Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot… English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That’s why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)…
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn’t make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn’t exactly help with this mess… but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers’ part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers…
Yep I’m learning Japanese and hate how they spell “maccha” as “matcha” in English because the English one doesn’t sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct
Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot… English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That’s why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)…
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn’t make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn’t exactly help with this mess… but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers’ part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers…
+1 for the interrobang
Yep I’m learning Japanese and hate how they spell “maccha” as “matcha” in English because the English one doesn’t sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct