'Read' and its past tense are spelled the same. How should they be spelled?
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Lead and lead as well. I got a lead on those lead undergarments you wanted. I'll lead you there later.
wrote last edited by [email protected]How did I get to the lead merchant? I was led here. But in the price negotiation, I took the lead.
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What? The e is just silent.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The French word for goose is Oie, pronounced "ua"
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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.
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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.How about we go with reed and red... see, you already know how to pronounce them!
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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 -
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
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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.We should be consistent and say "readed". While we're on the subject, why isn't the past tense of go "goed"?
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And the alarm goes off means it actually starts ringing. Weird language indeed!
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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.
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The conjugations can get as weird as English sometimes, though. Case in point: Ser.
wrote last edited by [email protected]"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"
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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.
