Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
Hover tooltip text:
Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
Bonus panel:
RSS Feed: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rss
English is a creole gone feral.
Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes... and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. Most of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.
I'm in south Florida. Doctors' offices usually have multilingual signs. Haitian Creole always looks goofy, but you immediately realize - that's what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French's oodles of rules that all matter, and English's very simple rules we don't follow, and said "Sa trè estipid, nou ka fè pi byen."
mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants
Oh yeah!
that's what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling
Holy shit!
that's what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French's oodles of rules that all matter
Can't we just use the Finnish rule of "each letter is only pronounced one way ever" and solve all the headaches?
If we ditch latin for IPA, maybe.
Maybe.
The more likely outcome is that some words would adopt those revised pronunciations, but most wouldn't, fracturing the rules by creating arbitrary exceptions. This has of course happened over and over and over. That is the shape of the hole we are in.
"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." - James D. Nicoll
Yes English is tough, though through practice comes understanding.
My favorite version of what you just did is "English is tough; it can be understood through thorough thought, though."
You missed the opportunity to throw "thorough" in there after "through".
there is no understanding, just repetition of what you've heard
Is "hiccough" pronounced the same as "hiccup?" Because if it is, I'm gonna have to put that in the same category as "colonel."
it is, but “hiccup” is the original spelling despite people claiming otherwise
There's an interesting history behind why colonel is spelled and pronounced how it is...
https://www.deseret.com/1996/8/4/19258272/french-italian-roots-explain-why-colonel-has-an-r-sound
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word's history. The French word "coronel" is derived from the Italian word "colonnello." When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first "l" sound to an "r" sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two "l" sounds or two "r" sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration "dissimilation."
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter "r" was changed back to an "l," making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
Pretty much any time a word is pronounced weirdly, you can blame the French.
and lieutenant in British English.
I'm gonna have to put anyone who spells it this way into the morgue if they keep it up tbh
Spanish in Mexico gets weird with the X:
Mexico - Mejico
Xochimilco - Sochimilco
Mexica - Mechica
Necaxa - Necaksa
'tis what happens when you staple nahuatl et al onto spanish
My mind was blown when my favorite 90s band "Live" was actually the live from "Alive" and not live from " Living".
I guess they didn't learn from ~~Lead~~ Led Zeppelin
english is my second language and i feel it has wasted a lot of brain memory, because i have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of each word separately and the link them together, when i could just learn one of those and know the other
Same and in most situations I can pass as an English first speaker.
I was at IKEA buying a bed frame and asked the person at the counter if she had put the slats on the bill... But I pronounced it like slates because I was sure I had seen an "e" at the end of the word and there went the illusion 🤷
This reminds me of a poem called "The Chaos" which highlights how dumb English can be as a language
There's also "English is a stupid language" which focuses on word constructions instead of pronunciation
That's not linguistic criticism, that's Jerry Seinfeld's rejected material.
There's an I Love Lucy scene where Ricky is trying to prove he is capable of reading to their baby, and the book is filled with -ough words.
My heart goes out to anyone trying to learn this language as a second (or third or...) language.
Yes! I’ve made that comment a lot; French is easier to learn than English because you only need to learn how to pronounce syllables, while in English you have to learn every single word. It’s insane.
Lol. Spoken and written French are so different they’re basically two different languages…
As a two year Duolingo slave I can attest french is in fact 3 languages in a coat.
There's written french, official spoken french and then the soup everyone speaks because nobody cares about proper speech rules.
French is still pretty consistent once you know the syllables. If you give me a word I don't know, I'll still be able to pronounce it correctly. You can't expect that with English.
Les poules couvent souvent au couvent.
Ok, it's true that verbs have different pronunciation rules. If you know that it is the verb, it's not an issue. But I admit that it can be tricky for new learners.
Yeah, everything’s easy once you’ve learned the exceptions!
So, heteronyms do exist, and there’s several hundreds of them. Yes, less prevalent than English, still though.
Now let’s turn around: homophones.
How do you spell [so]?
L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]? Is the author afraid of heights or authors? 🤔
Il y a plein d‘[o] [o] [o]. Good luck writing that down.
And let’s not go down the route of ambiguous verbs, where different verbs end up with the exact same conjugation, shall we. Rayions? Peignant? Moules (also plural of moule, lol)?
Oh, what about those accents? Say what you want about German Umlauts, but at least they’re consistent. Why does accent grave not change the pronunciation of a and u, but e? How do you know where to put an accent circonflexe?
Loic Suberville's YouTube shorts on French vs English (and sometimes Spanish) are pretty entertaining to show that they're all difficult as a non-primary language. :)
Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of ... English, but omfg did it not gel with me.
Yeah the general lack of gendered nouns is one of English's better traits, even if most of our words are bastardized words from other languages.
It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.
When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.
It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.
You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.
I actually ran into someone on Reddit who thought we should embrace it. They might be here too, I don't know.
How would one go about making a "font" that looks like the bonus panel? It's harder to learn all the logographs but you can fit a lot of information on a page that way.
just learn chinese
To answer your question: You'd have to have ligatures for every single word in existence so that is not possible.
I wonder what character set would work best for writing the English language. I'm legitimately thinking Korean could handle it better than the latin alphabet
Oh, can you expand on that a bit? I don't really know how Korean writing works.
Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
Share this community: [!linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works](/c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works)
Serious Linguistics community: !linguistics@mander.xyz