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English is weird
Morituri:
--- Quote from: jwhouk on 22 Nov 2020, 09:38 ---Turp-sih-core.
--- End quote ---
Ah. I see the problem. Thing is we stole that one from Greek, and we definitely aren't the only people using that name, or retelling her story, and students of literature from across a dozen languages are familiar with the same spelling and pronunciation we use, so if we ever attempted to regularize either, the response from everybody in the world would have been 'YOU GOT IT WRONG.' Where most of the time, ordinary words, etc. they really don't much care how we spell them. Or, if they do care, I'm sure they curse our ancestors.
Noah Webster is to blame for most of the consistency in English spelling (in the sense that before his dictionary and 'standard spellings' it was even worse). He faced the unenviable task of settling on consistent conventions for spelling words in a language having ten to thirteen vowels depending on your dialect, using an alphabet that has only five. I believe that 'silent e' at the end of a word signifying a different sound for an earlier vowel, is his invention for example.
Anyway, I think of Noah Webster here because if a word sounded exactly like what you're thinking of? That's probably how Webster would have spelled it. You can tell it's not one of his because a lone 'e' at the end of the word is NOT silent. He got rid of those in his standardization because they would have interfered with his silent-e convention.
Noah Webster was alive at what may have been the very last opportunity to settle on a set of related spelling conventions for entire large groups of words. Spelling before that time was pretty much optional, in that people would pretty much spell everything any way they liked and there wasn't enough agreement on any single spelling of anything to call any of the other spellings wrong. But his dictionary got traction in a way no dictionary had before. It was taken up and used by newspaper publishers who dictated that everybody writing for them should use the same spellings of things for the sake of consistency. And after a while, we wound up with the idea that there is such a thing as a wrong spelling - basically, any spelling we can't find in the dictionary.
Morituri:
Honestly we'd probably have done better adopting the umlaut from German. It gives them a nice way to keep track of some extra vowel sounds, and it doesn't seem like too much trouble.
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 22 Nov 2020, 17:27 ---Honestly we'd probably have done better adopting the umlaut from German. It gives them a nice way to keep track of some extra vowel sounds, and it doesn't seem like too much trouble.
--- End quote ---
Not to be nitpicky or something, what you mean is called Diaeresis.
And yes, it would be quite helpful.
German only uses the Umlaut, but not the diaeresis, so purely from written language we can't say whether "ue" is pronounced separately ("uë"), as "ü". For reference: if you can't write or display Umlauts, German uses the non-umlaut letter with an e behind it.
FreshScrod:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 22 Nov 2020, 17:16 ---
--- Quote from: jwhouk on 22 Nov 2020, 09:38 ---Turp-sih-core.
--- End quote ---
[snip]
--- End quote ---
At first I misread Terpsichore as terpischore like it rhymed with harpischord - Nope! I've been misreading - and mispronouncing - harpsichord, too, since I first learned it - I've known it for a few years, and this is the first time I'm writing it... wow I feel dumb (not really, we all must learn sometime... hopefully I'll learn sooner than later, but what I can I do to help it? Alot, but that's getting off topic.)
Honestly, I think that standardized spelling is one of the weirdest things about written languages generally. Not per se, but as a social phenomenon. I think it would be much more interesting if everybody spelled their words however they liked, so long as it could be recognized as the sound of the spoken word. That doesn't deal with homophones, but we seem to manage to discern which one was meant in speech, so at least, if we write how we speak, we won't have that problem any more than we do in speech. I think it's a limitation of the past, of physical typesetting, to have only five-and-some-halfs vowel signs, that computers can deal with - sure, there's only so many keys we can add to a keyboard before it's cumbersome, but we can use some sort of composition of characters that the computer can translate to the appropriate end sign, or how Chinese input systems let one type so many different glyphs with so few keys. At the least, it would make reading more immediately fun, trying e.g. to if I can discern authors by their preferred spellings. And writing can be more fun, too, letting different characters signified by different preferred spellings. We could still have some sort of standard spelling, for stuff like official paperwork with corporations, but it should feel like something unnecessarily stiff, rather than the opposite of diverse spellings feeling sloppy.
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 23 Nov 2020, 03:14 ---
--- Quote from: Morituri on 22 Nov 2020, 17:27 ---Honestly we'd probably have done better adopting the umlaut from German. It gives them a nice way to keep track of some extra vowel sounds, and it doesn't seem like too much trouble.
--- End quote ---
Not to be nitpicky or something, what you mean is called Diaeresis.
And yes, it would be quite helpful.
German only uses the Umlaut, but not the diaeresis, so purely from written language we can't say whether "ue" is pronounced separately ("uë"), as "ü". For reference: if you can't write or display Umlauts, German uses the non-umlaut letter with an e behind it.
--- End quote ---
No, I think Morituri did mean umlaut, as in meaning a sound-shift. That's how I read the "extra vowels" bit, anyway - extra vowels in the language, rather than extra vowels next to each other in a word. It's the same mark, which in English is primarily meaning diaeresis, e.g. noone looks like it sounds like noon, instead of no-one, but noöne would clear it up, if QWERTY let diacritics by default - I don't really feel like figuring out how to do it, so I bookmarked some wiktionary's letter variants pages, though i don't really use it that much anyway... it's nice to have around just-in-case. Neither is very popular, it seems, in English. I think both could be useful, but they can't be the same mark, then. I don't that will ever happen in English, though, because the only thing we seem to be good for is tangling other language's features into our own - we're not too big on making our own words or grammar or whatnot.
(click to show/hide)In other news, I just leaned my chin to rest on my palm - elbow on table - forgetting to first move my tongue from between my teeth... ouch.
zmeiat_joro:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 23 Nov 2020, 03:14 ---
--- Quote from: Morituri on 22 Nov 2020, 17:27 ---Honestly we'd probably have done better adopting the umlaut from German. It gives them a nice way to keep track of some extra vowel sounds, and it doesn't seem like too much trouble.
--- End quote ---
Not to be nitpicky or something, what you mean is called Diaeresis.
And yes, it would be quite helpful.
German only uses the Umlaut, but not the diaeresis, so purely from written language we can't say whether "ue" is pronounced separately ("uë"), as "ü". For reference: if you can't write or display Umlauts, German uses the non-umlaut letter with an e behind it.
--- End quote ---
My grandmother's sister had a German sewing machine where, instead of an umlaut there was a small "e" on top of the "U". I don't think I remember the brand name, though. It evolved from two lines above the vowel in handwriting.
I don't know about the origin of the diaeresis in French orthography. EDIT: oh right, it's from Greek; don't know when it was adopted in French, it's probably complicated probably around the òc/oïl split.
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