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-UE
English (the language, not the class)
2013-05-28 02:41:44
edited 2013-05-28 02:41:44 in General
One foot in front of the other, every day.
This is what you get when you speak German, French, Gaelic and Latin at the same time -- and speak all of them wrong. Poor show, English, poor show. A multitude of students each year struggle or fail your classes because you decided to sleep around irresponsibly.
Comments
A question I've had on my mind recently: what words are there that contain both an "sh" (Germanic origin) and a "tion" (Romance origin)?
In some Romance languages, isn't the suffix "tion" pronounced exactly as spelled, as in, "tee-on"? If so, that means that the English pronunciation of the suffix ("shon") is already a Germanic alteration of a Romance suffix.
That said, I am not sure of this at all and could be entirely wrong.
Don't forget Greek and Arabic.
I guess English has also had a bunch of one-night stands recently, but hey, which language hasn't?
I think all the "tion"s mutated to "cion" pronounced "si-on" in Spanish, at least, but I think the "ti+vowel" to "ʃ+vowel" mutation occurred in French first and then traveled to England in 1066.
That said, my linguistics knowledge isn't the best, so I could be wrong.
Icelandic, that teasy little minx.
You know, it sounded easy but I can't think of any. So I looked up a list of -tion words and came up with nothing.
Incidentally, I say "wumen" for women and "burry" for bury. Rather than "wimen" and "berry".
So the fact that "ghoti" depends on "wimen" actually fails as far as my pronunciation style goes.
Also, despite my best efforts, I can't successfully twist "busy" and "business" to be pronounced in a way that's faithful to their spelling but remains comprehendable to the typical U.S. English speaker.
However, for business, I do say "bizzenuss", rather than "bizznuss", so at least I make it less unfaithful to the spelling.
Also, I say "offten" for often and actually try to include a subtle "b" sound when pronouncing "subtle". Because "suttle" is a wholly unsubtle indication of pronunciation laziness.
It's not laziness. It's mute letters.
Why are the mute letters there in the first place?
Over time, they disappeared in speech, but remained in the written form.
Hebrew at least has a very good reason for a mute letter. Vowels only exist as attachments to consonants, so you need a silent consonant for isolated vowels.
^ In fact, the same could be said of most, if not all, languages written in abjads.
IJBM: English does not have the following sounds:
* throat h (ch in Bach)
* throat n (the consonant phoneme in the Cantonese word for "I")
IJBM: English does not represent the difference between "ai" and "aii". Specifically, "ai" is the standard "long i" sound in English, while "aii" is the way that some people pronounce the vowel sounds in "kite", "might", "ice", and "bright".
That's because they're allophones of the same phoneme. It wouldn't make sense to represent them with different letters because changing one to the other doesn't change the meaning of a word. Plus, they're not different in every accent.I learned this: literally two hours ago, at school. What the hell, IJBM.
That said, I've never actually noticeably heard any accent where they're the same.
Also, English doesn't spell "drink" as "jrink" and "truck" as "chruck", even though that's how they're pronounced. Though some people actually try to enunciate the "d" and "t" sounds correctly in such words.
I'm fairly certain they exist, but even if they don't, that's the less important part. The more important part is if you pronounce "eyes" with the vowel from "ice", or vice versa, you sound slightly weird but everyone can tell what word you mean. They register to native English-speakers as the same sound and the difference between them never conveys meaning.I had a linguistics tutorial yesterday and it took the TA a good five minutes to even convince the class (myself included) that they were even pronouncing the vowels differently.
I have no idea what you mean by "correctly": I guarantee there is no language in the world where sounds are not modified by the sounds around them. This is less complaining about English and more complaining about how the human brain and/or vocal tract work.Well there is a meaningful difference between "ai" and "aii" in Cantonese. For example, "[n]ai" means "lean (on something)" while "[n]aii" means "beg". May be why I noticed it.
Well, I admit I don't know much about Cantonese, but I would not be surprised to hear that there are sounds that it doesn't distinguish but English does.
Relevant?
When I enunciate "receipt" I actually try to make a bit of a p-like lips converging.
And how are cloven and oven different other than the first two letters?
They have different vowels.
The o in "cloven" is definitely different from the one in "oven". Dictionary.reference.com gives "klohv-uh n" for the former and "uhv-uh n" for the latter.
Oh. Right. People say "oven" as "uhvun". Right.
People other than myself at least. Though I use "oven" rarely enough myself.
ITT glennmagusharvey is Microsoft Sam.
So what is your first language and how long ago did you start learning English? Not trying to be snarky here; I'm genuinely curious.
I fucking love the English language. It is a glorious cosmopolitan sprawl driven by raw linguistic debauchery and it is brilliant. Tracing etymologies and shifting denotations and connotations in English words is a pleasure unmatched by any more organised literary language by dint of the wonderfully scattershot nature of its borrowings. I defy you to find a living language more diverse, more lively, more alive than English.
Yes, learning it is a bitch, but once you do, you have only the world to discover.
Technically, English is a dialect of German, which therefore is considered to contain English.
/partypooper