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They never did. Their spelling, meaning, and pronunciation are the same as they have always been.
The bigger problem is that lose should rhyme with pose or close. Loose is fine.
Don't get me started on ough and ead.
The lead soldier kneaded dough in the bough brush while they read the book that they previously read while taking a furlough in the rough.
I read this and all I could think of was "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
How can the soldier knead anything if they're made of lead?
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Loose rhymes with noose. I can't think of a word that's spelled and pronounced like lose so you have me there.
choose lose cruise booze
all rhyme lol
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english is a very silly language that's evolved so you can do almost anything with it
it's a risky strat but it seems to have worked
they are very different in my mind. perhaps because i first came across them in their respective contexts through reading.
even when speaking, to me, lose rhymes with booze and loose rhymes with goose.
this has never been a problem for me, personally.
And here's me, another non-native speaker, just learning that booze doesn't rhyme with goose.
So did you think "goose" was pronounced like "choose?" Understandable.
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May as well combine words with the same pronunciation into one word and call it Simplified English (/s)
Honestly tho, this is one of the features of Simplified Chinese, which created the infamous "fuck vegetables" (干菜类).
It's meant to say "dried vegetables" (乾菜類 in TC), but 乾→干. Meanwhile, there exists 幹→干 as well, which means "fuck".
So this is where I find cucumber?
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I mean yeah 'loose' could probably be pronounced like 'choose' and it would still make sense, but it absolutely wouldnt make sense for 'lose' to be pronounced like 'moose' or 'goose'. Im not sure what you even mean when you say they switched meanings either because thats just false.
They didn't, except among the ignorant and autocorrect.
It's a miracle I know it, and having to teach someone how to read and spell was an eye opener for me trying to explain "this is like this except for this one word because... Reasons and sometimes there's a variation like this because...reasons" so many times.
Agreed, I am teaching my second son to read.
I am having the same conversations as when I taught my first to read.
"ok, this word is a 'sight word' because it doesn't make the sounds you expect. It says won, but it looks like it says on-e"
Mostly the "reasons" just boil down to etymology. We spell things the way the languages we stole them from spelled them.
Having to explain to my spanish speaking friends why an english word is spelled one way but pronounced another entirely different way gave me the same experience. So many times i have to tell them: “i don’t know english is just weird.”
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What about the words that are only different in tone.
Content and content
There's ~~too~~ ~~to~~ two different ways to pronounce and spell many words.
Fuck, that's three!
Steady up over ~~their~~ ~~they're~~ there.
Those three sound completely different to me, as far as how I’ve been pronouncing them goes. “Their” doesn’t have the extra lagging e sound (as in the e in err) in “there” where I curl my tongue upward at the end. “They’re” preserves the ey sound in “they”, just concatenated with an r as in err sound.
When I say, “They’re there,” people can make out what I’m saying, though as more people seem to tell me that these are just homophones, maybe they’ve just been relying on context.
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Are you familiar with “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité?
Deep breath:
I believe the generally accepted scientific term for the English language is "clusterfuck".
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Trust me, it is equally frustrating for most Americans...or almost, anyway.
Wait, if they swapped meanings and then swapped spellings then doesn't that mean they're the same as before?
Grrr! English strikes again!
both come from the same root
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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