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Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.

Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

While 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.)

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MxM111@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?).

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- yetAnotherUser@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Smh just learn Ancient Greek:
  
  philosophy <=> φιλοσοφία <=> Phi Iota Lambda Omicron Sigma Omicron Phi Iota Alpha
  
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  - MxM111@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So, phi should be a single letter, right? It is single letter in Greek and other languages.
    
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    yetAnotherUser@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:
    
    At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
    
    And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.
    
    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.
    
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dudinax@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder if English’s history has made it particularly good at adopting words?

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- JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Your saying those crafty englishmen colonised, raped & pillaged everything down to the very words from everyone they encountered?
  
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