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You can change the spelling of one word in the English language to match how they are pronounced. What word do you pick? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by ericbomb@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

406 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm picking "Colonel" needs to be respelled to match how it's pronounced.

Try to pick a word no one else has picked. What word are you respelling?

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[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

English orthography is awful. Hard "c" AND soft "c"? Are you crazy? How about that "k" that is already the hard c sound? It should be "kat" and "kar". And it only goes downhill from there (or their?!?).

We should clean it up someday. But we'll probably end up with LOL-WTF-speak.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some of the low hanging fruit would just be to pick one pronunciation of "oo" and stick with it:

book
blood
floor
brooch
boot

The problem is that English has far more vowel sounds than vowels. And that's without even having certain sounds that are common in other languages like "ü".

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linguistics would teach that it is the orthography that is flawed. The English language has many vowel sounds, more than most languages. But as you demonstrate, the orthography "lumps" many of them together. Which, again, is why I think English orthography is awful.

There's a great article at Wikipedia, scroll down to the "Vowels" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology

There's a link the the article above to this page, which I don't suggest viewing on your phone. It has a great effort to document vowels across dialects of English, scroll down again to the huge table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects

Be careful, the linguistics "rabbit hole" is deep (but fascinating)!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, I really like the IPA and I wish it were something that was taught in high school. It would be great if people were competent at reading it and could maybe use it to explain how something sounds. It's hard enough that English has such flawed orthography. Then you add the fact that there are dozens of English dialects and it only makes things more complicated.

Do you know about Dr. Geoff Lindsey's YouTube channel?

https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do not know about that channel. I will check it out, thanks!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

His topics are really interesting, hope you enjoy them like I did.

[–] room_raccoon@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

It's not all bad. The varied spellings of English help with visual pattern recognition and increased reading speed.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That must have already happened and we got the Geordie accent from it!