• bigfondue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Ablaut is a feature in Indo European languages where the vowel sound of a root changes for different forms of a word. An example from English: “sing” is conjugated to “sang” and “sung”. Ablaut leveling would be losing the distinction between the vowels in different forms of the same word.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzMEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    You know what bugs me the most?

    • island - with a fake etymological “s” that was never pronounced. Compare it with German “Eiland”.
    • people - you got to borrow French “peuple”, then change that “u” into “o” for cosmetic purposes.
    • chaos - because you got to plop an etymological “h”, except conventionally the way to transcribe Greek /kʰ/→/χ/ is “kh” instead. But no, you need to disguise that /k/ as /tʃ/.
    • spamming a diacritic (apostrophe) to highlight elided sounds, but not using it to solve small orthographical quirks. It would solve the first two issues you’re complaining about - compare “mate” (bro) with “yerba matë”, “I record it” vs. “the recórd”.

    [/old man screams at the clouds rant]

    • Shihali@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      You’re about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You’re gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzMEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        [kʰ] or [χ], both end as /k/ [kʰ] in English anyway. But it feels weird that people insist on that etymological ⟨ch⟩ as if “English got it from Latin” was more important than “it’s ultimately from Greek”.

        • Shihali@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          On thinking it over, “proper” spelling of foreign words has done its own share of damage to English spelling. We don’t just have to learn our own spelling conventions, we also have to learn foreign ones. Or not (sent to you from Cairo, Illinois, locally pronounced “care-oh”)

          • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzMEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            Frankly, I agree. I’m perhaps biased because of Italian, but I think etymology doesn’t belong to the spelling; a consistent and dialect-agnostic set of rules that allows you to predict how to spell and pronounce a word is far more important.

            In special I never understood why English obtusely sticks to the double spelling standard, native (as in /gɪf/) vs. Romance+Classical (as in /dʒɪf/).

        • Shihali@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          It’ll be part of the great English spelling reform. Until then, it’s going to be spelled the way we Romanized Greek in the 16th century.