Someone take this woman away from me (Real Life Rant)

[Eumerin]

Originally posted by Traska
You pronounce Fish "uhfish"?

Because in "rough" (pronounced ruf), the r is, of course the R sound, the ou is the U sound, and the gh is the F sound. Unless the r all by itself is the RU sound... which would be weird.

As for the "un" sound on melon and lemon... that's just freaky. I've never heard lemon pronounced any way but "leh-min".

The 'ou' is the 'uh' sound, but 'gh' can't make an 'f' sound unless preceded by 'ou'.

Perhaps a better way to describe is that 'ough' is to 'uf' what 'ch' is to, well, 'ch'.

Without the 'ou', the 'gh' is merely a 'g' and an 'h' making their normal individual sounds.

[Quesci]

The 'ou' is the 'uh' sound, but 'gh' can't make an 'f' sound unless preceded by 'ou'.

And the ti is only the "sh" sound when followed by "-on." The joke really doesn't work if you analyze it that much.

I first heard that joke on Batman, where the Egghead's lair is at "The Ghoti Oeufs Caviar Factory"

Robin: "Holy semantics, Batman. You never cease to amaze me!"
Batman: "No time for compliments, Robin. We must thwart some criminals. To the Batmobile!"

==============

In 200 years, spoken French will have only one sound, a vowel. All consonants and gaps between words and sentences will disappear, leaving only an extended "Eauuuuuuuuuuuu..." Meaning will be inferred from facial expression. Written French will stay exactly the same.

These consonants will not be entirely forgotten; they will migrate to Czech, which will by that time have no use for vowels. Everyone there will be named Srbsvk and Cmnlrkz

In 200 years, the English vocabulary will be the union of all other vocabularies, but the spelling will be original.

Similarly, the Japanese alphabet will be the union of all other alphabets in the world.

The Cyrillic alphabet will eventually be the same as the Latin alphabet, only backwards. A mirror will suffice for translating Russian into Polish.

Finally, in 200 years, entire books in Germany will be one word. Plus a verb at the end, of course.

=============

ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

(see the rest of the poem and more at English language humor)

[Aethia]

Quesci - you made me spit out my soda

Okay, let's not even go into the US differences between soda, pop, coke, Coke and other such carbonated beverages.

In college I studied international relations and one class was a linguistic based class. In it several theories were tossed out to the class and asked if true or false.

The phrase "Can I aks (pronounced as 'axe') you a question?" sparks a memory. The theory was that African Americans used the word 'axe' which then promoted violent tendencies (aka gang wars, shootings, etc.)

Well, iirc, the entire class agreed with that theory. We were wrong. In the days of slavery, slaves weren't allowed books or other literary items and language was passed down through the generations via oral tradition. Thus those individuals in the South learned the English language by listening to others.

In the North, a typesetter reversed the letters 's' and 'k' from the original spelling, which is how we have the word 'ask' instead of 'aks'.

I always remember that story and being chagrined by my own history. Funny what typos can do to the meaning (and pronounciation) of words.



In the North, whe

[Eumerin]

For shame on not knowing that one!

Its also theorized that one of the reasons that the 'Southern' accent came about was because black slaves were taking care of the white children while the children were young. The children then picked up some of the mannerisms of the slaves and never completely lost them.

However, for obvious reasons that theory isn't well liked by some.

And its also possible that its just plain not true.

[Quesci]

I'd believe it. My linguistics teacher once told the class that all the plays and movies about the revolutionary war or founding fathers got the accents wrong. He described the colonial new england accent as sonding like a modern day southern accent.

[Naito]

Must disagree...

Originally posted by Lilosh
"Now, These two items look Simu-ler" (Pronounced Sim-You-Lar. This is supposed to be Similar, for those who couldn't tell.)

I'm truly sorry, Lilosh, it really isn't similar at all, it's almost entirely different...

Naito

[Saleani]

Things like "thru" were devised by Dewey (the same one whose "decimal system" is used in many Libraries). He was not too thrilled about the variance in spelling variations in the way words were written and wanted to standardize the spellings.

People in the era of Shakespeare would probably laugh at us for wanting to spell words one way and only one way.

Regional dialects are mostly different vowel sounds for the words. Coding names for the census (and later for telephone directories) lead Odell and Russell to patent the Soundex algorithm (in 1918 no less!). Soundex is meant to figure out names by avoiding vowels. Soundex is still used for some computer operations and most SQL database servers have a soundex function. My Florida driving license starts with a soundex of my surname. Your's may also do the same.

[CeslynR]

As an English born girl, brought up in Scotland and recently moved to Canada, (and I have a degree in English language) I' m interested in this whole dabate.
Aethia, I have one question, if the 'aks' (for ask) comes from an oral tradition and 'ask' is a typsetting error from the americas, the why is 'ask' used in England? I do know frequently that the English was changed after the colonisation of the americas, (ie. the u was added in English to words such as colour and labour), hence the americans actually use the original spelling.
This doesn't seem to explain this situation though?

[Eumerin]

The typesetter story actually sounds fishy to me. I'm fairly certain that if I dug through my old Shakespeare texts I could find it being spelled 'correctly'.

As far as spelling goes, the first American dictionary was the work of Webster, iirc. If I remember the story, he went through the various spellings of different words and arbitrarily chose the ones that he prefered, and put those versions in his dictionary. That would be the explanation for why English and American spellings evolved somewhat differently.

[Quesci]

From linguistlist.org:

"The Standard West Saxon Old English ancestor of 'ask' was 'axian', pronounced, of course, /ks/, and /aks/ can still be heard in some accents from the South of England, as well as in some US accents. But there has always been variation in the ordering of the /s/ and the /k/ in this word, even before 1100 AD (in Old English both 'axian' and 'ascian' are seen). So you certainly can't argue that 'there is no valid linguistic tradition for the word "aks" -- both pronunciations are very old indeed."

From RootsWeb.com

"'Ax' or 'axe' as a regular or dialect metathetic variant of 'ask' has a very long history, going back well into the Old English period. The OE forms were 'ascian', 'aescian', acsian', 'ahsian'"

"If you saw the PBS "The Irish Tenors" you heard them deliberately pronounce it AKS in the old Irish songs. I guess you don't have to be from the Bronx or Spanish Harlem or the American South."

[Tweedledea]

I have to grit my teeth sometimes when my colleague speaks.

'Pacific' (specific, naturally)
'Crozzont' (croissant, hah)
'I'm weary of ...' ('I'm wary of...' /sigh)