4 ms·
You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure
by anyfoo 4y ago
You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point.
By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane.
What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent.
If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. The French don't seem to agree. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe
- anyfoo 4y agoOkay yeah, especially around the "-ent" ending, and sometimes whether a final s is pronounced, it can be ambiguous. So maybe my feeling that it's much harder in English than in French is just personal bias. German and Italian on the other hand... (of course every language still has exceptions, plenty of).