'Read' and its past tense are spelled the same. How should they be spelled?
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On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced "Redding". This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).
Little details, picked up along the way.
Reading is a place itself, the football club is the club for that place
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Yup. Blame the Normans.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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What dialect of English will we base the new spelling system on?
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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We should be consistent and say "readed". While we're on the subject, why isn't the past tense of go "goed"?
Be the change you want to see. Making people cringe as bonus!
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What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/) (I couldn't find the link to the actual comic)
Edit: it's to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.English has so much of this sort of nonsense. Like the fish can be spelled ghoti thing.
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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)
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The French word for goose is Oie, pronounced "ua"
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.
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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.
You pronounce the middle syllable as "me"?
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We should be consistent and say "readed". While we're on the subject, why isn't the past tense of go "goed"?
We should be consistent and say “readed”.
But you should still pronounce it redded.
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And German has a word for it: Blei
Bly in Swedish. But we add some weirdness to the Bly part so a "lead pencil" is blyertspenna ("penna" meaning pencil). I can't think of another word where that specific addiction is used, and I have no idea what it means.
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Reading is a place itself, the football club is the club for that place
Next you're going to tell me there are places in the UK named Manchester and Liverpool and Notts County and St Johnstone and Celtic and Rangers and Port Vale.
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English has so much of this sort of nonsense. Like the fish can be spelled ghoti thing.
Except that "gh" is never pronounced "f" at the start of a word and "ti" is never "sh" at the end. The "o" is perfectly correct, though. Phosh.
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Bly in Swedish. But we add some weirdness to the Bly part so a "lead pencil" is blyertspenna ("penna" meaning pencil). I can't think of another word where that specific addiction is used, and I have no idea what it means.
I've looked it up and "blyerts" means "black lead, graphite" from German "Bleierz" (lead-ore).
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We should be consistent and say “readed”.
But you should still pronounce it redded.
But then it would get confused with "redead" which could be detrimental when dealing with necromancers.
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What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/) (I couldn't find the link to the actual comic)
Edit: it's to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.what if we just change the past tense to red? simpler?
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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.
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it's means "it is". It is really not difficult, just pretend you are Data and swear off contractions.
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.
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what if we just change the past tense to red? simpler?
Make it
redd
, to easily distinguish from the color. -
Make it
redd
, to easily distinguish from the color.wrote last edited by [email protected]The irony with using Connect is that the text for "redd" being done in code format makes it red.
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On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced "Redding". This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).
Little details, picked up along the way.
It's pronounced "Redding" Railroad?? All those times I sang "Take a look, it's in a book, Reading Railroad!" were a lie!