And yet they still use king George's foot as a unit of measurement, curious.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
707 points (93.5% liked)
Memes
45746 readers
1397 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
And then became a bloodsoaked colonial power to surpass the previous bloodsoaked colonial power. 
A foot is defined as 0,3048 meter. They use the metric system, but with a conversion.
Miles, feet, and inches are all base 12 - just saying.
It would be awesome to have a base-12 number system paired with a base-12 measurement system. It's just so much nicer to deal with than metric or imperial. So many measurements would become much easier. Take length. You could have the base measurement be equal to a meter, then use 1/3 meter sticks as roughly equivalent to a 1 foot ruler.
I always want to pronounce the American versions of these words phonetically when I see them.
And what the heck is going on with the US pronunciation of “buoy”? None of those syllables are in that word.
Buo-y
Apparently we have the Dutch to blame for that one, as the verb form is apparently descended from Spanish.
I still don't understand the English insistence on borrowing words from other languages, yet refusal to standardize spelling into ways that actually make sense within the language.
So I still blame English for being silly with their transliteration.
Blame the great vowel shift.
But also, English spelling can't standardize because English pronunciation isn't standard. West Coast vs Midwest vs South vs East Coast have vastly different accents. Any spelling reform that makes English phonetic for one would be wrong for the others.
And it keeps changing! People keep moving and interacting with other languages, adding and dropping words and accents over time.
Blame the French actually, they invaded and screwed everything up beyond repair.
Funny thing about those "French" people.
William the Bastard of Normandy was the grandson of a fellow named Rollo the Viking.
Rollo had conquered the French northern coast and wrecked so much shit the French king just offered to make him a vassal, and give him more land in the process, if he protected the land he'd taken from other Viking raiders. This area would develop a hybrid culture from the mixing of the Germanic invaders and French population.
English, already a bastardized Germanic language, combined from the spoken languages of Germanic invaders who would come to be known as Anglo-Saxons and the native population, got further hybridized by a French Viking who actually spoke a French-Germanic dialect known as Norman.
Tl;Dr
Sea Germans hate linguistic purity, and English's problems are all their fault.
ʤəst stɑːt ˈjuːzɪŋ aɪ-piː-eɪ
Do it backwards, pronounce the British versions
- Cull our
- Hume our
- Flave our
Simplified English vs Traditional English
It's not even that. At the time they split, English wasn't as standardized. You can see it looking back in the Lewis and Clark expedition journals written by Meriwether Lewis. He doesn't even have consistency in his own writing, and he was no country bumpkin.
I mean we already got rid of T.
You mean we the Bri'ish?
I see what you did there
The good ol' glottal stop.
Check the Declaration of Independence. You'll find the 'u'. Noah Webster was a dick.
The Declaration was pre standard. It sure was a political decision to land on another standard than the Bri*ish
I don't get US spelling of "meter" for the metric system they don't even use. My car dashboard is two meters wide. Speedometer and tachometer. It's probably about half a metre wide.
I dunno what a kilometer would be. A device that can measure anything in thousands of something; weight, volume, speed, etc.
"The scale says you weigh 0.07 metric tonnes."
"Oh my god, I'm so fat."
"No, that's only 70kg, it's this stupid kilometer. Makes everything seem bigger than it is."
*opens a german dictionary*
*it says „Meter“*
*shrugs*
Now that you have it open, could you find a funny compound noun or two? I love those!
I'm German, I don't need a dictionary for that. We make them up on the fly. For example, Autowaschanlagenführer or Türöffnungsmechanismuswartung
I remember a little German from it being mandatory in school here in Denmark where we also like compound nouns so imma give it a shot:
"Car wash hose boss" and "door opening mechanism maintenance"?
"door opening mechanism maintenance"
Yes
"Car wash hose boss"
Almost. „Car wash operator“ it is.
If I worked in a car wash I would demand to be called a hose boss
Same tbh 😂
How about Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung? That's my personal favorite, though it lacks umlauts.
I'm guessing that means speed limit? Nice 😂
Yes
Okay I'm curious. With Danish being a Germanic language, how much are you benefiting from cognates and the like when making your guesses?
Some. Danish isn't as closely related to German as it is to Norwegian or Swedish, but there are a lot of similarities such as similar words. Danmark is mostly an even weirder than Dutch combination of German and English 😁
Weirder than Dutch? I do not believe this.
I know it's a tall order but I'm pretty sure it's true. Danish is a really weird language 😄
I dunno what a kilometer would be. A device that can measure anything in thousands of something; weight, volume, speed, etc
It's the opposite. A kilometer is a thousand meters, a kilowatt is a thousand watts and a kilogram is a shitload of cocaine.
Because homonyms are the worst part of any language and Noah Webster agrees with me.
for the metric system they don’t even use.
British people will fund pirates to steal our measuring weights, only to convert themselves 200 years later and then act like the US doesn't have a single STEM field. And then drive by the mile for a pint of milk.
Well you have me- from proto-european which means to measure.
Then you have metrical (metricus/metrikos from Latin/Greek) that means to measure rhythm in poetry.
Mētrum/Metron again from Latin/Greek meaning "measure, length, size, limit, proportion"
Then "metre" which is originally a unit of length. Then you have a "metre stick" which is a stick used to measure a metre. You can blame the French for basically calling it a "measurement stick" but it refers to a very specific measurement.
Then you have the -or suffix in Latin which means "to have to do with" or "to pertain to". Then that turns in to -re and -er in Old English.
And like everything else - Brittan used both for centuries before deciding one was "right" and everyone else is at fault for the other way (just like how "Soccer" is a British term). Famously Shakespeare used both -re and -er.
Lastly, the US uses the metric system for its professions. It's layman's terms that don't use metric.
I think you need to rework that one bud.