Fucking French. ‘we’re never, ever going to say this ‘h’ character, but you still need it to spell words correctly because fuck you, that’s why.’
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Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 4 days agoThat’s your issue? Not adjective declination?
I’m nearly at the end of Duolingo’s German content and spelling has mostly been quite easy (as a native English speaker). You want a spelling challenge, try French.
obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com 3 days ago
Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 3 days ago
English isn’t exactly innocent there. See knight, plumber, mnemonic, pterodactyl.
weker01@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Well those are words descendent from Latin and Greek.
Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:
- Some dictionary writers (ca. late 1400s IIRC) wanted spellings that seemed fancier like French and Latin, which is why e.g. the silent B in plumber was added ‘artificially’.
- The printing press was invented right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift so old spellings got “locked in” even though spoken English continued to change significantly for a long time afterward.
Saleh@feddit.org 3 days ago
So we have this verb and the ending in third person plural is -ent but we just dont pronounce that so it pronounces the same way as third person singular…