I wonder if English’s history has made it particularly good at adopting words?
Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 year agoWhile that’s possibly true now, English has been “three languages in a trenchcoat” from the beginning and survived on theft ever since. Every word entry in the dictionary lists what other language it was taken from, or who invented it, usually as a joke. (For instance one of the possible sources of OK or Okay is a joke-misspelling of All Correct.)
dudinax@programming.dev 1 year ago
JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your saying those crafty englishmen colonised, raped & pillaged everything down to the very words from everyone they encountered?
MxM111@kbin.social 1 year ago
Having English as second language, you don’t have to convince me that spoken language and spelling are only loosely related. While being dyslexic does not help either, something dies in me each time I am spelling “eye”, or “year” and struggle with the words like philosophy (fylosophy?).
yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 1 year ago
Smh just learn Ancient Greek:
philosophy <=> φιλοσοφία <=> Phi Iota Lambda Omicron Sigma Omicron Phi Iota Alpha
MxM111@kbin.social 1 year ago
So, phi should be a single letter, right? It is single letter in Greek and other languages.
yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 1 year ago
Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:
So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.