Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
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Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you’re good.
Bonus panel:
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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.
english is my second language and i feel it has wasted a lot of brain memory, because i had 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
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.”
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?
mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants
Oh yeah!
that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling
Holy shit!
My mind was blown when my favorite 90s band “Live” was actually the live from “Alive” and not live from " Living".
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.
Is “hiccough” pronounced the same as “hiccup?” Because if it is, I’m gonna have to put that in the same category as “colonel.”
and lieutenant in British English.
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.
Yes English is tough, though through practice comes understanding.
You missed the opportunity to throw “thorough” in there after “through”.
