Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "RobWords"
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For all that a decent amount of French entered English with the Norman invasion, the vast bulk of it (and of the Latin you'll find there also, that part that hadn't already entered long since via the church, or Roman influence on the Germanic peoples) showed up in later centuries when French was the language of the nobility from one end of Europe to the other, and thus a 'prestige' language that people used to show off how fancy they were (as well as being quite useful if one was traveling). Likewise much of the Latin comes from scientific endevours, where a combination of the prominence of religious institutions in early scientific advancement and the need for a common language (and it's nature as a mostly 'dead' language offering quite a lot of advantages in this role) saw it become another prestige language, showing off one's education and (pretense to) intellect.
I can't help but imagine that the result would be less the loss of long, complicated words that are clearly thought of as French or Latin in origin today, and more the loss of the simple, basic ones people don't think about much, such as 'beef' and the like.
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Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once...
And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further.
Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
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It is worth pointing out that, if you're not going to elaborate, you Should respond to negative questions in English in the same way: Yes for the speaker's statement being correct, and no for it being incorrect.
Mind you, it is generally considered better to elaborate to avoid confusion, and when you do that the yes/no element behaves differently (I forget the explaination for what's actually going on there), and the rest of what you say is the acutal answer.
Of course, if you're somewhat aware of the grammar and reasonably considerate of others you also avoid asking quesitons in the negative in the first place when speaking English, because most people are sufficiently ignnorant about such matters that they will not respond in line with the above, and you will be left with no idea what they actually meant and have to ask for further clarification, restating the question and getting them to restate the answer, causing further confusion and delay, so it's best avoided in general.
Not that one is taught any of this, generally. In fact, in primary school we were actively taught to ask questions in the negative and other such tricks so as to force the other party to actually give more than single word answers or the like, the idea being that it facilitated conversation (a blunt 'yes' or 'no' will cause a conversation to stall out because it leaves the other party with nothing to respond to.) ... which is great when the idea is to keep a conversation going, not so much when you want useful and actionable information so you can get on with things.
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@adamcetinkent See, your problem there is your willingness or not to accept a thing which exists.
It is an informal register of a specific dialect.
Now, it may not be apropriate or sensible to use a given register and/or dialect in a given context (and those who insist that we should not teach children how to speak a standard dialect and formal register As Well As their local dialect, the informal register they use with their ingroups, and whatever technical dialect they end up picking up from their education and employment, are best ignored (for want of willingness to put in the effort of writing multiple extra paragraphs on the matter), but that's an entirely different matter from rejecting them as valid in the correct context.
The issue isn't that people can, and do, use slang or various dialects among the appropriate ingroup. It's the people who are incapable of speaking in more standard and formal registers than needed (and those who would suppress attempts to impart this skill to them) as it makes it much more difficult for them to communicate with others, and thus to actually represent their interests when those Outside their ingroup get involved. (which is to say, refusing to actually teach proper standard dialect and formal register can be just as effective a tool at suppressing a group as actually supressing their langauge/dialect/whatever. Arguably more effective if you're willing to play the long game.)
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English does, in fact, have rules, at least as much as any language does.
Unfortunately, we Also have many decades, possibly even centuries, of tradition of teaching utter nonsense instead of the actual rules of the actual language.
A few decades back people who actually knew what they were talking about realised this and, having gathered enough evidence to prove it, convinced the educational systems in much of the English speaking world to basically toss the lot, keeping only a very few provable useful basics while they spent several more decades nailing down the Actual rules and, with much more difficulty, the best way to go about teaching them.
From what I hear, many American schools kept right on teaching what amounted to half remembered fragments of style guides which weren't great at their intended role (One of the most popular of which is infamous for violating its own rules in the text describing them, or in text used as an example of how to correctly follow a different rule) of allowing one to pretend that one could pass for a member of the upper classes when they were published many decades before, nevermind teach children basic langauge skills in the class room.
I'm not sure on the current state of the project to create an actually Useful ciriculum teaching English as it actually works, though to my understanding there has been progress made.
I have a book from the time when such things came with a second copy of the same work on CD (to facilitate the use of a search engine and other useful tools) that's almost a thousand pages long that is an actual structured and accurate reference guide to, well, basically English Grammar, based on how people actually speak (at least when speaking the more standard dialects).
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@berryesseen ... For reference, the V and W sounds are so imediately and obviously different to speakers of most English dialects that the inability to make the distinction was traditionally seen as a speech imediment (or an overly pretentious affectation, depending on what was going on in the upper classes at the time), if less so than people who were unable to distinguish R from W.
For added bonus points, W is decidedly non-standard in how one forms the sound. Phonetically it doesn't actually even fit on the consonant table properly, because the table has 'how is the airflow obstructed' on one axis and 'how far back, forward in the mouth is the airflow obstructed' on the other... and W (and a very small subset of globally MUCH rarer other sounds) is formed by obstructing the airflow in two places at once. Neither of which are the same point at which it is obstructed to form a V.
V is the voiced form of F. F and W sounds have nothing in common, and the only thing that V and W have in common (voicing, that is, vibrating the vocal cords) they also share with B,D,G,Z,J, and several others.
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@mymo_in_Bb Scrapping C entirely is a bad idea indeed, yes. But there's a solid argument for using it only where we currently use ch, and then actually writing z rather than s where z is meant and s rather than c when s is meant.
Whether it's actually worth the effort or not is a different story, of course.
As for G... well, it's worse and more easily solved, as half the time it's g as it shoudl be, and the other half it is j... though I'm sure this would then occasionally cause ambiguity with j, given it is sometimes read as y... quite a bit less though (mostly in foreign words that have resisted anglicisation for lack of common use).
Q is an interesting one. It actually makes a different sound from k... but that there is no k/q minimal pair in English (save for foreign proper nouns). English speakers mostly can't actually pronounce a k sound in the places where we write q... but also can't pronunce a q sound in the places where we write k (again, mostly)... but also mostly can't tell the difference between the two sounds (which have different IPA characters, mind you), and don't enounciate the distinction particularly well.
Which is to say there's a perfectly reasonable argument regarding why Q is there... but also an argument at least as solid that it's existence is pointless and we should get rid of it.
As always, the main issue is less the change itself, and more that the prople proposing it don't know about and/or understand the knock on effects and have thus put no effort into handling the consequences there-of.
(sort of like the various ideologically corrupted twits who keep insisting on trying to force changes to how others speak in the (incorrect) belief that it will somehow advance the cause of their ideology... but can't be arsed to understand how the language actually works Before their change and consequently just cause problems for everyone that mostly serve to create opposition to their goals where none previously existed).
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@nolongerlistless English only actually has one pair of words where the difference between voiced and unvoiced th makes any difference: "thigh and thy". And the latter of the two is an archaic second person possessive pronoun that no one actually uses except for humour value or to sound 'fancy' (which tends to backfire as it's almost never used correctly) or when quoting the bible or Shakespere... and even then only certain, old, translations of the bible.
And at this point Shakespere is basically incomprehensible to most people without translation anyway, far too many of the words have long since fallen out of use, just to start with.
In all other contexts, while using the wrong reading of TH will make you sound odd, it's still perfectly comprehensible and causes no confusion... Exactly the same as L, which English also actually has two sounds for (which way you pronunce it is dictated by where it is in the word), but it doesn't even have an equivalent to the thy/thigh contrast, so no one ever considers that relevant... except speakers of other langues that either only use one L sound consistently or actually DO contrast the two sounds, to whom that particular quirk showing up when someone is speaking their langauge is a pretty big sign that the speaker's native langauge is English.
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The answer is that Japanese doesn't have an L, and has a very different R from English's R...
Japanese R is formed in a manner very close to (but not the same as) English D (it doesn't sound like one, exactly, but it also doesn't sound like an English R, really)... It is Not the same sound as English R, but it IS the closest sound Japanese has to an English L.
It's a bit of a mess but basically?
Japanese has an R, it doesn't have an L. Most Japanese speakers struggle to hear the difference between English L and English R. So depending on what they're doing, they'll either write 'r' regardless (if its intended for other Japanese speakers to be able to easily read and say it), more make a best attempt at the correct one (if actually trying to speak English) with highly mixed results if they know which one it's supposed to be... or if they Don't know which one it's supposed to be (having not seen the word written down and, remember, quite possibly not being able to hear the distinction), just flat out Guessing.
(for reference, there are a lot of native English speakers who, for various reasons, just flat out can't hear the difference between 'th' and 'f' (or the Other 'th' and 'v'). Sometimes due to hearing problems, sometimes just because they grew up in an area where the distinction Doesn't Exist and so never learned to hear the distinction (you'd think television would help on that front, but apparently not?). You get quite similar results. Likewise English speakers trying to learn languages with meaningful tone distinctions.)
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To my recollection, Most homographs are words where the two options are different parts of speech (noun vs verb, for example), and as a result have different stress patterns, and the change in stress is what causes them to be said differently. Marking the stress would deal with those ones.
Of course of the remainder, if I recall correctly at lest, some of the most commonly encountered ones are just flat out irrelgular word forms (read vs read, for example).
And then, of course, there's the Homophones (sound the same despite being spelled differently) and the homonyms (words that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but mean completely different things). Arguably having a bunch of homophones and homographs is at least sort of better than having more homonyms.
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Naturally, as is so very common with these things, no attempt to address the vowels (we write them using five-ish characters. Depending on dialect and how you count, English has anywhere from 10 to 20 vowels. The problem should be obvious), and no concern for the ability to actually write the blasted thing quickly (a large part of the reason why the lower case letters are the way they are, though not the entirity of it). And little concern for why words are spelled the way they are (and thus what changes would need to be made to support the substitutions), though it's possible I just mised those if they were present, as I was somewhat distracted at some points.
There's a reason why Conlang communities generally have Very mixed opinions on English spelling reforms (basically: it's where a lot of people start out, so no one wants to discourage it, really, but they're also almost universally awful when you start actually considering the practicalities, because they tend to ignore an awful lot of factors that are very relevant to creating a usable orthography, nevermind one you can actually get people to adopt.)
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Might want to talk to certain portions of the more radical leftists in your society. Though it might perhaps be more accurate to call them a language mafia. And then they manage to Export their nonsense.
Not to say the Right doesn't have its own share of Incredibly Stupid ideas when it comes to language, just that they're much less successful at codifying and exporting them. (This is mostly a lack of skill in marketing, mind you.)
And its not like other countries (my own included) don't have their own elements that pull the same nonsense, because they Absolutely Do. They're just prone to importing America's as well. And almost with out fail, imported or home grown, it's ideological propaganda the whole way down (regardless of which ideology) that doesn't make a single scrap of sense if you actually Know Anything about English, Linguistics, or History. But, given that the sorts of people who get up to such nonsense are targeting primarily the ignorant, and generally don't actually care about any aspect of the thing other than that it advances the ideology they perport to represent in ways that advance their own power and influence, well, to expect otherwise may well be expecting too much.
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Sort of. The thing is though, isntances where they 'say their name' are significantly less common than instances where they Don't, so it's more practical to mark the less common one.
More of a problem is that this specific quirk of English orthography is actually completely divorced from acutal vowel length (that is, whether a vowel is 'long' or 'short' outside of an English language primary school classroom). Many of the so-called 'long' vowels are actually shorter than the supposed 'short' vowels in terms of how long they're held for... and most of them are actually diphthongs rather than straight vowels to begin with.
And then there's English's Actually long vowels, of which there's a couple that are just long sounds (they don't contrast with a short one other than reducing to schwa sometimes), and an awful lot that are 'the vowel after a voiced stop in one of the Many dialects (most of them, to varying degrees) where the 'voiced vs unvoiced' contrast is actually something of a lie, and they're instead 'unvoiced vs aspirated'... except s before the stop at the start of a syllable suppresses the aspiration and causes confusion, as the p in 'spot' is closer to the b in 'bot' than it is the p in 'pot' in those dialects, while the o in 'pot' is short and the o in 'bot' is long. Because the voiced consonants are still voiced... Kind of... the voicing just starts right at the End of the sound rather than the Start of it, so ends up more attached to the vowel (all English vowels are voiced, as a rule) than the consonant, making it seem like you started the vowel earlier, and thus held it longer... '
yay sound change?
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@pleappleappleap In Australia and New Zealand, Linked Italics have completely replaced cursive. The advantages are extensive. It's almost as fast (most people add their own extra linking flourishes here and there that pretty much eliminate the difference without losing any clarity (poor handwritting is poor handwritting regardless, of course) and actually mutually intelligable with every other way of writing the language, unlike full cursive (where most of the letters are indistinguishable from w and the bulk of the rest have nothing in common with how they appear in any other font/typeface/writing system/whatever), not to mention actually developing out of 'printing' when one is learning it, rather than, again, being funcitonally an entirely different script.
Ok, to be fair, my 90-something year old Grandmother still writes in cursive (Which basically no one my age can actually read) and I wouldn't be surprised to find any future nieces and nephews basically writing only in 'printing' or 'scribble' as a result of how little use most people have for writing sigificant amounts of text by hand these days, but in between those two extremes, linked italics are the rule.
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Q and K are actually not formed the same way in the mouth, due to the W (written U) after the Q... but the sounds come out so similar that the distinction is a bit pointless.
G making a J sound: blame the french.
X: yeah, there's really no good reason for keeping this one other than how much of a pain changing it would be, because it's always read 'eks'... except when it's xy, in which case the combination reads 'zi'.
The C, on the other hand, is actually both more reasonable and more of a mess than most people think.
using SC instead of SS where SS is expected happens because SS is sometimes ZZ (I have no idea why it is not just Written as ZZ in those situations, mostly because I've put zero effort into finding out), so SC is used when you want to be completely clear that you want an S sound and not a Z sound. (supposedly there's also a third reading for SS, but I never remember what that's all about).
CK replacing most, but not all, instances where one would expect CC or KK is just annoying. There's really no good reason for CK to replace KK other than people being confused about what they're supposed to do, and CC in the middle of a word becoming CK ... I think it's because sometimes you're supposed to pronunce the two Cs seperately, but sometimes it seems to be because someone didn't like the look of sticking a K in the middle of that word. And word final CK is because you're not allowed to end words in C... except when the character immediately before the C is an I, so an extra K gets bolted on the end.
And then, of course, any word ending in 'IC' that is then going to take the suffix "LY" for some reason I don't entirely understand doesn't take "LY" but instead "ALLY"... which of course lead to people deciding (entirely reasonably in light of the other rules/patterns) that the base word ending not in IC (after all, word final C is not permitted) but in ICAL, and taking the standard LY suffix. ... but of course, they only did that with Unfamiliar words. So the words everyone used all the time didn't have that happen, but the ones that were new to a lot of people (even if they became common Later) did have that happen.
If you want something really infuriating, try figuring out the rules for V. It's like if the rules for C were less complicated, but made even less sense. And the only justification for any of it is that in looped cursive script, lower case W and lower case VV are too hard to tell apart. ... except in loose cursive script any string of characters without an ascender, decender, cross piece, or dot on it (and some that should have those but don't because looped cursive is unreasaonable nonsense in its own right) ends up looking like vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv (or rrrrrrr) no matter what you do so I have no idea why they bothered. (There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand ditched it in favour of linked Italics with personal flourishes... I forget when exactly. My grandmother writes in looped cursive, my mother does not (I think she Might be able to, not sure?) but can read it, I can neither write nor read looped cursive. But linked italics is basically as quick to write, and if you can read printed or carved text you can read linked italics (unless the person who wrote it had Particularly bad handwriting) rather than having to learn what amounts to an Entire Additional Character Set!)
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honestly, the one indicating 'long' vowels is misleading and confusing to begin with... if only because the thing it's indicating has nothing to do with the actual vowel length and is more to do with which syllables in a word it is permitted in or not... which is already goverened by the stress marks (for reference, 'long' A, I, O, and U are all diphthongs, and 'long' I in particular is actually a pretty short sound most of the time. 'long' E can be actually long, or actually pretty short, depending on where it is being used, but the length is non-contrasting... except there's the whole issue with the ongoing transition from 'syllable initial voiced stops' to 'syllable initial unvoiced stops followed by long vowels' (note that the now unvoiced stops are still Unaspirated, where as the 'proper' unvoiced ones are actually aspirated As Well, so...)
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well, the macron would probably mislead you a lot, because English 'long' and 'short' vowels... aren't. 'long' vowels are the ones that sound like the name of the letter, 'short' vowels are the ones that don't... most of the 'long' ones are actually diphthongs, the reaminder are more properly short vowels by any other standards, the 'short' vowels can be reduced to schwa (at least mostly), 'long' vowels usually can't, and this results in interactions with the stress pattern regarding where they can and can't appear. And then there's the Other diphthongs, and the sounds represented by digraphs which may be long or short but are neither 'long' nor 'short', the list goes on. Oh, and just to make it worse, English Does actually have a proper length distinction, but nothing about the writen words normally indicates this, as it's usually a result of silly things going on with the surrounding consonents.
But yeah, most of these would be helpful.
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arguably, when they already don't know how to do it is the best time to change the system, then you teach them the new system without them first having to unlearn the old one.
Of course, the actual problem is a combination of bad parenting (sometimes enforced by bad labour laws/practice, or similar indirect causes, sometimes just because the parent is, for want of a better term, unsuitable for the role), and various bad policy that prevents teachers from compensating for that (or, in some cases, Requires that they lower their standards, due to the metric being 'kids passing' or 'parents not complaining about their kids not passing' rather than 'kids actually learning', or otherwise forces poor outcomes for similar reasons. Like the particular batch of idiots trying to claim that the teaching of mathematics to black kids was somehow racist (I give good odds that most people heard about that idea from various propaganda against far more reasonable reform that didn't acutally include it... but I'd also give good odds that the origin of that particular stupid was encountered in the wild rather than fabricated form whole cloth, and either way you can absolutely encounter people in the wild who actually agree with it Now!)
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@lakrids-pibe It's interesting to note that the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written Q (when the word isn't a foreign borrowing that has not yet been fully anglicised) is not actually the same as the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written K. ... largely because the former is always followed by a 'w' sound (written U) while the latter is not (except when someone is playing games and spelling it kw precisely because that's not how it is usually written). English actually forms 'r' sounds several different ways due to similar issues, and has two very different pronunciations of 'l', with which one you get being dicatated by where it is in a word (and thus its interaction with other sounds), with the latter example making for quite a distinct English accent in languages that only have one l pronunciation, or have both but as distinct sounds that can actualy form minimal pairs and are made on purposes rather than just as an incidental result of surrounding sounds.
C is absolutely a confusing mess, but it doesn't need to be.
CH is fairly obviously it's own thing.
The k sound is K, there's really no good reason to write that with a C.
The "rule" about word final C is a bit messy. IC is permitted, but otherwise it must become CK or CE, depending. And of course there's a lot of situations where you should get KK by the standard rules and get CK instead as well, and CE introduces confusion where it looks like the E should modify any vowel before the C but it just... doesn't. Except when it does. (oh, and as an added bonus, most words that ended in IC but took an ALLY suffix where other words would take an LY suffix have changed over time to instead end in ICAL and take the standard LY suffix).
SC is a bit interesting. This isn't C being weird so much as it is S being weird and C being incidentally caught in the crossfire. Because S can be read as a 'z' sound, and particularly because SS can be read as if it were ZZ (and the fact that that's a Thing is a pain in the butt in its own right), SC is used to indicate 'no, I actually mean the 's' sound, but a double letter is required here'. I also vaguely recall something about there technically being a third 's' sound to go with unvoiced s and voiced z, and that also influences which way it's written, but I can't for the life of me remember how any of that works.
Mind you, where C is confusing, V is just Dumb.
First off: Can't end words in V, ever. So any word that Should be written ending in V, is instead written either with F, so words which actually end in the 'f' sound must be written with word final FF. Or, if that is not done, the word must instead end in VE. This is a silent E, just by the by. You'd think that would cause confusion regarding the reading of the preceeding vowel, except nope, V always counts as two characters for vowel interactions, despite being written with one character and the W, nominally a double V, only count as one... TH (digraph, not across a syllable boundary) also only counts as one character for vowel interactions, mind you.
C's confusing weirdness, you can at least see the reasons why it's weird, it's not hard to track back and go, 'ok, yeah, I hate the result but I can see why it was done that way'.
V is just inexcusable nonsense. The only justification for any of it is that bad handwriting/poor typefaces make VV and W too similar (well, I suppose in looped cursive vv and w are hard to tell apart... but then again, even written entirely correctly, looped cursive writing basically looks like vvvvvvvvv or rrrrrr with the occasional acender, decender, dot, cross piece, or capital letter Anyway (seriously, so many of the letter forms have Nothing in common with any other way those charactes are depicted), so that wouldn't make it any Worse. ... There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand straight up abandoned looped cursive in favour of linked italics decades before the (English speaking) world apparently just gave up on proper handwriting in general in favour of typing everything (and given that kids are apparently taught on ipads these days, not even doing That properly): In linked Italics you can actually tell what the letters are.)
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Well, aside from it marking 'long' and 'short' vowels in the sense used in primary school English... which is to say not actually long and short vowels at all (which English does actually have again these days) but rather that the 'short' ones can become 'schwa' while the 'long' ones are said the same as the name of the letter (which is usually, but not always, a diphthong).
In practice, the main difference is that (for the most part) the 'short' ones can be reduced to schwa if unstressed and the long ones can't (and thus usually can't appear in syllables where the stress pattern would cause schwa). Current spelling rules actually already account for this... if you know what the stress pattern you're dealing with is, because they only tell you which reading to use from among those the stress pattern permits, assuming you already Know the stress pattern... so, yeah, marking the stress pattern (or even just the primary stress from which the rest can be infered) is a Huge deal.
Wind and Wind, for example. The one with the 'long' I by English primary school conventions (it says the name of the letter) is, by length in the way it is used for vowels in any other context, the Shorter of the two. Marking it as 'long' is just going to confuse things. (for reference, the two 'i' sounds in these words are formed in completely different parts of the mouth, they're functionally entirely different vowels... though this may vary by dialect). Wound and Wound, one is a diphthong, the other... you could argue it's a long vowel or a short vowel, but it's probably a mid length vowel or in free variation between the two due to not needing to actually use length as a contrast with anything. Either way, the two are completely different sounds, again. (actually, the baffling part is that they're not spelled 'wound' and 'woond', given that that is a valid spelling for that sound).
The nonsense with s and z is one of the few things where just changing the spelling would actually be the best solution. Same with f and v (and do away with the idiot rule that says 'words can't end in v, so words that should end in v end in ve*, so ve is treated as vve for interactions with other sounds, and some combination of this and how recently we shifted to actually distingushing v, w, and u means that v is usually treated as if it were vv (that's two vs, not a w) in other palces as well.)
*except, of course, where they instead are written as f, and thus the words that Actually end in the f have to be spelled ff... and as a result we get 'of' and abriviated 'have' being confused with one another and people pitching a fit over it when you point it out because they hear 'could've' and think 'could of' and then assume that that is what it's Supposed to be and can't understand how it could possibly actually be 'could have'....
Err... which is to say an accent marker would be a bit silly for the voicing issue when the correct characters already exist and wouldn't actually cause any meaningful confusion, unlike most other english spelling reform problems.
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@drlukewhite It probably helps that English's Actual irregularities aren't actually too bad compared to any other langauges. Though a lot of people think there are many more than actually exist, because, for some reason, it's pretty common to teach what is actually a rather complex system as if it were much simpler than it is, and the things that don't work as a result of what is being taught not actually being how it actually works get written off as 'irregular' or flaws, when they're not.
And just to clarify my stance on these things: There's no good reason why -ough is such a disaster and hasn't been at least tidied up. Just... Sound change has completely destroyed the logic that lead to that spelling in the first place. (mind you, I'm not sure how much I like the typical replacements ("tho", "enuff", and so on)).
And there's no good reason why (normal) words can't end in v... especially as English has plenty of words that Do end in v, you just can't write them that way... which necessitates adding a silent 'e' to the end... but then that would affect preceeding vowels, so we have to claim that v is always treated as if it was a double letter, but you can't have actual double v, because vv and w are too hard to tell apart. So now we have a whole stack of special rules and exceptions when we could... just let words end in v in written form and be done with it.
Which is to say, there are certainly some Issues that could use tidying up. Just... mostly not the things that your average random English speaker would think of.
Functionally, for all that English is written using the latin alphabet, in partctice, between the two, three, and even four letter combinations needed to indicate certain sounds, and the position in a syllable affecting how a charcter is to be read, it really functions more like a syllabalry (I believe that's the word I want, I may be muddling it up).
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48 characters isn't actually meaningfully harder than 26 if it eliminates enough special weird rules about how 'this makes this sound, except under these circumstances where it makes that sound, unless this other thing in which case it makes this other, completely different sound'. because those rules mean you're actually not only learning 26 characters. Well, ok, you only have to learn how to Write 26 characters, so that part's simpler, but you learning to Read and Spell is a lot more difficult as a result.
Mind you, the Shavian alphabet has plenty of other issues, to the point where I think it's not a good option at all. But 'it has more characters' is not actually an argument against it, given that Any good representation of English that actually works is going to have over 40 characters because learning to write a bit under twice as many characters (and we're still not talking the numbers needed for something like kanji by a Long shot) in order to massively simplify spelling and reading is actually a good deal.
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actual evidence is that Dvorak is not actually objectively better, only situationally. Same with pretty much every 'change which character is mapped to which key without changing the phsyical position of any of the actual keys' alternative keyboard layout.
Well, ok, I'm excluding the objectively, and sometimes intentionally, Terrible ones, but QWERTY doesn't actually fall into that catagory either.
You want a keyboard that's actually Better? Ortholinier, full-split, ergonomic keyboard. THAT actually makes a significant difference, even keeping the qwerty arangement.
Well, I say 'keeping the qwerty arangement', but just about everything that isn't the alphanumeric keys ends up shuffled around somewhat in practice (the spacebar is split in two, but it's Really common to replace the left half with the backspace key, and put the enter key right next to the space bar under the thumb, similar things like that).
So... basically, the relative arangement of the alphanumeric part of a qwerty keyboard is fine. It's everything Else about it (and standard format keyboards in general) that needs improvement.
And while switching from qwerty to dvorak might be a matter of tradition (it's not actually tradition, it's cost/benefit... the cost of all the time wasted on retraining vastly outweighs the Actual benefit of switching layouts for all but a few niche use cases, but that decision is often made subconciously, so the difference isn't always all that big), switching to full split ortholinier is a small part cost (you're functionally making two half keyboards and a wire, it's a bit more complicated and uses slightly more raw material, even if you don't make them mechanical or programable), and a large part.... also cost (retooling factories is Hugely expensive compared to just... continueing to make the same thing you already do, and then there's the opportunity cost of all the keyboards you aren't making, and thus selling, in the meantime.)
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@JeroenJA It was probably perfectly phonetic... in the dialect of the person who codified the spelling, at the time when they did so. Too bad about the many hundereds of other dialects, or everything drifting over time, and the need to not render texts from other times and places unintelligible to the reader (well, shifts in vocabulary still do so, but that only requires an appropriate dictionary, not relearning the entire skill set that is reading).
English spelling is actually a lot more logical and consistent than people give it credit for (though not perfectly so). The problem is that it's also a lot more complex than most people, including those Teaching it, tend to give it credit for as well. And is rather let down by a couple of rather significant flaws
English straight up needs a diactiric to indicate where the primary stress in a word is (it would eliminate so many of the problems with the vowels, as it is for some insane reason assumed that you already know the stress pattern, and thus that only ambiguity regarding the reading of a given vowel that is not already resolved by way of it's position in that pattern needs to be clarified via the spelling), as well as bringing back the one that indicates when a two vowel character string is Not a digraph (because there's a syllable break in the middle)... and applying it to consonants in the same situation would probably also help.
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There's a few very basic changes to modern English orthography that would Vastly improve the whole thing for minimal cost to anyone but keyboard manufacturers. They're largely not the ones people automatically pounce on. Mark primary stress (So Much of the weirdness of English Spelling rules exceptions comes down to disambiguation only being used if the stress pattern didn't already block alternative readings... with the only indication as to which stress pattern to use being the presence or absense of such disambiguation!), bring back the marker disambiguating between digraphs and syllable breaks (coop vs co-op, among others).
Then you get sillyness like words just... not being allowed to end in v. And v being treated as functionally a double character string even when it isn't. combine the two and you get a lot of word final silent e that doesn't actually follow any of the other rules around silent e because the rule forcing its existence is 'words can't end in v, v counts as two consonants when determining vowel interactions'. ...just... let words end in v and let vv be a valid letter string (though the former eliminates most instances where the latter would be required).
-ough words just straight up need re-spelling at this point, it's a nonsensical dumpsterfire of unsalvagable historical debris.
Let that settle in then reanalyse. You'll note that this involved the addition of a couple of diacritic modifiers (both of which can go on any vowel, one of which might arguably also be used on consonents), but did not require the elimination or replacement of any digraphs, instead just straight up disambiguating what's already there so the over all whole is less incoherent.
Yes, there's an argument for doing Something about C (no, just straight up eliminating it doesn't fix things), yes, bringing back Thorn would be aesthetically pleasing, no, we shouldn't be getting rid of q (English q and k are actually different sounds, though they are mutually exclusive: If a q can exist a k can't, and vice versa, so there's no minimal pair, so you Could get rid of the q, there's just no need to do so. Might be an argument for doing away with qu in favour of qw or just q, though (we already have j for dzh, after all)).
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They're 'ov' and 'of' but english spelling for some reason has a pathological aversion to ending words in 'v'. You get a lot of silent 'e' in places where it doesn't look like it should be, doing Nothing, because written words Can't end in v so have to have something after it, never mind that there are plenty of words that, as Pronunced, absolutely do end in v.
This nonsense goes so far as to cause a single v to be treated as a double consonant (at least some of the time, not sure if it's entirely consistent) when determining how vowels around it interact, though to be fair that might also be because to this day it's very hard to tell vv from w in handwriting and many typefaces. (meanwhile, the digraph 'th' is often treated as a single consonant in similar situations).
Though why it came out as 'of' and 'off' rather than 'ove' and 'of', I couldn't tell you.
(mind you, the seperation of w, u, and v into their own characters is a lot more recent than you might think (honestly, it's recent enough to make me question how the heck anyone managed without it for so long), which may also have contributed.)
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On the other hand, for the loan words that settled in quite nicely, replacing them with anglish sounds alien, awkward, and in places even incomprehensible and/or hostile.
As for insincerity, that probably comes more from how English uses the borrowings: They're often a lot more specific and defined, with the older, simpler, germanic words being used when that precision is unnessicary. Consequently, the loanwords show up more in contract law... and when used by weasels looking to pretend that what they did was actually something else (but also by perfectly honest folk when what they did or said actually Was something else and they're dealing with unplesant individuals who are pretending otherwise.)
Well, that explains the insincerity. 'Mushiness' is something English just does to itself, or perhaps more accurately that its speakers do to it. Bland is, if anything, rather confusing, as generally speaking the term indicates a Lack of variety, while English gets most of its variety from precisely such borrowings (and an awful lot of English's borrowed words form further afield come by way of Spanish or Portugese).
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@creativecraving Linked Italics. I know I contrasted them with cursive earlier (because they're not what most English speakers mean when they say 'cursive' in normal conversation), but they're technically a Type of cursive, in that the characters are written with curved lines and link together. A character very similar to an alpha is used instead of the standard typographical lower case a, but otherwise it's just straight up the standard latin characters used when the letters are written separately or as they appear in most type faces.
The upper case characters are just flat out the same as the typed ones and not (supposed to be) linked at all (unlike most other 'this character doesn't link' rules, this one is generally not ignored).
Properly speaking anything with a decender terminates a line and you are supposed to lift your pen and start a new line on the next character... most people I know tend to end up at least giving those characters whose decenders curve or angle to the left a loop to link them into the next section and keep going. If you're doing it properly, i, x, and t have you only putting down one of the two strokes as part of the initial word-line and then going back to add the cross pieces and dots. (j, between having a decender and generally only appearing at the start of words, isn't Supposed to link to anything, and so gets its dot immediately... people absolutely link to it as if it was an i when it appears anywhere other than word initially and give it a loop back up to the next character otherwise though.)
Every link is basically just starting the character with a seraph at the mid-point of the line, and ending with a seraph at the end of the main penstroke of forming the character... and then just not lifting your pen as you move onto the next character (this means that most characters are connected by a half height /, with a few (including o) linking to the next character with a -, and as mentioned, decenders aren't supposed to link but in practice any that curve left usually do with a loop that transitions into a /).
The result? Very few characters are actually formed differently from how they would be if you were writting the letters unlinked, and most (all?) of them it's more a matter of 'write the rest of the letters then come back to do the second stroke instead of stopping to finish the letter immediately' rather than 'write this character entirely differently'.
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modern English does not even "kind of" have genders because of the pronouns, English instead divides pretty much all living things by their physical number, age and sex (the number of divisions made in practice varies based on a whole bunch of factors, you'd be surprised how long the list can get for one kind of farm animal), using a different word for each relevant combination, and the pronouns reflect this.
A lot of ignorant people have put about a large amount of of confusing stupidity due to a combination of not being able to get their head around this fact and the fact that English uses the word "gender" for four very different but tangentially related things: Grammatical gender, (an agreement system used in many languages. what gender a word has is usually more down to it's pronunciation or spelling than any real association with a given sex), biological sex (because the word "sex" was becoming badly overloaded, while prudes and immature idiots were making life difficult for the bureaucrats of the time about it), specific social constructs (gender roles. the individual responsible for most of the nonsense surrounding this was a journalist who later admitted to pretty much fabricating the bulk of it in order to meet a deadline. didn't stop various factions latching onto the idea and exploiting it to the hilt for various ends), and what ultimately amounts to an aspect of neurology and psychology (gender identity. transgender people and the like. I'm of the opinion that a lot of baggage and nonsense could have been avoided if a better term had been chosen, because malicious and/or stupid actors on all sides of That issue have run the ability to use the terms to conflate the concepts into the Ground in their rhetoric. often actually undermining their own point if the listener actually applies an ounce of logic to the argument... not that most do, tribalism and ideology being what they are).
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Turns out using an ortholinier key layout(? arrangement? not sure on the term there. It's not which value is asigned to which key, it's where the keys themselves are physically located relative to each other), putting much less strain on your fingers, and a fully split keyboard (because 'ergonomic' keyboards that Aren't fully split aren't actually all that ergonomic, just less bad than the straight ones), putting much less straing on your back, shoulders, and wrists, makes dramatically more difference on that front.
Dvorak somewhat reduces how often you're doing the thing that strains your weaker fingers. A better shaped keyboard just removes all the issues that cause unnecessary strain in the first place. Admittedly, they also tend to be programable, mechanical keyboards, so they can be Dvorak as well if you like. The downside, of course, is that they're not the mass produced standard, and are consequently Expensive.
Also, by all metrics other than phsyical strain, the gains from using Dvorak (or any other layout for the alphanumerical keys) rather than Qwerty are so small that they're pretty much entirely overwhelmed by the losses from having to retrain... so if picking which one to learn in the first place, Dvorak is probably a bit better (aside from the fact that you'll almost never encounter any keyboard set up that way outside of enthusiasts) than Qwerty, but if you learned Qwerty there's no real benefit to switching.
That said, there's a Lot of benefit to be had from reasigning various other keys based on what you actually use your keyboard for the most (people using certain programing langauges all the time get quite a bit of benefit out of having the Esc key where Tab is normally located, for example).
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The current state of things in New Zealand is that books only get looked at by the part of the government that does official censorship if someone complains about them. (there are restrictions on the sale of publications containing pornographic images, but not on texts) In the event that there are credible complaints, the censors go over it and impose whatever restrictions they think reasonable to deal with said complaints.
This only rarely happens and it's rarer still that it amounts to anything.
Still, there was one book banned in recent times. It was considered objectionable due to advocating various things including holocost denial, but the thing that actually saw it censored (flat out banned, I believe) wasn;t the views expressed in it directly, but the likelyhood that not doing so would lead to riots, one way or another.
At the same time, the author was doing some sort of speaking tour... he was refused entry into the country on the grounds that the resources required to prevent someone from murdering him or his presence from causing a riot wasn't justified when they could just not let him into the country in the first place, particularly given that the police weren't actually confident they'd be Successful at those tasks (more effort may have been put into finding alternative means if his views were more palitable, mind you, but at the same time the problem would have also been less serious to begin with in that case too.)
On a more amusing note, a particular Shirt was also banned in New Zealand by the censor's office. Again, they don't even Look at anything that's not video games or tv/movies unless there are complaints (or it's a very edge case thing and the creator submits it for review themselves just to make sure there's not going to be an issue, I suppose).
Basically, the standards for getting them to even look at such a thing are pretty high, and the bar for them going 'nah, it's fine' is Very low.
In this case, the shirt was banned. But the reason it was banned was interesting. It wasn't that it was offensive, but that it was Only offensive. It's purpose was deemed to be 'to shock and offend, and nothing else'. Turns out, if it had actually been making a joke, or some sort of statement, or even just arranged in a meaningfully artistic fashion to make some sort of picture, or really Anything to give it a reason to exist other than to upset random people for no good reason, it would have been Fine... but it was just a bunch of swearwords (and maybe some slurs, can't quite recall) printed on a shirt that enough people took offense to to warrent the censors office making a ruling on the matter, and so it was banned.
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