I have noticed that a lot of English speakers and ESL learners are puzzled by the inclusion of the ‘b’ on ‘limb’, or the first ‘d’ in Wednesday? I do actually pronounce the ‘b’ on limb, it’s a small-plosive at the end. It’s hard to hear, so I can understand why it would get dropped by a lot of people, but it is not - strictly speaking - silent. To me, ‘Lim’ is a Korean name, completely different from ‘limb’.
Likewise with the D in Wednesday. I do leave the second ‘e’ out of Wednesday unless I am making a pointed reference to the fact that it is Wotan’s Day, but there are a lot of ‘hard to hear’ consonants that we do pronounce. English is kind of notorious for these, for example ‘strength’. We string together vowels and consonants pretty arbitrarily; which is why an educated English speaker can pronounce Nietzsche correctly despite it having five pronounced consonants in a row.
At some point in the 20th century (19th?) ‘shew’ became ‘show’, but I still pronounce it like ‘shew’.
One thing that does bother me about English is the useless case system. We inherit this and we get none of the benefits. I mean I/me, who/whom. It doesn’t give you any more freedom in word order or anything; it’s just a useless relic and you can see it often does disappear in vernacular. I also wouldn’t be averse if people dropped the useless word transformations for plurals.
A last one I notice: most Americans will pronounce ‘to’ by itself to rhyme with ‘do’ but in a sentence it gets significantly shortened (almost ‘tu’), even thoug ‘do’ does not.
How about getting a functioning alphabet? It’s no wonder you can not pronounce stuff, when letters serve no other purpose than to help you recognise the words.
How about getting a functioning alphabet? It’s no wonder you can not pronounce stuff, when letters serve no other purpose than to help you recognise the words.
I understand the sentiment, but it’s not really possible. English is a polyglot and international language; yes many of our letters are useless for pronunciation but that is because we absorb anything and everything. The best way to understand how to pronounce a word is to recognize where it is from, which means you need to know a little bit about 3-15 different languages. I don’t see any realistic solution to this; it would require us to implement some kind of alphabet soup that would look like a cross between Swedish and Pinyin.
But I agree, learning to pronounce German words from written text is pretty trivial if you have a ear for the gutteral and glottal (though German grammar is a nightmare sometimes). But German is a very limited continental language; it does not have the same history and polymorphic structure of English. There are too many sounds and too many words in our language to be able to ‘clean it up’ the way Germany or Japan have.
They tried that when they Romanized Japanese, and it still doesn’t work. And Japanese has far fewer sounds than English.
That is what you tell yourself, but the real reason is that you let yourself get successfully invaded by the French.
Also by the Swedish, Danish, various Germans, the Romans (and most of the words come from Latin, not French), not to mention the native speakers of such bizarre languages as Old Irish and Welsh. Add to that the many German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese loan words which have become second nature (Ramen).
You mean, the Germans did not let the French take them over and confuse their language.
I mean that, for whatever reason, the central Continent annihilated Gothic and normalized around a North German so much that even the Austrians speak North German.
If I were going to bother making a synthetic English I’d make it more Old Germanic (like Norse), I don’t much care for Romance languages; despite the billion words I get from them. This would involve bringing back lots of cases and inflections, and I don’t know how well English speakers could understand that, myself included. I am too used to this arbitrary-ass analytic language.
Ricky I believe there are actually slightly more words that come from French than come directly from Latin - of course, the vast majority of these French words ultimately come from Latin.
14th or 15th, and it’s always been pronounced with an “oh” sound.
I know that’s not true. There are plenty of English actors who use an ‘ew’ sound.
It is - strictly speaking - silent.
Again, wrong by objective usage. Most Americans it is silent or nearly so. But I have heard plenty of native English speakers use it, because it is different than ‘lim’.
We don’t get many from classical Latin, for sure; but we have had a large influx of literary Latin. A lot of our pronunciations and spellings are closer to Latin than French. French is, of course, a major influence; quite possibly they overlap/reinforce one another.
I’ve never heard 'em; are you sure you’re not just hearing accent artifacts (i.e., people whom you hear saying “ew” think they’re saying “oh”; so you’d hear “ew” for all their “oh” sounds)?
Again, I’ve never heard any pronunciation other than “lim”, but I just checked half a dozen on-line dictionaries, American and English, and my off-line OED, and none of them have any pronunciation other than “lim”, either. And the original Old English spelling was “lim”, if that counts for anything.
To someone speaking a language like Old Norse, French and Latin probably seem nearly identical; especially when you’re dealing with it among literate professionals who are mainly reading and not speaking the language. Likewise, to a person who speaks Chinese I doubt there is much noticeable difference between Dutch and Deutsch.
I just had a look on Wikipedia - they reckon Latin and French each account for about 29% of English words. I’d say the French-origin words are generally more common than the Latin ones, however (most of the Latin ones are probably technical terms). Consider that it says 26% of English words are of Germanic origin - I’d think most of the words I’ve used in this post (including repeats) are of Germanic origin.
Yes, as far as I can tell most of my ordinary vocabulary is Germanic, even if you take out the simple grammatical stuff (the). I think I use more Latin words than French ones, probably because physics comes up a lot more in conversation than coffee in my crowd. I’ve certainly talked about abjuration a lot, but not so much advocacy.
Those proportions make sense, just like the words that have the weirdest inflection and case rules in English are those which are the oldest. The words you use all the time are likely to retain closest to original (Germanic) forms, whereas we are going to adopt a lot of foreign words which will eventually be a larger absolute ratio despite their relatively lower use in speech.