English is fucked up in large part due to being corrupted by the French cancer. If anything we are one of the most qualified to talk shit about them.
Comment on French culture
NONE_dc@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As a Spanish speaker, I find it so ironic to see this meme in English…
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 1 day ago
shneancy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
English might be a bit- creative with the spellings of words but at least they pronounce most of the letters, not just half of them
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
But the pronunciations are different word by word. French letter combos make the same sound even if they are not each pronounced the American away, which is nice as a French novice.
NONE_dc@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Queue
(and why the fuck Mike and Nike aren’t pronounced similarly?)
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well “Mike” is a typical appreciation of the name Micheal of Hebrew origin that long predates the English language. “Nike” is Ancient Greek, which also predates the English Language. Nike is the name of the Greek god of victory. So neither one of those is English.
Rubanski@lemm.ee 1 day ago
It’s like how you pronounce Hercules and molecules the same way
NONE_dc@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But why is pronounced “Nai-ki” and not “Ny-ke”? We here don’t give a fuck a say “Nike” like Mike.
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 1 day ago
literally a french word
Adiemus@lemm.ee 1 day ago
A better example might be “home” and “some”, where only one letter is different, but the pronounciation is completely different. There are many words like these. English doesn’t make sense at all.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Mike and Nike are pronounced similarly
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
They are…it’s a regional thing
See here m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkg5nLOgxII
Soup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
French does pronounce most of the letters, they just tend to drop the last one. Then there’s our “though” which is often shortened to “tho” with no consequence. English is not creative, either, most of the time the words were actually pronounced in a way that matches and time changed how we spoke them. That and we just kinda lifted the spelling of loan words but said them differently because whichever of our many accents at the time made it otherwise uncomfortable to say.
bob_lemon@feddit.org 1 day ago
English needs a major spelling reform, but there’s no way to actually implement one. In order to match spelling to pronunciation, you would be to have a well-defined “high English” pronunciation.
But any semblance of uniform pronunciation doesn’t even exist within the UK (or even just England), much less across the entire English-speaking world, including places like Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many more countries.
And even if you somehow manage to create something (this is basically how “high German” was created, after all), good luck getting all the different governments to adopt the reformed spelling.
shneancy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
also good luck basically upheaving the entire ESL world by making all the texbooks obsolete. would be pretty wild
obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com 22 hours ago
The letter ‘h’ just entered the chat.
Soup@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
In French? Yea, it’s there it’s just called, some of the time anyway, an aspirated H. It’s also pretty rare and I’d be willing to bet that that is due to loan words.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh. Yeah. Right. Sure. Let’s say that.