Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language

  • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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    6 months ago

    I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly.

    There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo, if you people haven’t added a sixth one since the last time I looked.

    Radii, fiancé, and façade are apparently perfectly cromulent English words that native English speakers who’ve never seen an ii, an é, or a ç are supposed to be able to pronounce correctly…

    Your words for food animals come from completely different and unrelated languages depending on whether the animal is alive or dead (since the people who tended to the farms and the people who actually ate their meat spoke different languages)…

    There are probably more irregular verbs than regular ones… (again, probably because of English really being three different languages in a trenchcoat)…

    At some point in the sixteenth century you apparently just up and decided to randomly switch the pronunciation of all your vowels… without changing how you wrote them

    While most languages have developed some form of standard and regulative body, English seems like it’d rather leave the whole grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and whatnot situation as an exercise for the victim speaker, writer, or reader

    Yeah, no, not particularly broken at all… 😒

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo

      That’s a good thing. Vowels are enormous in the range of ways they can be pronounced. Any vowel can become any other vowel before it’s done being pronounced, and then you can chain that effect. You can tell where people are from by their vowels. Vowels convey analog information whereas consonants convey digital. Vowels therefore have bandwidth to carry extra information. And so not only do we have lots of vowel pair sequences with their own rules for pronunciation, we have tons of rules for how surrounding consonants change those vowels. And then finally we have all sorts of cultural understandings about how altered vowels indicate mood and intent.

      It’s good we don’t try to pretend there are only a handful of vowels.

      • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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        6 months ago

        That’s a good thing.

        Nah, man. That’s the abused justifying the abuser. That’s pure Stockholm syndrome.

        There’s no world in which the oos in moon, book, door, blood, brooch, and cooperation (I had forgotten about this one. There are six. SIX! 😩) representing SIX different sounds is a good thing. There simply isn’t.

        A sane language would replace some of those with u, ø, ō, ô, ö, õ, whatever, make some rule so that the poor sod attempting to decipher the written word could begin to know how to pronounce it… but not English. Not English. 😞

        • WIZARD POPE💫@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Are there any other words that have it though? Also if the english spelling were consistent you would not need the dieresis

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.