawgruhfee I’ll die on this hill

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

You know what bugs me the most?

  • island - with a fake etymological "s" that was never pronounced. Compare it with German "Eiland".
  • people - you got to borrow French "peuple", then change that "u" into "o" for cosmetic purposes.
  • chaos - because you got to plop an etymological "h", except conventionally the way to transcribe Greek /kʰ/→/χ/ is "kh" instead. But no, you need to disguise that /k/ as /tʃ/.
  • spamming a diacritic (apostrophe) to highlight elided sounds, but not using it to solve small orthographical quirks. It would solve the first two issues you're complaining about - compare "mate" (bro) with "yerba matë", "I record it" vs. "the recórd".

[/old man screams at the clouds rant]

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

You're about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You're gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

[kʰ] or [χ], both end as /k/ [kʰ] in English anyway. But it feels weird that people insist on that etymological ⟨ch⟩ as if "English got it from Latin" was more important than "it's ultimately from Greek".

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

On thinking it over, "proper" spelling of foreign words has done its own share of damage to English spelling. We don't just have to learn our own spelling conventions, we also have to learn foreign ones. Or not (sent to you from Cairo, Illinois, locally pronounced "care-oh")

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Frankly, I agree. I'm perhaps biased because of Italian, but I think etymology doesn't belong to the spelling; a consistent and dialect-agnostic set of rules that allows you to predict how to spell and pronounce a word is far more important.

In special I never understood why English obtusely sticks to the double spelling standard, native (as in /gɪf/) vs. Romance+Classical (as in /dʒɪf/).

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

It'll be part of the great English spelling reform. Until then, it's going to be spelled the way we Romanized Greek in the 16th century.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Oh I’m in good company, this is my kinda rant 🤙

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Wow, I guess this is like UK schoolhouse rock? Not bad

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I think I get the general gist of Morphological Leveling, but I don't understand Ablaut Leveling

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ablaut is a feature in Indo European languages where the vowel sound of a root changes for different forms of a word. An example from English: "sing" is conjugated to "sang" and "sung". Ablaut leveling would be losing the distinction between the vowels in different forms of the same word.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

When we fix the irregular verb sing we will create a new heteronym between singed-as-past-of-sing and singed-as-past-of-singe 🫠

this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
48 points (94.4% liked)

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