Comment on I hate that that happens
pyre@lemmy.world 3 weeks agono it’s not. you can find quirks like this in every language.
Comment on I hate that that happens
pyre@lemmy.world 3 weeks agono it’s not. you can find quirks like this in every language.
khannie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
True enough but I feel like English has more quirks than other languages though I acknowledge that may be bias.
I used to have near fluent Irish way back when and I don’t recall any shenanigans like this (again I acknowledge I may not have been presented with them). I feel like most other languages have a more clearly defined set of pronunciation rules too.
Irish looks horrific (Siobhán is shiv-awn for example) but very very closely follows pronunciation rules so that pronunciation would be no surprise to a native reading it for the first time. English sure as fuck does not follow rules like that.
Near. Neat. Book. Boot. Etc.
(Some small subset of Irish folks do say “boo-k” though)
pyre@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
maybe I should have clarified: not every language has quirks in the same ways. German has weird articles that make no sense. French has different pluralization rules for up to four objects
But even of you just want to think about writing: German makes super long words that look monstrous by mushing words together. French doesn’t pronounce half the letters in its spelling. Arabic doesn’t really have vowels but instead uses diacritics that are often omitted so you have to be really familiar with the language to read at all.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
What?
pyre@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
well I can’t find a source for it now. maybe I’m misremembering. I read it in the book The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah. maybe it was referring to some remnant exception, maybe it was about another language. can’t verify it cause the book is not nearby right now. maybe I confused it with four different ways to pluralize in French (s, x, aux, none) idk.