[ 25-Dec-21 ] Jolly and Horny PoA - Discussion

[TeeJay]

10 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

And beyond all that, you can have a lot of fun with just "th", "ou" and "gh". Add or remove one letter and every sound in the word changes. "Tough -> Though -> Through -> Thought..." The spoken language is completely divorced from its spelling.

I wanna add in

Time to put my University degrees to work here...

Simply, English is the way it is because it is, as I put it, a derivative language instead of a root language. And the reason I call it a derivative is that it built itself out of (and my brain is fuzzy on the details as it's been about 15 years) seven different languages (one or two of which were the local Gaelic - Welsh Gaelic being one of them - and rest being invading languages including Roman (Latin), Frank, and Norwegian). So the reason that you have such a wide variation on spelling and pronunciation is that the words are all taken from different sources to begin with. And if you think the spellings and such is wacked now, you should have seen what it was like before English codified itself somewhere in the 11th century I think it was? It had all sorts of spellings for the same word with the same meaning. And, still, what variations we have today sounds completely different to Old English, which sounds like its own language until you listen really hard and pick out the words.

And because of that English is not spoken the way it is written.

And, also because of that, English continues to grow as it simply and easily adds in new words to its lexicon every day. English doesn't need to translate it, it just incorporates it in. It's like the Borg. lol.

Tune in next week when we discuss how English words are built (and how you can build new ones) and that there's only 3 rules to written English.

[natstar]

Last day of the event so don't forget to claim your rewards/finishing tasks in time don't leave it for the last minute server normally lags with everyone claiming rewards.

[Liliat]

I finished the last goal ~3h ago, and claimed all rewards just now, after refilling my combativity. Perfect!

(What? Playing with fire? 🔥)

[DvDivXXX]

6 hours ago, TeeJay said:

Time to put my University degrees to work here...

I can relate, as I share my life with a woman who used to teach French in a UK Uni, and is now an English teacher in France, all the while doing freelance translation work both ways for the past decade or so. I mean I'm fluent in both languages, but she knows tons of nitty-gritty stuff that still goes well over my head. ^^

IIRC, one of the big issues for English spelling is that at some point all accents and special characters were removed from the alphabet, among other oversimplifications like the destruction of any trace of genres and almost everything but the most basic of conjugation. Which made English the simplest written language ever, but also very much disconnected from its spoken counterpart.

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Anyways, I might be able to vote for the poll soon-ish for once. I'm only missing Levi for now, but I'll get her next week when I have enough kobans for this PoV. ^^ It's been a while since I was able to vote before the poll is long forgotten (I still stand by my "don't judge a book by its cover" approach to girls in HH).

[Zteev]

Managed to finish on the last day, was happy with that. Bought the extra path as usual.

On an English language aside, another really interesting thing is that both UK English and US English have different word for the same thing, including things invented primarily in one or the other place, and the country where things weren't invented uses a different word than the invention used.

[Zorba the Geek]

On 12/31/2021 at 4:19 AM, DvDivXXX said:

Never apologize for speaking English. I've learned the language through US sources myself, but if the English language is anything besides more and more global, it's inconsistent in general and a complete mess in terms of pronunciation and spelling in particular. Wherever you are in any English-speaking country, it's a challenge to find two people who speak the same English. Until someone figures out an alphabet that actually fits the language and its billion different pronunciations for every single letter of the Roman alphabet, it won't improve. This is an "EN" forum, definitely not a "US" forum or anything as restrictive as that. No limited edition is favored (or favoured) over any other. ^^

Glad you liked this PoA.

English could be regarded as a foreign language to native English speakers, too.  So many inconsistencies reflecting a multi-ethnic origin of English evolution as a language.  We have 'Plough', 'Thorough', 'Thought', 'Through', "Though', 'Enough' to name a few examples with one syllabic root.  These examples could be seen as a number of English dialects that were transliterated when English as a written language started to become widespread.  This made a real mess of Samuel Johnson's attempts at writing the first English dictionary (as comically portrayed in an episode of Blackadder).

I'm interested in the etymology of English and how the language was derived.  We have Celtic Britain (interesting how similar Breton French is to Welsh and Cornish - Western Celts or Britons (utterly different from the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland).  Then there were the Anglo-Saxons who gave us Old English with its mix of Fresland, Nordic and German (in a time German, itself, was evolving into a distinctive language of its own - notably Prussian).  Contemporary were the Romans who gave us little of their language until the Normans (under the leadership of William Bastard) arrived in 1066.  When the legal system and its idiom evolved into its modern form, French Latin was widely adopted, and was further incorporated into medical idiom.  What is especially fascinating to me is how Norman-French names for meat cuts as applied to cooking became widely used in English: Poultry (Poulette - fem), Beef (Boeuf), mutton (mouton), pork (le porc), etc.  Of course the French gender attributes were not kept in English.  Then we had the evolution of personal pronouns (like thy, thine, thou from singular of 'you' to its plural forms - King James English.

Whatever the case, English is still evolving, sometimes in ways I don't like, pedant that I am.  My current gripe is how a verb has become a noun without any grammatical acceptability.  The most annoying example is 'the learnings I have taken from such and such'  The Forum spell checker even told me there is no such word!).  Of course, the correct word is 'Lesson'.  'Learning' is an indefinite present tense verb; 'Lesson' is its noun equivalent.  Why 'Learning' entered the lexicon as a noun I have no idea, but it really annoys me.  I fear it will stick around as the media has widely adopted it.  For non-native English speakers, it must be a real nightmare of confusion to understand all the inconsistencies!  As for American English, they have anachronistic quirks of their Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: 'gotten', aint, etc, with spellings adopted to try to get around those very inconsistencies of British English.  Try as they might, though, they are not winning the war on weights and measures.  Miles, yards, acres, pounds and ounces are a thing of the past in most countries.  In fact kilograms, hectares and kilometres are slowly creeping into America I've noticed, possibly because such a weird measurement as US gallon is used there, and only there.

How's that for verbosity? WAY off topic too.  Sorry.