What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by BunScientist@lemmy.zip))
Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:
- A fruit preserve
- Traffic that’s stopped
- To play music
- A door that won’t open
- A difficult situation
- To force something in somewhere it’s not supposed to be
- To interrupt a signal
- Something you don’t like or can’t do (“that’s not my jam”)
And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.
The other English thing I find super interesting is how there’s a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say “The big old red wooden door” it works as a description, but if I say “The wooden old red big door” it sounds weird even though it’s the same information. People aren’t usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.
Would be interested in more about the order - wondering if there is a name for that? I have been called out by teachers and friends and colleagues about strange sentences and it was often because I wouldn’t write the ‘normal’ way. I’ve learned the conventions over the years and often find myself making edits to swap words and phrases around to meet expectations.
Apparently it’s called the Royal Order of Adjectives, and it’s essentially: determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, qualifier.
You don’t have to use all of those in the description, but that’s broadly the order to use them in to make it sound ‘right’. So for example in the comment I made above, it fits because I used:
- determiner (The)
- size (big)
- age (old)
- colour (red)
- material (wooden)
in that order. I’m sure I was never taught that in any organized way (I just had to look up what it was called lol) but I still got it in the right order anyway just by typing it out in the way that felt right, which I think is interesting.
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:
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)
And the alarm goes off means it actually starts ringing. Weird language indeed!
And this might just be a UK thing but if a person goes off it means they get really angry. And it can mean to leave for somewhere.
So a firework goes off which makes the fire alarm go off which makes the safety officer go off. Then he goes off to get a fireman. But he leaves the milk out, so it goes off.
Also sanction and sanction, same word but completely opposite meanings.
Pitted olives got me in a similar fashion.
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.
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.
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
I before E, except after C!
As long as you don’t count the word caffeine. Or protein. Or species. Or seize or heinous or leisure or weird or feign or their or reignite or any of the other 923 words that are exceptions to this rule lol.
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…
Ah, thanks for the reminder to look through some TNG again. Data is such a great character and fills the role of the outsider looking in perfectly.
Plus he’s a sex toy, which is cool. If peak Denise Crosby wanted to find out if I was fully functional, I might bust a hydraulic hose right there.
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 meta aspect of ‘shit’ has to be up there.
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.
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?
And that’s one of the sounds “ou” can make.
- there’s “ou” as in bought
- there’s “ou” as in house
- there’s “ou” as in touch
- there’s “ou” as in group
- there’s “ou” as in boulder
- there’s “ou” as in famous
- there’s “ou” as in tour
Inglish speling iz stoopid.
Me too, thanks!
I found it! https://www.exocomics.com/193/
Nice! Thank you
I’ve never been a fan of read/read/red They’re too popular to all be comingled like that.
Just place read/read with Peruse/Perused
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
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
“well” is a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an interjection
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.
Ils sont fous, ces Français.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch
Are you talking about Johannes Gutenberg?
What I get from this is that if those English idiots had stuck to French, we wouldn’t have this mess.
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.
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
Words that produce the same sounds should have same spelling. Read in past tense and red is the same sound, so why isn’t past tense of read - red?
Why most ‘c’ in words produce ‘k’ sounds?
Car and kar also produce the same sounds, so why C instead of K?
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
99% agree with this. This is a native speaker issue, except where someone took up bad habits from the natives…
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 see 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
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.
This one has also bothered me because I pronounce all three of these differently.
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.
