3w ago

The English features I hate so much that I actually learned their true names.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_e

Cognitive dissonance on the more accurate name of “Ignored e”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

Record a record? Convict a convict? What an annoying concept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_leveling

At least irregular verbs are drifting away, that’s a pleasant surprise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisyllabic_laxing

fotograffy > fuhtawgruhfee I’ll die on this hill

12 comments

You know what bugs me the most?
island - with a fake etymological "s" that was never pronounced. Compare it with German "Eiland".
people - you got to borrow French "peuple", then change that "u" into "o" for cosmetic purposes.
chaos - because you got to plop an etymological "h", except conventionally the way to transcribe Greek /kʰ/→/χ/ is "kh" instead. But no, you need to disguise that /k/ as /tʃ/.
spamming a diacritic (apostrophe) to highlight elided sounds, but not using it to solve small orthographical quirks. It would solve the first two issues you're complaining about - compare "mate" (bro) with "yerba matë", "I record it" vs. "the recórd".
[/old man screams at the clouds rant]
- You're about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You're gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.
  
  [kʰ] or [χ], both end as /k/ [kʰ] in English anyway. But it feels weird that people insist on that etymological ⟨ch⟩ as if "English got it from Latin" was more important than "it's ultimately from Greek".
- Oh I’m in good company, this is my kinda rant 🤙
I am this old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI9hHo9_QB8
- Wow, I guess this is like UK schoolhouse rock? Not bad
I think I get the general gist of Morphological Leveling, but I don't understand Ablaut Leveling
- Ablaut is a feature in Indo European languages where the vowel sound of a root changes for different forms of a word. An example from English: "sing" is conjugated to "sang" and "sung". Ablaut leveling would be losing the distinction between the vowels in different forms of the same word.
  
  When we fix the irregular verb sing we will create a new heteronym between singed-as-past-of-sing and singed-as-past-of-singe 🫠

12 comments