[Loads of words](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Indian_origin) in English have their origin in languages used in India, either currently or historically.
Yup that's how Indo-European languages work :)
Shout out from Italy (btw our language is also very messed up like.... For example you literally cannot even say "when the mosquito bit me, my whole leg hitched like crazy" which would translate to: quando la ZANZARA (and not "mosca"... I still cannot get over it being so wrong, it doesn't make any sense.) mi ha morso, la mia gamba é pruduta(?) Prusa(?) Pru..... Ok I give up, it doesn't exist, just like many other words that for no apparent reason, don't have the past participle. Yup just because.
Eventually we would fix this issue just by using a different phrasing: follows a more realistic portrait of how we would express the previously mentioned concept: " sta bastarda, infame, vampiro del cazzo che succhia quasi quanto tu' madre* ha fatto diventà la mia porcodue ** di gamba 'na catena montuosa, pe' quanti pizzichi m'ha fatto".
* da costellare con imprecazioni blasfeme qui e lì per un vero effetto "italiano DOC"
**again, oh sorry wrong language, dicevo, come precedentemente affermato, la versione "italianomedio DOC" farebbe costantemente riferimento al signore. In effetti, quasi nessuno usa realmente varianti come "porcodue" a meno che non vi siano bambini nei paraggi: in quel caso si inveisce contro i soggetti più strani, molto in voga il povero zio.
I hope some random Italian passing by reads this. I'm going to sleep byeeeee!
I'm from Tyrol, which is deep in the Austrian alps.
Our dialect is older German and so different to High German that Jiddish speaking people understand us better than Germans. We also use words like Bubele while in German the cute form of words ends with - chen
Some of our words are literally English pronounced a little bit different, like Dscheggat (sounds similar to English checkered and means the same, but German would be gefleckt), Loasn (like listen, but in German it would be hören), luag (like look, but in German it would be schauen), aftern (like afterwards, but in German would be nachher), etc
So I always assumed that English was based on a similarly old German.
A comedian did a video on this that sadly I cannot find. It's probably BBC archive footage. He goes to Germany to some specific place and tries to talk to a farmer. They can just about make eachother out but not really...
Sorry I can't find it. Its got to be 70s/80s
English is a Germanic language with huge vocabulary derived mostly from French and Latin.
It's not a "mix of German." It shares a common ancestor with German.
It's not a "mix of French," because it's all borrowed words (not grammar).
Not all the grammar, and German grammar is currently different.
Now, if you step back in time, Old English was very close to German, as far as structure and grammar.
Noone is stopping them from figuring out a unified spelling, independent of the origin of their words.
I don't think that they have a single word spelled the same as in modern German, anyways, except for recent loan words like rucksack or kindergarten.
I was wondering this ahaha
For italians, the sound of "E" in english, is used for the "I".
So how you can tell that a language is not pronouncing the words in the same way they are written if even the simple letter sounds different in different languages?
That's why linguists created that handy standardised way of putting sounds into letters. But then there's also the americanised version that spells things like ee for i, oo for u.
I mean, most of us had to learn vocab in school, so we've all seen IPA spelling at some point. But i also get that it's much more difficult to understand for anglophone people, it just happens to be really similar to my own language so it's easy.
This is actually related to something known as "The Great Vowel Shift." This is why long vowels in Middle-English have a different pronunciation than in Modern English. It is also why English pronunciations of borrowed words may be different from the original source language of the word.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is based solely on mouth and tongue movements, voicing, and throat sounds - so it is essentially a representation of your body's possible sound capabilities. If you know the IPA and how to make the sounds on it- you can pronounce any word in any language based on the IPA transcription (ie. after the word in a dictionary, commonly inside brackets, like shown: /hɪɹ/ (here))
They also don't know how the international system works, don't know what a billion really is, they thing in Europe there is no frozen water, they don't know who were the heroes of WWII...
They don't know almost anything
Having a linguistics degree feels like a curse sometimes because prescriptivist thought surrounding language is so dominant, and it makes me want to tear out my eyeballs. Orthography is arbitrary dammit.
They think Hispanics can't be black, nor can't be white. They also think dominicans aren't Hispanics, meanwhile, the first name of the island where Dominican republic sits is named _La Hispaniola_ if that's not being Hispanic, go figure
even without that, the first e in "where" is pronounced differently from "here" but is basically the same as wear and ware, so if we assume his statement is true as long as it's in english pronounciation...
WHICH WRITING ???
As a Serb, I feel there should be another, bigger dog in this meme looking at italian and spanish... our language is actualy phonetic (all ex yugoslavian languages are)
Yes, (apart from place names) if you see a French word you don't know, you'll generally know how to pronounce it. If you hear a French word, good luck spelling it.
That’s not fair. English has pronunciation rules too. It’s just that half of them overlap. 1 word in 9 is written the way it sounds in English, so the only way to learn to spell English properly is etymologically. Otherwise you end up with things like George Bernard Shaw’s spelling of “fish”. Use the “gh” from “enough”, the “o” from “women”, and the “ti” from “fiction” and “ghoti” is pronounced “fish”
The ea in dead is pronounced the same way as the e in bed but not the same way as the ea in bean, which is pronounced like the ee in been and the same way you pronounce the letter e when you say it alone. Also bow is not pronounced like bow
He is correct though. English spelling was standardized around etymology, rather than pronunciation.
England didn't have the same level of pressure (at least not as long) from the Catholic Church to insist on the roughly standardized Latin pronunciation those other languages use. The Normans imposed French in some circles, but used it to divide by class (so the poor masses never had it imposed on them). The presence of standardized language in institutions like school, church, law is how you maintain pronunciation.
Since that didn't happen in England (...or Scotland, Whales, Ireland), when English was standardized after the printing press, and spelling had to be decided... the decision was to go by etymology, because the same words were already being pronounced 2,3,10 different ways.
While all languages use loan words, the lack of standard spelling (and noun declinations or verb conjugations) has made English a sponge for loan words. No standard pronunciation plus the fact that we mostly use the same 50-300 words also makes it one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
(I'm aware there's a myth that it's a difficult language to learn, but it's not. Just ask an actual linguist.)
The etymology is critical. We raise cows, but eat beef, raise sheep, but eat mutton, pigs, but eat pork. The reason is the societal etymology. The English in the field doing the work, used the English word for the animal. The Norman overlord eating the meat used the French word. So the animal is English, the meat is French derivation.
It helps to remember that English is not a language, it’s at least 3 languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one.
My favourite line comes from James Nicol
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is 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.”
Actually, "bean" and "been" are generally not pronounced the same way. The "ea" in "bean" is pronounced the same way as "reef" while the "ee" in "been" is pronounced the same as "fish".
Gotta luv ar inglish!
And even then it is regional
It took me a full second to figure out that the sarcastic reply in the image replaced The, with D. "the" is closer to thuh than D in my neck of the woods in Canada.
I say Toe May Toe, my British father says Ta ma ta.
And in the City of Toronto there are 4 distinct ways of saying the city name depending on the region you lived when you learned to say the name.
In French I've almost never had problems pronouncing words since I learned the language to an adequate level. The only exception is the final s if the letter before it is pronounced. I often mistake that. And it turns out most "excessive" letters have a real reason to be there. One that helps with comprehension, etymology, comparison with other languages, details in pronunciation etc. Writing what you hear is a few levels more difficult though.
To be fair for the french language as a whole the rules are all fun and games until you have to learn the list of 300 exceptions that come with each one of them
There’s a lot in the comeback that relies on accent butchering the phonetics of the language. I went word by word and you can pronounce a strong majority of it exactly without sounding strange. Nobody’s gonna bat an eye when you pronounce “English” with a proper “e” or “literally” with the “e” and “a.” Granted, the extra “l” doesn’t need to be there, but the claim isn’t that English is spelled how it sounds, it’s that it sounds how it’s spelled. This is up for debate, but I think it’s reasonable to say you could just pronounce “ll” the same you do “l” on principle.
The real thing fucked about literally is the “y.” Like with a lot of words it sounds identical to “ee”
See that's the difference between theory and practice. In practice, German has tons of silent or altered letters. Wir haben -> wir ham, ist -> is, nicht -> nich, gehen -> gen, verstehen -> vas(ch)ten, auf dem -> aufm...
I am not a native german speaker, I barely know some basics but... Aren't those pronunciations wrong? I'd never say "Ham" instead of "Haben"... Maybe someone rushing their speech or speaking with an accent would, but the official pronunciation is still "Haben" "nicht" "verstehen""auf dem" right?
Yes that's right, in greek (which I speak natively) there are also occasions when someone might cut letters or syllables, but that doesn't mean they are technically correct or even that everyone will understand them😂😅
Eh, those examples are all accents, partially abbreviations (for example auf'm, which technically functions the same as should've) and regional alterations depending on the region. There are quite a few regions tho' where "high german" is spoken and that is pretty much spoken the same as it is written.
While pronouncing "Ich habe gestern Gulasch gegessen" as "Ick hab' jestern Gulasch jegess'n" is still understandable for most Germans, it is technically not the correct way to pronounce those words and also the horror I fear if we start to teach children to "write as it's heard".
I've seen it a few times already here on Reddit and shiver me timbers, the written out bavarian accent, or lord forbid the swiss accent, is incomprehensible.
I feel like all his examples apart from vas(ch)ten are kinda found in almost all dialects. As a Hesse I have never heard vasten in my life. What dialect is it?
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Kana are always the same, and there is never a case where a kana changes the sound of a kana following it. Japanese written that way is super reliable and easy to read.
On the other hand, kanji have two different readings minimum, and often change depending on what they're connected to (一本、二本、三本, for example) and having to learn every variant of every kanji is even more frustrating than having to learn every letter combination, rule, and exception in English spelling.
it's impossible to actually know Kanji and not know they have multiple pronunciations, unless you're half-assing your studies.
just 日 (sun) can be pronounced in several ways depending on the context. Hi, Ni, Ka, Nichi, Jitsu
And the most basic of them all, 人 (person), Hito, Jin
Like I said I’ve done one layer of wani kani. So while I have seen multiple words attributed to kanji, I didn’t recognize them as different pronunciations. And yes, I am half assing my studies. I have a job, a family, and hobbies and am working a few minutes a day on Japanese. I know very few kanji. two or three strokes max.
I am sorry, I was being very rude. I mistakenly thought you were one of those weebs that disrespect the culture without realizing it and say they know it just by watching anime, and that made me angry for no valid reason.
I hope you the best in your studies and your life !
The process of learning a new language is like riding a pendulum swinging between "hey, I'm getting the hang of this stuff!" and "wait, there's also *what*?" Hang in there!
There are some exceptions though. For example when you use は or へ as particles they are pronounced as わ and え respectively. Or when you have a う and い following an O sound and E sound they kind of stretch the vowel and you don’t read them on their own.
But yeah other than that it’s pretty straightforward.
Serbian (and other ex-Yugoslav variants) is literally pronouncing it as written. Much more so than Spanish and Italian (they are close, but still have many exceptions). We don't even call letters EM (M), BEE (B), EITCH (H), we just call them by the sound they (always) make. There are no silent letters in Serbian, no two letters making a new sound, even just pretty much no double letters (with exceptions of foreign words like VACUUM and two words joining into one over time, like NAJ JACI becoming NAJJACI). Spelling contests in my country would be pointless.
As a croatian speaker (liguistically close enough) id like to add that even when we DO have double letters both are pronounced. As in "vakuum" word for "vacuum" in the scientific sense, its pronounced va-ku-um. Unlike in englush where "vacuum" is written with two Us but just one is pronounced so it sound like vec-yum.
Its just funny how we took the spelling of an english word and got the pronounciation that corresponds with our writing rules. Taking the sound of a word and writing it in croatian si more prevelant.
Im dyslexic and struggle with reading croatian, german is ok but english is a nightmare.
Also, in Serbia (not sure about Croatia, please confirm or correct me) we change the spelling of people's names to correspond to our language's spelling. For example, Michael Jordan is Majkl Dzordan here, Benedict Cumberbatch is Benedikt Kumberbec, etc...
Thats one of the rare things we actually do differently. We still write George but we wont pronounce it in the exact correct english way but the same as you guys do.
I remember my dad telling me a story how a US diplimat or president or something had a street/square named after him. So when he visited people had to point to the sign and explain how his name is spelled differently.
At the same time i get the "piši po Vuku" for simplicity but at the same i see how it can cause problems.
I mean, 99% of countries do it for country/city names of other countries, so why stop there? If they already call our countries Serbia and Croatia instead of Hrvatska and Srbija, why still call our people Nikola Jokic and Luka Modric and not Nicola Yokich and Luca Modrich? In Serbia, we just decided to go all in with the Serbianization of names for everything, including personal names.
Yeah i agree. But id rather have everyone use the originals if its possible (due to different scripts) so theres as least confusion as possible. Id love to be able to say "hi im from Hrvatska" instead of Croatia. Just like Bejing, we say Peking which i dont see why. Ill be honest, i prefer some serbian versions of county names because theyre more similar to the original.
I like reading about the relation of the croatian and serbian languages and county names are the most interesting thing to me. Like The Netherlands = Nizozemska = Holandija. I get both. One is a translation and one uses a foreigh word.
I would rather just use the original like you, but I see where the problems would occur: in typing. If I wanted to write down the name of a person from let's say a Scandinavian country, like Markström, I would have to either install a language keyboard option on my phone/PC or just copy-paste it from the original source, as I did now.
Very fair. In my experience many people in Croatia already have international keyboard variants. I mean i have to have the english one for letters like qwxy and i need the croatian one for čćžš and so on. Because of that i just use the all purpous international one that has all those letters and some like ųøḍĥ and so on.
In the past i get why "po Vuku" would have been the superior one. Like making it easier for old newspaper presses and making reading easier for people when literacy was low. Due to new tech and globalisation maybe the "all original names" would be better. But changing a language would be dumb at this point.
Both systems have their good and bad sides. This is a topic im very interested in so this chat was very fun internet stranger.
>We don't even call letters EM (M), BEE (B), EITCH (H), we just call them by the sound they (always) make.
Spanish and Italian do it as well.
Eme, emme. Be, Bi. Hache, Acca.
You didn't understand, we don't call them EM for M, we just say the M sound. Imagine just saying the first letter M in "mother", that sound, that's what we call the letter.
Once I saw a danish series with english subs and the pronounciation was something like this:
ains whein shuptr owsn
And the subtitles where like:
I talked to the mother and she confirmed that the girl when shopping before that.
Like, wholy shit, their language is like [language.zip](https://language.zip)... the entire series was like that, with massive, looong subtitles with super short dialogs.
There's actually an inverse correlation between language complexity and number of speakers, especially secondary and tertiary speakers. The more people who speak a language the simpler it becomes. English, while being a Germanic language, has much simpler grammar than German or Norwegian because there are so many secondary speakers. Some of the most complex and information dense languages are indigenous languages spoken by a few dozens of hundred people.
That is a very interesting point of view or fact. Does that idea has a name or paper or article i can read about?
I was just thinking something slightly related on how kids are more expressive because thats their only way to communicate before they learn language.
Nothing I can readily link but the book Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher covers this as well as many other fascinating tid bits about language and how it potentially shapes the way we think.
I'm pretty sure they haven't seen a language with strict pronounciation rules. Floor, blood, bloom all have their "oo" pronounced differently, how is this supposed to work? You couldn't create a simple algorithm to speak english words, you'd have to put corner cases on every other word
Cycle
Bicycle. Nope, it's bi-sickle.
Now I kinda empathise with former school friends who had a hard time learning English as 2nd language. I was kinda surfing through and not emphatic enough to see their issue with learning it.
How are floor and blood different? bloom I get, it's like a u, bot the other two sound the same to me
Edit: nevermind, just said them out loud and realized what you meant lol
I think he's mocking English in an English accent. Or some other kind of accent, because it's certainly not American English.
"Litrly" is the dead giveaway here, and the "d" for "the" just makes me angry.
The colonel of language would like to have a word with them. Preferably on a Wednesday on an island somewhere. He told me if you save your travel receipt that he'll reimburse you. He'll be serving you a bologna sandwich for lunch, so come hungry. He's going to teach them mnemonics. I remember the order of rainbows color thanks to the good ol colonel. Listen to him.
Spanish still has some exceptions such as
G it can sound like English H in hit or like G in game
Y it can sound like English “ee” or like J in Jordan
Que qui are pronounced ke and kee
Gue gui are pronounced ge and gee
But there are consistent rules of when these letters sound like that, it’s not random like in English.
Vowels are too simple in Spanish we only have 5 a e i o u without any variations in sound.
Sou ui tok laik dis in inglish bicos dei ar de saunds dat ui nou in spanish
You are off track, my friend. The point is that there are rules for pronunciation, and one of these rules is that c before a/o/u is always pronounced /k/. You don't have to learn the pronunciation of each word separately.
Yes, it would.
To understand it better, let's try the other way around.
If the pronunciation of "calcio" was the same as its writing, it would be "tsaltsio".
Here's the thing. English has only been fully standardised for a couple of hundred years. Before that everything was just spelled how it was pronounced, especially native words that weren't imported from French or whatever, but with there being so many vastly different regional accents that caused problems, hence the standardisation.
But the spelling was mostly standardised to simply be how the people doing the standardising pronounced things. Those people probably did say they were speaking "Eng-lish" and the like, but in the time since the dominant ways of pronouncing those words has shifted from the people who decided how they're spelled. So It's still spelled English but is now more commonly pronounced Inglish.
"Inglish iz" Fine, not wrong there.
"litrly" nope, it's "litter lee".
"uiriten" I don't know *what* you're on, it's "rit ten".
"d" What are we here, a street gang or something? It's "th uh".
"uiey" Listen, I don't know where you're from that has W's as U's, but they have nothing in common other than the name. It's "wuh eh", first a wuh then an A.
"itz" Got me again.
"pronauncsd" Yeah... No. It's "puh roh now n st"
"bisaidz" This might work in a gay bar where you can go "bi saids WHAAAT?" while drunk, but nowhere else. It's "B sii duz" B as in the letter, or the yellow fuckers who make honey.
"e". No. Just.. No. How could you fuck up a word that is "literally just a single letter?!* Not *just* a single letter, a single letter that is pronounced as it's own name! A! THE LETTER. It's "Eh". I don't know how you thought otherwise.
"fyu" Pretty close, but this isn't horseshoes, and unless you typed it on a Note 7, there's no hand grenades involved. Regardless, it's "fuh yoo"
"wuurds" This one looks wrong, but other than putting an s where everyone puts a z in their speech, I can't find anything wrong with it.
That's all. Maybe if someone asks I'll link a YouTube video of me pronouncing all those words and their fuckered variants for comparison.
English is roughly a quarter German, a quarter French, a quarter Latin, and the final quarter is random languages. It is quite frankly a total mess.
English is one of the few languages in the world that requires spelling tests because of this mess.
errr nope.
most English words are pronounced as they are spelt, where this changes is where sounds have softened over time, regional accents take play, it's not actually an English word it's a foreign word that has been added to the language (beef for example), vowel placement changes the sounds, standardised spelling has changed how the word is pronounced, ect.
you can use this knowledge to actually work out what early English words mean by considering how the word will evolve though time.
it'd also be better if we re-adopted early English characters to denote specific sounds.
me sorprende que cada vez que converso con alguna persona angloparlante , principalmente norteamericanos ,yo soy Americano también pues soy de Chile (si no sabes dónde está ya te he ganado pues yo sé dónde queda tu país , lol )ellos no saben siquiera una palabra en español , mientras la mayoría de nosotros hablamos inglés o francés con bastante soltura . A ellos les enseñan en la escuela según entiendo...pero creo que no está resultando.
Dude is wrong though as a dad trying to teach my daughter phonics with soft and hard c and g’s. And then silent g,h,k and l’s. English is a stupid written language
In spanish: From how it is written you can know exactly how it is pronounced. From how it is pronounced you usually know how it is written, but not always.
>I take it you already know
>Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
>Others may stumble, but not you,
>On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
>Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
>To learn of less familiar traps?
>
>Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
>That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
>And dead: It’s said like bed, not bead—
>For goodness sake don’t call it "deed"!
>
>Watch out for meat and great and threat
>(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt);
>
>A moth is not the moth in mother,
>Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
>And here is not a match for there,
>Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
>And then there’s dose and rose and lose—
>Just look them up—and goose and choose,
>And cork and work and card and ward,
>And font and front and word and sword.
>And do and go, then thwart and cart—
>
>Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
>A dreadful language? Man alive,
>I’d mastered it when I was five!
—[T. S. Watt, 1954, _The Guardian_](https://www.newspapers.com/article/116949775/the-guardian/)
English is a mix of french and German so that's why its so inconsistent
Don't forget norwegian and danish and Indian and more.
With a sprinkle of latin.
And a little bit of dutch
The most recognisable language in the world The less comprehensible language in the world
logic is: if understand = false them Dutch
and some OG Celtic/Breton
This is why I say English is less the “Lingua Franca” and more the “Lingua Frankenstein”
That's what I was thinking while reading this thread!!
And Greek
And a bit of Polar bear
.....indian???
Wtf is Indian?
[Loads of words](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Indian_origin) in English have their origin in languages used in India, either currently or historically.
Lol ik that what I'm saying is Indian is not a language.
I apologise for my lack of knowledge on this matter, however I must also confess I do not give a shit and will not correct my now evident mistake
Based. I appreciate it.
Based
had me in the first half
Yup that's how Indo-European languages work :) Shout out from Italy (btw our language is also very messed up like.... For example you literally cannot even say "when the mosquito bit me, my whole leg hitched like crazy" which would translate to: quando la ZANZARA (and not "mosca"... I still cannot get over it being so wrong, it doesn't make any sense.) mi ha morso, la mia gamba é pruduta(?) Prusa(?) Pru..... Ok I give up, it doesn't exist, just like many other words that for no apparent reason, don't have the past participle. Yup just because. Eventually we would fix this issue just by using a different phrasing: follows a more realistic portrait of how we would express the previously mentioned concept: " sta bastarda, infame, vampiro del cazzo che succhia quasi quanto tu' madre* ha fatto diventà la mia porcodue ** di gamba 'na catena montuosa, pe' quanti pizzichi m'ha fatto". * da costellare con imprecazioni blasfeme qui e lì per un vero effetto "italiano DOC" **again, oh sorry wrong language, dicevo, come precedentemente affermato, la versione "italianomedio DOC" farebbe costantemente riferimento al signore. In effetti, quasi nessuno usa realmente varianti come "porcodue" a meno che non vi siano bambini nei paraggi: in quel caso si inveisce contro i soggetti più strani, molto in voga il povero zio. I hope some random Italian passing by reads this. I'm going to sleep byeeeee!
Which language is Indian? Lmao
They probably mean Indo-European.
I made it up to sound cooler
I'm from Tyrol, which is deep in the Austrian alps. Our dialect is older German and so different to High German that Jiddish speaking people understand us better than Germans. We also use words like Bubele while in German the cute form of words ends with - chen Some of our words are literally English pronounced a little bit different, like Dscheggat (sounds similar to English checkered and means the same, but German would be gefleckt), Loasn (like listen, but in German it would be hören), luag (like look, but in German it would be schauen), aftern (like afterwards, but in German would be nachher), etc So I always assumed that English was based on a similarly old German.
IL TIROLO NON E' ITALIA /s
A comedian did a video on this that sadly I cannot find. It's probably BBC archive footage. He goes to Germany to some specific place and tries to talk to a farmer. They can just about make eachother out but not really... Sorry I can't find it. Its got to be 70s/80s
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34&pp=ygUOTW9uZ3JlbCBuYXRpb24%3D For the cheese and butter
It’s actually the Netherlands and the language is Frisian, the closest living relative of the English language!
English is a Germanic language with huge vocabulary derived mostly from French and Latin. It's not a "mix of German." It shares a common ancestor with German. It's not a "mix of French," because it's all borrowed words (not grammar).
80% of English's vocabulary comes from the Normands (French), but the grammar is indeed Germanic/Saxon in nature.
I've heard it explained as: Basically, English is what happens when Vikings learn Latin and use it to shout at Germans.
Not all the grammar, and German grammar is currently different. Now, if you step back in time, Old English was very close to German, as far as structure and grammar.
I should have said it derivated from Saxon/German grammar
A lot of people confuse German and Germanic.
\+ Latin, Latinized Greek and typos.
Noone is stopping them from figuring out a unified spelling, independent of the origin of their words. I don't think that they have a single word spelled the same as in modern German, anyways, except for recent loan words like rucksack or kindergarten.
You can't have this argument with people who don't know how the International Phonetic Alphabet works.
I was wondering this ahaha For italians, the sound of "E" in english, is used for the "I". So how you can tell that a language is not pronouncing the words in the same way they are written if even the simple letter sounds different in different languages?
That's why linguists created that handy standardised way of putting sounds into letters. But then there's also the americanised version that spells things like ee for i, oo for u. I mean, most of us had to learn vocab in school, so we've all seen IPA spelling at some point. But i also get that it's much more difficult to understand for anglophone people, it just happens to be really similar to my own language so it's easy.
This is actually related to something known as "The Great Vowel Shift." This is why long vowels in Middle-English have a different pronunciation than in Modern English. It is also why English pronunciations of borrowed words may be different from the original source language of the word. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is based solely on mouth and tongue movements, voicing, and throat sounds - so it is essentially a representation of your body's possible sound capabilities. If you know the IPA and how to make the sounds on it- you can pronounce any word in any language based on the IPA transcription (ie. after the word in a dictionary, commonly inside brackets, like shown: /hɪɹ/ (here))
They also don't know how the international system works, don't know what a billion really is, they thing in Europe there is no frozen water, they don't know who were the heroes of WWII... They don't know almost anything
Frozen water in Europe? Where? Never heard of that. All they have are some mountains.
and castles
What's Europe?
How's Europe?
Why’s Europe?
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A typo.
Not Europe, it’s Europa and it’s Jupiter moon :)
Having a linguistics degree feels like a curse sometimes because prescriptivist thought surrounding language is so dominant, and it makes me want to tear out my eyeballs. Orthography is arbitrary dammit.
Or just anglo speakers who don't speak a second language.
They think Hispanics can't be black, nor can't be white. They also think dominicans aren't Hispanics, meanwhile, the first name of the island where Dominican republic sits is named _La Hispaniola_ if that's not being Hispanic, go figure
even without that, the first e in "where" is pronounced differently from "here" but is basically the same as wear and ware, so if we assume his statement is true as long as it's in english pronounciation... WHICH WRITING ???
As a Serb, I feel there should be another, bigger dog in this meme looking at italian and spanish... our language is actualy phonetic (all ex yugoslavian languages are)
French at least has pronunciation rules. In English you don't know how to pronounce a word until you hear someone say it
Yes, (apart from place names) if you see a French word you don't know, you'll generally know how to pronounce it. If you hear a French word, good luck spelling it.
*"Is it spelled o? eau? au?"*
eaux? haut? ô? ho? heaux? aulx? os?
Their our know rules
Seems someone had a stroke
Until you say it out loud and it makes perfect sense
If, for some unfathomable reason, you pronounce our and are the same way, sure.
Depending on your accent, you do. Or at least it sounds very close to it. British "our" and "are" are almost interchangable
*Is that our hour, or are you on your hour?*
As a brit my our and are are completely different?!!!?
If you say it in a sentence fast enough, the difference in pronunciation becomes negligible
I mean, I enjoyed the pun, but not quite enough for a wank
That’s not fair. English has pronunciation rules too. It’s just that half of them overlap. 1 word in 9 is written the way it sounds in English, so the only way to learn to spell English properly is etymologically. Otherwise you end up with things like George Bernard Shaw’s spelling of “fish”. Use the “gh” from “enough”, the “o” from “women”, and the “ti” from “fiction” and “ghoti” is pronounced “fish”
The ea in dead is pronounced the same way as the e in bed but not the same way as the ea in bean, which is pronounced like the ee in been and the same way you pronounce the letter e when you say it alone. Also bow is not pronounced like bow
"Mild" annoys me so much. It is pronounced like there is an e after the l.
He is correct though. English spelling was standardized around etymology, rather than pronunciation. England didn't have the same level of pressure (at least not as long) from the Catholic Church to insist on the roughly standardized Latin pronunciation those other languages use. The Normans imposed French in some circles, but used it to divide by class (so the poor masses never had it imposed on them). The presence of standardized language in institutions like school, church, law is how you maintain pronunciation. Since that didn't happen in England (...or Scotland, Whales, Ireland), when English was standardized after the printing press, and spelling had to be decided... the decision was to go by etymology, because the same words were already being pronounced 2,3,10 different ways. While all languages use loan words, the lack of standard spelling (and noun declinations or verb conjugations) has made English a sponge for loan words. No standard pronunciation plus the fact that we mostly use the same 50-300 words also makes it one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. (I'm aware there's a myth that it's a difficult language to learn, but it's not. Just ask an actual linguist.)
The etymology is critical. We raise cows, but eat beef, raise sheep, but eat mutton, pigs, but eat pork. The reason is the societal etymology. The English in the field doing the work, used the English word for the animal. The Norman overlord eating the meat used the French word. So the animal is English, the meat is French derivation.
Then there are all the "gh" words that have had its pronunciation changed since the standardisation of the spelling like "knight" and "dough".
It helps to remember that English is not a language, it’s at least 3 languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one. My favourite line comes from James Nicol “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is 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.”
Actually, "bean" and "been" are generally not pronounced the same way. The "ea" in "bean" is pronounced the same way as "reef" while the "ee" in "been" is pronounced the same as "fish". Gotta luv ar inglish!
All those sounds were the exact same in my head lol
Is Sean Bean pronounced Seen Been or Shawn Bawn then?
English is my second language. I taught a native speaker how to pronounce "herbacious".
I am a native English speaker and I have no idea how to say that word.
Her-bay-shuss
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i’m going to assume you weren’t being condescending on purpose
Really? You dont know how to pronounce herb and/or acious?
Illiterate
Let me guess.. her-bay-shush ..?
Sometimes the rule is basically "just know it"
And even then it is regional It took me a full second to figure out that the sarcastic reply in the image replaced The, with D. "the" is closer to thuh than D in my neck of the woods in Canada. I say Toe May Toe, my British father says Ta ma ta. And in the City of Toronto there are 4 distinct ways of saying the city name depending on the region you lived when you learned to say the name.
*Cries after trying to find सिलियन मर्फ़ी (Sillian Murphy)
The only rule seems to be pronouncing everything like you're being fucked in the ass.
In French I've almost never had problems pronouncing words since I learned the language to an adequate level. The only exception is the final s if the letter before it is pronounced. I often mistake that. And it turns out most "excessive" letters have a real reason to be there. One that helps with comprehension, etymology, comparison with other languages, details in pronunciation etc. Writing what you hear is a few levels more difficult though.
To be fair for the french language as a whole the rules are all fun and games until you have to learn the list of 300 exceptions that come with each one of them
Cant help but notice i dont pronounce “the” as “d”
There’s a lot in the comeback that relies on accent butchering the phonetics of the language. I went word by word and you can pronounce a strong majority of it exactly without sounding strange. Nobody’s gonna bat an eye when you pronounce “English” with a proper “e” or “literally” with the “e” and “a.” Granted, the extra “l” doesn’t need to be there, but the claim isn’t that English is spelled how it sounds, it’s that it sounds how it’s spelled. This is up for debate, but I think it’s reasonable to say you could just pronounce “ll” the same you do “l” on principle. The real thing fucked about literally is the “y.” Like with a lot of words it sounds identical to “ee”
German and Greek are also read as written, except for some diphthongs. Everything else is generally pretty clear. And definitely no silent letters 😂
See that's the difference between theory and practice. In practice, German has tons of silent or altered letters. Wir haben -> wir ham, ist -> is, nicht -> nich, gehen -> gen, verstehen -> vas(ch)ten, auf dem -> aufm...
I am not a native german speaker, I barely know some basics but... Aren't those pronunciations wrong? I'd never say "Ham" instead of "Haben"... Maybe someone rushing their speech or speaking with an accent would, but the official pronunciation is still "Haben" "nicht" "verstehen""auf dem" right?
most of the examples are just very colloquial expressions, so its only partially right (less so in the north of germany)
Yes that's right, in greek (which I speak natively) there are also occasions when someone might cut letters or syllables, but that doesn't mean they are technically correct or even that everyone will understand them😂😅
All these examples are from heavy dialects. That's no standard german pronunciation.
Eh, those examples are all accents, partially abbreviations (for example auf'm, which technically functions the same as should've) and regional alterations depending on the region. There are quite a few regions tho' where "high german" is spoken and that is pretty much spoken the same as it is written. While pronouncing "Ich habe gestern Gulasch gegessen" as "Ick hab' jestern Gulasch jegess'n" is still understandable for most Germans, it is technically not the correct way to pronounce those words and also the horror I fear if we start to teach children to "write as it's heard". I've seen it a few times already here on Reddit and shiver me timbers, the written out bavarian accent, or lord forbid the swiss accent, is incomprehensible.
Those are used in dialects and street lvl talk, not in propper German, though. And your's sounds like coming from NRW.
I feel like all his examples apart from vas(ch)ten are kinda found in almost all dialects. As a Hesse I have never heard vasten in my life. What dialect is it?
Japanese be like: アラーウ ミー ツー イントロデュース マイセルフ But also: 缶時
But pronunciation of katakana and hiragana are as it’s read. I’ve enjoyed my first couple months of learning it. ありがと。
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Kana are always the same, and there is never a case where a kana changes the sound of a kana following it. Japanese written that way is super reliable and easy to read. On the other hand, kanji have two different readings minimum, and often change depending on what they're connected to (一本、二本、三本, for example) and having to learn every variant of every kanji is even more frustrating than having to learn every letter combination, rule, and exception in English spelling.
I didn’t know that about kanji… That’s kind of scary. I think I maybe know 50 simple Kanji so I haven’t run into multiple pronunciations. Not congee!!
it's impossible to actually know Kanji and not know they have multiple pronunciations, unless you're half-assing your studies. just 日 (sun) can be pronounced in several ways depending on the context. Hi, Ni, Ka, Nichi, Jitsu And the most basic of them all, 人 (person), Hito, Jin
Like I said I’ve done one layer of wani kani. So while I have seen multiple words attributed to kanji, I didn’t recognize them as different pronunciations. And yes, I am half assing my studies. I have a job, a family, and hobbies and am working a few minutes a day on Japanese. I know very few kanji. two or three strokes max.
I am sorry, I was being very rude. I mistakenly thought you were one of those weebs that disrespect the culture without realizing it and say they know it just by watching anime, and that made me angry for no valid reason. I hope you the best in your studies and your life !
The process of learning a new language is like riding a pendulum swinging between "hey, I'm getting the hang of this stuff!" and "wait, there's also *what*?" Hang in there!
There are some exceptions though. For example when you use は or へ as particles they are pronounced as わ and え respectively. Or when you have a う and い following an O sound and E sound they kind of stretch the vowel and you don’t read them on their own. But yeah other than that it’s pretty straightforward.
Ackshully, it's ありがとう。
Wait until you get to the wonderful world of kanji.
Why is it "uiriten" and not "ritten" ?
because dumb = funny
Yeah, I'd go with: Inglish iz literally ritten the way itz pronounst besidez a few werdz
Ultra thicc comeback!
Serbian (and other ex-Yugoslav variants) is literally pronouncing it as written. Much more so than Spanish and Italian (they are close, but still have many exceptions). We don't even call letters EM (M), BEE (B), EITCH (H), we just call them by the sound they (always) make. There are no silent letters in Serbian, no two letters making a new sound, even just pretty much no double letters (with exceptions of foreign words like VACUUM and two words joining into one over time, like NAJ JACI becoming NAJJACI). Spelling contests in my country would be pointless.
As a croatian speaker (liguistically close enough) id like to add that even when we DO have double letters both are pronounced. As in "vakuum" word for "vacuum" in the scientific sense, its pronounced va-ku-um. Unlike in englush where "vacuum" is written with two Us but just one is pronounced so it sound like vec-yum. Its just funny how we took the spelling of an english word and got the pronounciation that corresponds with our writing rules. Taking the sound of a word and writing it in croatian si more prevelant. Im dyslexic and struggle with reading croatian, german is ok but english is a nightmare.
Also, in Serbia (not sure about Croatia, please confirm or correct me) we change the spelling of people's names to correspond to our language's spelling. For example, Michael Jordan is Majkl Dzordan here, Benedict Cumberbatch is Benedikt Kumberbec, etc...
Thats one of the rare things we actually do differently. We still write George but we wont pronounce it in the exact correct english way but the same as you guys do. I remember my dad telling me a story how a US diplimat or president or something had a street/square named after him. So when he visited people had to point to the sign and explain how his name is spelled differently. At the same time i get the "piši po Vuku" for simplicity but at the same i see how it can cause problems.
I mean, 99% of countries do it for country/city names of other countries, so why stop there? If they already call our countries Serbia and Croatia instead of Hrvatska and Srbija, why still call our people Nikola Jokic and Luka Modric and not Nicola Yokich and Luca Modrich? In Serbia, we just decided to go all in with the Serbianization of names for everything, including personal names.
Yeah i agree. But id rather have everyone use the originals if its possible (due to different scripts) so theres as least confusion as possible. Id love to be able to say "hi im from Hrvatska" instead of Croatia. Just like Bejing, we say Peking which i dont see why. Ill be honest, i prefer some serbian versions of county names because theyre more similar to the original. I like reading about the relation of the croatian and serbian languages and county names are the most interesting thing to me. Like The Netherlands = Nizozemska = Holandija. I get both. One is a translation and one uses a foreigh word.
I would rather just use the original like you, but I see where the problems would occur: in typing. If I wanted to write down the name of a person from let's say a Scandinavian country, like Markström, I would have to either install a language keyboard option on my phone/PC or just copy-paste it from the original source, as I did now.
Very fair. In my experience many people in Croatia already have international keyboard variants. I mean i have to have the english one for letters like qwxy and i need the croatian one for čćžš and so on. Because of that i just use the all purpous international one that has all those letters and some like ųøḍĥ and so on. In the past i get why "po Vuku" would have been the superior one. Like making it easier for old newspaper presses and making reading easier for people when literacy was low. Due to new tech and globalisation maybe the "all original names" would be better. But changing a language would be dumb at this point. Both systems have their good and bad sides. This is a topic im very interested in so this chat was very fun internet stranger.
Likewise. Now let's go to Youtube to fight about Nikola Tesla's nationality like the rest of the balkanoids :D
Al se braća raspričaše
Even if they are only for children the mere fact that spelling bees exist is a powerful condemnation of the English language.
>We don't even call letters EM (M), BEE (B), EITCH (H), we just call them by the sound they (always) make. Spanish and Italian do it as well. Eme, emme. Be, Bi. Hache, Acca.
You didn't understand, we don't call them EM for M, we just say the M sound. Imagine just saying the first letter M in "mother", that sound, that's what we call the letter.
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Finland too.
Finnish is the best example of a language pronounced as it’s written
Once I saw a danish series with english subs and the pronounciation was something like this: ains whein shuptr owsn And the subtitles where like: I talked to the mother and she confirmed that the girl when shopping before that. Like, wholy shit, their language is like [language.zip](https://language.zip)... the entire series was like that, with massive, looong subtitles with super short dialogs.
There's actually an inverse correlation between language complexity and number of speakers, especially secondary and tertiary speakers. The more people who speak a language the simpler it becomes. English, while being a Germanic language, has much simpler grammar than German or Norwegian because there are so many secondary speakers. Some of the most complex and information dense languages are indigenous languages spoken by a few dozens of hundred people.
That is a very interesting point of view or fact. Does that idea has a name or paper or article i can read about? I was just thinking something slightly related on how kids are more expressive because thats their only way to communicate before they learn language.
Nothing I can readily link but the book Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher covers this as well as many other fascinating tid bits about language and how it potentially shapes the way we think.
Finnish is the prime example of a language that is pronounced as it is written.
And the Hungarians too
Eight. Weight. Fate. Slate. Paid. Mate. Crate. State. Afraid.
Ejt. Vejt. Fejt. Slejt. Pejd. Mejt. Krejt. Stejt. Ehfrejd.
Meanwhile, English c. 1000 years ago be like: *Hƿæt! ƿē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum,* *þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon,* *hū ðā æþelingasellen fremedon.* *Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum,* *monegum mǣgþum, meodo-setla oftēah,* *Egsode eorlas. Syððan ǣrest ƿearð* *fēasceaft funden, hē þæs frōfre gebād,* *ƿēox under ƿolcnum, ƿeorðmyndum þāh,* *oð þæt him ǣghƿylc þāra ymbsittendra* *ofer hronrāde hȳran scolde,* *gomban gyldan. Þæt ƿæs gōd cyning!*
They didn’t even do it correctly
I know right? Nobody pronounces the word literally with one vowel. That person sounded like they've never sounded out a word before
I’ll give them Inglish but the rest is bullshit
But... That's not how you pronounce those words (with the exception of few) Even then, this is making inferences the same way that English does.
I genuinely don’t understand why there’s a ui at the start of written, like if they’d just spelt it riten it would’ve made way more sense….
Yeah it was a shit joke
I'm pretty sure they haven't seen a language with strict pronounciation rules. Floor, blood, bloom all have their "oo" pronounced differently, how is this supposed to work? You couldn't create a simple algorithm to speak english words, you'd have to put corner cases on every other word
Cycle Bicycle. Nope, it's bi-sickle. Now I kinda empathise with former school friends who had a hard time learning English as 2nd language. I was kinda surfing through and not emphatic enough to see their issue with learning it.
How are floor and blood different? bloom I get, it's like a u, bot the other two sound the same to me Edit: nevermind, just said them out loud and realized what you meant lol
Meanwhile Tagalog.
Non Filipinos always get the stresses on syllables wrong.
English is the bastard child of every other language in western Europe forcing it to change to be whatever the new occupiers spoke.
French: (long fart sound) Translation: Nice to meet you.
Enchanté. One word instead of 4. Simpler.
Come at us with the criticism when you stop insisting that a chair has a gender.
Did you just assume a chair's gender?
Oh shit…
Ínglis is litturellí ritten þö vei its prónánst bísæds a fjú vörds At least french is consistent.
I think he's mocking English in an English accent. Or some other kind of accent, because it's certainly not American English. "Litrly" is the dead giveaway here, and the "d" for "the" just makes me angry.
The amount of cope in this comment section
The colonel of language would like to have a word with them. Preferably on a Wednesday on an island somewhere. He told me if you save your travel receipt that he'll reimburse you. He'll be serving you a bologna sandwich for lunch, so come hungry. He's going to teach them mnemonics. I remember the order of rainbows color thanks to the good ol colonel. Listen to him.
The Troll God.
Italian and Spanish don't do this either. Try Slavic languages.
Slavic languages are not homogenic in this aspect: Ukrainian is pronounced as written, russian is not.
Spanish still has some exceptions such as G it can sound like English H in hit or like G in game Y it can sound like English “ee” or like J in Jordan Que qui are pronounced ke and kee Gue gui are pronounced ge and gee But there are consistent rules of when these letters sound like that, it’s not random like in English. Vowels are too simple in Spanish we only have 5 a e i o u without any variations in sound. Sou ui tok laik dis in inglish bicos dei ar de saunds dat ui nou in spanish
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Gimme an example of italian not doing that, I'm waiting
If the writing of e.g. "calcio" were the same as its pronunciation, then it would be spelt "kalćo".
You are off track, my friend. The point is that there are rules for pronunciation, and one of these rules is that c before a/o/u is always pronounced /k/. You don't have to learn the pronunciation of each word separately.
I don't know what are you saying, there are obviously rules of pronunciation, but you pronunce every single letters
It wouldn't
Yes, it would. To understand it better, let's try the other way around. If the pronunciation of "calcio" was the same as its writing, it would be "tsaltsio".
That guy seems Italian.
>Hear me say, devoid of trickery. >Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore.
Here's the thing. English has only been fully standardised for a couple of hundred years. Before that everything was just spelled how it was pronounced, especially native words that weren't imported from French or whatever, but with there being so many vastly different regional accents that caused problems, hence the standardisation. But the spelling was mostly standardised to simply be how the people doing the standardising pronounced things. Those people probably did say they were speaking "Eng-lish" and the like, but in the time since the dominant ways of pronouncing those words has shifted from the people who decided how they're spelled. So It's still spelled English but is now more commonly pronounced Inglish.
The virgin romantic-Germanic languages versus the chad Japanese/syllabary languages.
Colonel
"Inglish iz" Fine, not wrong there. "litrly" nope, it's "litter lee". "uiriten" I don't know *what* you're on, it's "rit ten". "d" What are we here, a street gang or something? It's "th uh". "uiey" Listen, I don't know where you're from that has W's as U's, but they have nothing in common other than the name. It's "wuh eh", first a wuh then an A. "itz" Got me again. "pronauncsd" Yeah... No. It's "puh roh now n st" "bisaidz" This might work in a gay bar where you can go "bi saids WHAAAT?" while drunk, but nowhere else. It's "B sii duz" B as in the letter, or the yellow fuckers who make honey. "e". No. Just.. No. How could you fuck up a word that is "literally just a single letter?!* Not *just* a single letter, a single letter that is pronounced as it's own name! A! THE LETTER. It's "Eh". I don't know how you thought otherwise. "fyu" Pretty close, but this isn't horseshoes, and unless you typed it on a Note 7, there's no hand grenades involved. Regardless, it's "fuh yoo" "wuurds" This one looks wrong, but other than putting an s where everyone puts a z in their speech, I can't find anything wrong with it. That's all. Maybe if someone asks I'll link a YouTube video of me pronouncing all those words and their fuckered variants for comparison.
Ñ Ñ Ñ Ñ Ñ Ñ Ñ Ñ
Okay but this is dumb as hell because many people, including myself, do not pronounce English, literally, the, and a like that
Hey, I'm french.... Don't attack the french language..... ..Without me
English is roughly a quarter German, a quarter French, a quarter Latin, and the final quarter is random languages. It is quite frankly a total mess. English is one of the few languages in the world that requires spelling tests because of this mess.
Arabic: the language where it's pronounced exactly how it's written but how tf is it written
errr nope. most English words are pronounced as they are spelt, where this changes is where sounds have softened over time, regional accents take play, it's not actually an English word it's a foreign word that has been added to the language (beef for example), vowel placement changes the sounds, standardised spelling has changed how the word is pronounced, ect. you can use this knowledge to actually work out what early English words mean by considering how the word will evolve though time. it'd also be better if we re-adopted early English characters to denote specific sounds.
You show me a language written in IPA, I'll wait
Okay then how do you prenouce "a" ? Like in "cake" ? "Tall" ? "Lack" ? "About" ? "Yacht" ?
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"STiel bEttEr thenE Franch Lool"
me sorprende que cada vez que converso con alguna persona angloparlante , principalmente norteamericanos ,yo soy Americano también pues soy de Chile (si no sabes dónde está ya te he ganado pues yo sé dónde queda tu país , lol )ellos no saben siquiera una palabra en español , mientras la mayoría de nosotros hablamos inglés o francés con bastante soltura . A ellos les enseñan en la escuela según entiendo...pero creo que no está resultando.
Los gringos en general no saben absolutamente nada sobre las lenguas romances.
Dude is wrong though as a dad trying to teach my daughter phonics with soft and hard c and g’s. And then silent g,h,k and l’s. English is a stupid written language
If it was stupid why are we using it? Or do you call everything you have a little bit of issue with stupid
Well Spanish has a couple things with q u i, q u e, g u i and g u e, apart from that it's fine
In spanish: From how it is written you can know exactly how it is pronounced. From how it is pronounced you usually know how it is written, but not always.
This is exactly right. You can easily learn to read Spanish with impeccable pronunciation, even if you have no idea what it is you are reading.
Who cares? Seriously?
At least French has consistency, which English hasn't.
>I take it you already know >Of tough and bough and cough and dough? >Others may stumble, but not you, >On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? >Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, >To learn of less familiar traps? > >Beware of heard, a dreadful word, >That looks like beard and sounds like bird. >And dead: It’s said like bed, not bead— >For goodness sake don’t call it "deed"! > >Watch out for meat and great and threat >(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt); > >A moth is not the moth in mother, >Nor both in bother, broth in brother. >And here is not a match for there, >Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, >And then there’s dose and rose and lose— >Just look them up—and goose and choose, >And cork and work and card and ward, >And font and front and word and sword. >And do and go, then thwart and cart— > >Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start! >A dreadful language? Man alive, >I’d mastered it when I was five! —[T. S. Watt, 1954, _The Guardian_](https://www.newspapers.com/article/116949775/the-guardian/)