What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by [email protected]))
Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
My wife and I had a good snicker one time when I brought home edamame peas in the shell.
They were shelled, but she wanted them shelled.
Flammable/imflammable is another one that comes to mind.
As carved into history by Dr. Nick:
Also sanction and sanction, same word but completely opposite meanings.
Pitted olives got me in a similar fashion.
And the alarm goes off means it actually starts ringing. Weird language indeed!
English has many contronyms.
- Clip: to attach (clip X to Y) or detach (clip coupons)
- Dust: to remove dust or to add it (dust the cake with icing sugar)
- Fine: excellent (fine wine) or not great but decent (it’s fine)
- Left: remaining (I have 5 left) or gone (I had some but they left)
- Oversight: supervision (he had oversight over the whole process) or lack of supervision (I forgot to do that, it was an oversight)
Just remember
Pretty sure the past tense of “lead” is actually “led.”
Unless of course you’re referring to the type of metal, lead, which I guess the meme isn’t clear on.
Pretty sure there’s a chemical element named “lead”
I heard lead leads in weight.
Interesting if true.
And German has a word for it: Blei
That would explain why a pencil, which contains a “lead” (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift
Some call it differently because it doesn’t contain lead anymore but Bleistift is still the common name
It’s not saying anything about past tenses in that meme, it’s just saying that each word has two different pronunciations that rhyme with the other.
What’s not clear? It’s written right there!
It’s all about led vs lēd.
I had to look this up.
And today I learned ALL my brit friends are spelling it wrong. That’s more than two!
Brits aren’t “spelling it wrong” any more than those in the US are. It’s just cultural differences. Do you also claim Germans spell things wrong? Or the Chinese?
Also the language is called English. By default, the English are doing it right and anything else is wrong. Maybe better, the argument can go for decades longer, but if anyones wrong its everyone else.
My point is no one is wrong. Well, you are, but not for the way you spell things.
Bought, caught, taught, fought, thought, sought, and wrought are all past tense verbs and all rhyme. The present tense forms are buy, catch, teach, fight, think, seek, and work, none of which rhyme.
Me too, thanks!
Spanish is awesome. All its verbs in their regular form do end in “-ar”, “-er” and “-ir”.
The conjugations can get as weird as English sometimes, though. Case in point: Ser.
“Me voy a ir yendo” can translate into “I’m leaving”, but it is funny because you are using three times, in spanish, the same verb.
Edit: I play with it and as a prank sometimes I translate it like if it were a chain of “going to”. “I’m going to going to to”
“que sera sera” es un ejemplo.
How is that weird, as (nearly?) the only regular form of this verb?
It’s “its,” by the way.
This is the grammar thing I fuck up the most, and I don’t call people on it because I’m pretty sure I don’t know how it works. Autocorrect changes it & I just say “oh, whoops”, and it still looks wrong…
it’s means “it is”. It is really not difficult, just pretend you are Data and swear off contractions.
I think the contraction vs possesive thing messes with me, and my brain can never settle on what goes where when, how, or why…
Just try changing it to “it is”. If the sentence still makes sense, it’s “it’s”. Otherwise it’s “its”.
Here’s a shortcut: test if you could drop “his” into the same spot and have it make sense. (And of course you’d never write hi’s or his’s.) If “his” would work, “its” would work.
My keyboard is very keen on completing “it’s” regardless of context. I imagine this is the case for most people, since usually I see “it’s” when “its” would be correct.
I also think it’s difficult to know that “it’s” is wrong to use because it feels like it follows the common apostrophe for possession rule:
“Australia’s capital is Canberra” -> “Australia is the largest country in Oceania. It’s capital is Canberra.” (wrong, but intuitive)
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
…Very long. Highly recommended
It’s because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England’s first one didn’t know how it worked and neither did any English speaker
So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.
And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.
Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn’t speak English made choices to change it
No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.
But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.
Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.
Anyways, that’s why English doesn’t make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.
This also occurred in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, a period when spoken English pronunciation was changing significantly.
Yep…
There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.
I missed that, my bad.
It certainly doesn’t help 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.
A French. The language where you have 5 wovels, use 3 for the word goose and the other 2 to pronounce it.
What? The e is just silent.
The French word for goose is Oie, pronounced “ua”
It’s really not. Maybe if you pronounce an English ‘u’, but not a French one. Source: I’m French Canadian.
If you look at an IPA chart, you can see how going from /i/ to /e/ to /a/ is a process of the vowel becoming more and more “open” over time (said with the mouth wider and wider).
In Quebec, the vowel shift that caused “oi” to have a /wa/ sound didn’t fully happen. So, the word “moi” is often pronounced more like /mwe/ or /mwɛ/. But “oiseau” (bird) is still pronounced with a /wa/.
The modern French pronunciation of the Loire river /lwaʁ/ influences the English pronunciation /lwɑːr/. But, other languages use a spelling that matches the French but have a different pronunciation. In Italian and Spanish it’s Loira. The Latin name was Liger. So, it used to have a /i/ pronunciation before the vowel shift.
tl;dr: modern French pronunciation vs spelling is just about as bad as English.
What I get from this is that if those English idiots had stuck to French, we wouldn’t have this mess.
More like if the French royalty hadn’t conquered England…
England hasn’t been ruled by the English for centuries bro
Yup. Blame the Normans.
When people shit on the English, it’s usually for stuff a small group of French royalty/oligarchs were doing. And they were doing bad shit to the actual English too.
Like the joke about “robbed the world for spices, used zero”.
The royalty 100% used all the fancy spices and sold them to their cousins in mainland Europe. But the common Englishman sure as fuck couldn’t afford them.
The most shit we should be giving the common English, is for not following the common French’s example
Oh god, we’d be stuck with all those silent letters
On the other hand, you seldom have the issue of having no clue how something is pronounced because you’ve only ever seen it written. So it balances out.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch
Are you talking about Johannes Gutenberg?
“Read” and “readed.”
Present: read Past: red (in the fediverse), redd (on the old site)
Obvious.
“It has been red”.
So was the text red or has the text been read?
Both. How do you know it was red when you have not red it? Someone must have red it to state it’s red.
I can’t reed
Where, were, we’re. Even native speakers have problems with this. I don’t know how many times I had to correct such cases, especially with American authors.
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this, I see this type of mistake far less frequently with those who learned English as an additional language.
Exactly. People with English as a second language go from meaning to writing. Native speakers go from sound to writing.
There, their, they’re is something native speakers confuse as well. I have only ever observed native speaker write should of instead of should‘ve or should have.
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this
That makes no sense since they would use it more, however native speakers from the US do have problems with it, and other words (they’re/their).
Rarely encounter it with others.
Their spelling is embarrassing, same as their very limited vocabulary. IDK what they do in schools.Native speakers acquire the language before learning to read. Remember, writing is a representation of spoken language not the other way round.
No it is. People were speaking for tens of thousands of years before they started writing. Modern people wee the written word as more valid than spoken, but it’s a historical quirk that words pronounced identically should be spelled differently in English. Words that are spelled differently in English were once pronounced differently as well, but languages change and our spelling system is frozen in the 1600s.
Modern people are the written word as more valid than spoken
Now there’s a sentence I can’t make sense of.
There is no influence of history in when kids learn to write their language or if they used it orally, they learn to write it then how it’s supposed to be written.
If your reasons were valid every Anglo would have problems, they don’t.
Since it’s noticably the US specifically I can only assume it’s sub standard education.
As confirmed by their poor vocabulary compared to other Anglo’s
That is still not a valid reason.
It’s true that I see it more rarely with the British. I suppose they read more or something.
Possibly, education is my main guess
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this
99% agree with this. This is a native speaker issue, except where someone took up bad habits from the natives…
I pronounce these all differently though? [wɛɹ], [wəɹ] and [wiɹ]
Maybe, yes, but as someone who has seen tons of unedited writings, I can tell you those mixup as common as muck.
Where, were, we’re.
I never had a problem with those, until I started with stuff like Reddit.
Now, I find myself making the mistake and catching it in proofreading.
Guess my brain is starting to age too.This one has also bothered me because I pronounce all three of these differently.
Fast can mean moving with great speed or fixed securely in place (among other things).
The alarm went off so i turned it off.
My ally turned on me and then I turned her on
Lead and lead as well. I got a lead on those lead undergarments you wanted. I’ll lead you there later.
How did I get to the lead merchant? I was led here. But in the price negotiation, I took the lead.
“Read” is spelled s-a-m-e? English is a weird language.
Wait until you hear about how we pronounce colonel!
We pronounce it the same as the linux colonel.
Good old Colonel Angus!
What about parmesan?
Well I say that like it’s spelled. I don’t make the zh sound at the end of that’s what you’re referencing. I know some do though.
Reed and Red
Reed, red. Homophones should be homographs too.
What dialect of English will we base the new spelling system on?
Transatlantic English
All of them. If you speak some weird rural UK accent you spell it differently. And certain people from New York, for example, spell curl as coil.
I think this would be the same in RP as it is in most American-ish accents, though.
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
