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Thanks for this correction! I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù
by idlewords 9y ago
Thanks for this correction!
I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù and ÿ are not a thing in standard French.
Polish is uniquely bad not because of the diacritics, but because of the special phonetic behavior of digraphs ('si', 'ci', 'zi', 'rz', 'sz', 'cz', 'ch', 'dż', 'dź', 'dzi').
- adamzochowski 9y agoTo strengthen your argument there is another digraph 'ni'. But this is now approaching discussion that writing doesn't match phonetic. Pronunciation shifts. Words change. Brother Grimms (famous for fables) were linguists studying how consonants use has changed. They talk how 'pater' (like paternity) shifted to 'father'. But Polish has own such shifts. Take a word like 'jabłko', which many people pronounce 'japko' or 'śliwka' that is pronounced as 'ślifka'. There is even a branch discussing how people using correct pronunciation are HyperCorrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish
- evincarofautumn 9y agoI wouldn’t call it “using correct pronunciation”—the whole idea of hypercorrection is that the result is not correct, because some perceived rule was mistakenly over-applied, like in English * “He gave it to Sam and I”. (Plus I’m guessing that sound change happened pretty early on, because as far as I know, all Polish consonant clusters obey that rule of voicing & devoicing obstruents.)
- tomaszj 9y agoDigraphs aren't unique to Polish, though. Take Hungarian as an example ('cs' or 'zs' to start with).
- glandium 9y agoThere's at least one word that uses ù in French: où (where, as opposed to ou, or)
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoI drove today next to the "nonstandard" Haÿ-les-Roses (south of Paris)