4 ms·

Which gives you an opening for the excellent double contraction “shouldn’t’ve”

by rimunroe 1y ago

b112 1y ago
The letter H deserves better.
- worthless-trash 1y ago
  I think we gave it too much leeway in the word sugar.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
The funniest part is that in that contraction the first apostrophe does denote the elision of a vowel, but the second one doesn’t, the vowel is still there! So you end up with something like [nʔəv], much like as if you had—hold the rotten vegetables, please—“shouldn’t of” followed by a vowel. Really, it’s funny watching from the outside and waiting for English to finally stop holding it in and get itself some sort of spelling reform to meaningfully move in a phonetic direction. My amateur impression, though, is that mandatory secondary education has made “correct” spelling such a strong social marker that everybody (not just English-speaking countries) is essentially stuck with whatever they have at the moment. In which case, my condolences to English speakers, your history really did work out in an unfortunate way.
- roywiggins 1y ago
  We had a spelling reform or two already, they were unfortunately stupid, eg doubt has never had the b pronounced in English. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/doubt https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/doubt That said, phonetic spelling reform would of course privilege the phonemes as spoken by whoever happens to be most powerful or prestigious at the time (after all, the only way it could possibly stick is if it's pushed by the sufficiently powerful), and would itself fall out of date eventually anyway.
- jdbernard 1y ago
  > but the second one doesn’t, the vowel is still there! Isn't the "a" in "have" elided along with the "h?" Shouldn't've Should not have What am I missing?
  - jack09268 1y ago
    Even though the vowel "a" is dropped from the spelling, if you actually say it out loud, you do pronounce a vowel sound when you get to that spot in the word, something like "shouldn'tuv", whereas the "o" in "not" is dropped from both the spelling and the pronounciation.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
      The pronounced vowel is different than the 'a' in 'have'. And the "h" is definitely elided.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        Many English dialects elide "h" at the beginning even when nothing is contracted. The pronounced vowel is different mostly because it's unstressed, and unstressed vowels in English generally centralize to schwa or nearly so.
- dan353hehe 1y ago
  Don’t worry about us. English is truly a horrible language to learn, and I feel bad for anyone who has to learn it. Also I have always liked this humorous plan for spelling reform: https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    English spelling is pretty bad, but spoken English isn't terrible, is it? It's the most popular second language.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      You never realize how many weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies there are in this language until you try to teach English, which will also probably teach you a bunch of terms and concepts you've never heard of. Know what a gerund is? Then there's things we don't even think about that challenge even advanced foreign learners, like when you use which articles: the/a. English popularity was solely and exclusively driven by its use as a lingua franca. As times change, so too will the language we speak.
      - huimang 1y ago
        Every real, non-constructed language has weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies. English is on the more difficult end but it's not nearly the most difficult. I'm not sure how it got to be perceived as this exceptionally tough language just because pronunciation can be tough. Other languages have pronunciation ambiguities too...
    - int_19h 1y ago
      English is rather complex phonologically. Lots of vowels for starters, and if we're talking about American English these include the rather rare R-colored vowels - but even without them things are pretty crowded, e.g. /æ/ vs /ɑ/ vs /ʌ/ ("cat" vs "cart" vs "cut") is just one big WTF to anyone whose language has a single "a-like" phoneme, which is most of them. Consonants have some weirdness as well - e.g. a retroflex approximant for a primary rhotic is fairly rare, and pervasive non-sibilant coronals ("th") are also somewhat unusual. There are certainly languages with even more spoken complexity - e.g. 4+ consonant clusters like "vzdr" typical of Slavic - but even so spoken English is not that easy to learn to understand, and very hard to learn to speak without a noticeable accent.
- veqq 1y ago
  > phonetic A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Though rendering historical texts illegible, a phonemic approach would work: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciatio... But that would still mean most speakers have 2-3 ways of spelling various vowels. There are some further problems with a phonemic approach: https://alexalejandre.com/notes/phonetic-vs-phonemic-spelling/ https://alexalejandre.com/notes/phonetic-vs-phonemic-spellin... Here's an example of a phonemic orthography, which is somewhat readable (to me) but illustrates how many diacritics you'd need. And it still spells the vowel in "ask" or "lot" with the same ä! https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fkl2h8yv8vps81.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1700%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3baffd07dedb0d797be765e5277e2dfcccfbe73e https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
  - inkyoto 1y ago
    > A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Not only that, but since pronunciation tends to diverge over time, it will create a never-ending spelling-pronunciation drift where the same words won't be pronounced the same in, e.g. 100-200 years, which will result in future generations effectively losing easy access to the prior knowledge.
    - selcuka 1y ago
      > since pronunciation tends to diverge over time, it will create a never-ending spelling-pronunciation drift Once you switch to a phonetic respelling this is no longer a frequent problem. It does not happen, or at least happens very rarely with existing phonetic languages such as Turkish. In the rare event that the pronunciation of a sound changes in time, the spelling doesn't have to change. You just pronounce the same letter differently. If it's more than one sound, well, then you have a problem. But it happens in today's non-phonetic English as well (such as "gost" -> "ghost", or more recently "popped corn" -> "popcorn").
      - 1y ago
- pjc50 1y ago
  The thing is that English takes in words from other languages and keeps doing so, which means that there are several phonetic systems in use already. It's just that they use the same alphabet so you can't tell which one applies to which word. There are occasional mixed horrors like "ptarmigan", which is a Gaelic word which was Romanized using Greek phonology, so it has the same silent p as "pterodactyl". There's no academy of the English language anyway, so there's nobody to make such a change. And as others have said, the accent variation is pretty huge.
theoreticalmal 1y ago
My favorite variation of this is “oughtn’t to’ve”

Which gives you an opening for the excellent double contraction “shouldn’t’ve”

b112 1y ago

The letter H deserves better.

worthless-trash 1y ago
I think we gave it too much leeway in the word sugar.

mananaysiempre 1y ago

The funniest part is that in that contraction the first apostrophe does denote the elision of a vowel, but the second one doesn’t, the vowel is still there! So you end up with something like [nʔəv], much like as if you had—hold the rotten vegetables, please—“shouldn’t of” followed by a vowel. Really, it’s funny watching from the outside and waiting for English to finally stop holding it in and get itself some sort of spelling reform to meaningfully move in a phonetic direction. My amateur impression, though, is that mandatory secondary education has made “correct” spelling such a strong social marker that everybody (not just English-speaking countries) is essentially stuck with whatever they have at the moment. In which case, my condolences to English speakers, your history really did work out in an unfortunate way.

roywiggins 1y ago
We had a spelling reform or two already, they were unfortunately stupid, eg doubt has never had the b pronounced in English. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/doubt https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/doubt That said, phonetic spelling reform would of course privilege the phonemes as spoken by whoever happens to be most powerful or prestigious at the time (after all, the only way it could possibly stick is if it's pushed by the sufficiently powerful), and would itself fall out of date eventually anyway.
jdbernard 1y ago
> but the second one doesn’t, the vowel is still there! Isn't the "a" in "have" elided along with the "h?" Shouldn't've Should not have What am I missing?
- jack09268 1y ago
  Even though the vowel "a" is dropped from the spelling, if you actually say it out loud, you do pronounce a vowel sound when you get to that spot in the word, something like "shouldn'tuv", whereas the "o" in "not" is dropped from both the spelling and the pronounciation.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
    The pronounced vowel is different than the 'a' in 'have'. And the "h" is definitely elided.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Many English dialects elide "h" at the beginning even when nothing is contracted. The pronounced vowel is different mostly because it's unstressed, and unstressed vowels in English generally centralize to schwa or nearly so.
dan353hehe 1y ago
Don’t worry about us. English is truly a horrible language to learn, and I feel bad for anyone who has to learn it. Also I have always liked this humorous plan for spelling reform: https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  English spelling is pretty bad, but spoken English isn't terrible, is it? It's the most popular second language.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    You never realize how many weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies there are in this language until you try to teach English, which will also probably teach you a bunch of terms and concepts you've never heard of. Know what a gerund is? Then there's things we don't even think about that challenge even advanced foreign learners, like when you use which articles: the/a. English popularity was solely and exclusively driven by its use as a lingua franca. As times change, so too will the language we speak.
    - huimang 1y ago
      Every real, non-constructed language has weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies. English is on the more difficult end but it's not nearly the most difficult. I'm not sure how it got to be perceived as this exceptionally tough language just because pronunciation can be tough. Other languages have pronunciation ambiguities too...
  - int_19h 1y ago
    English is rather complex phonologically. Lots of vowels for starters, and if we're talking about American English these include the rather rare R-colored vowels - but even without them things are pretty crowded, e.g. /æ/ vs /ɑ/ vs /ʌ/ ("cat" vs "cart" vs "cut") is just one big WTF to anyone whose language has a single "a-like" phoneme, which is most of them. Consonants have some weirdness as well - e.g. a retroflex approximant for a primary rhotic is fairly rare, and pervasive non-sibilant coronals ("th") are also somewhat unusual. There are certainly languages with even more spoken complexity - e.g. 4+ consonant clusters like "vzdr" typical of Slavic - but even so spoken English is not that easy to learn to understand, and very hard to learn to speak without a noticeable accent.
veqq 1y ago
> phonetic A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Though rendering historical texts illegible, a phonemic approach would work: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciatio... But that would still mean most speakers have 2-3 ways of spelling various vowels. There are some further problems with a phonemic approach: https://alexalejandre.com/notes/phonetic-vs-phonemic-spelling/ https://alexalejandre.com/notes/phonetic-vs-phonemic-spellin... Here's an example of a phonemic orthography, which is somewhat readable (to me) but illustrates how many diacritics you'd need. And it still spells the vowel in "ask" or "lot" with the same ä! https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fkl2h8yv8vps81.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1700%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3baffd07dedb0d797be765e5277e2dfcccfbe73e https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- inkyoto 1y ago
  > A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Not only that, but since pronunciation tends to diverge over time, it will create a never-ending spelling-pronunciation drift where the same words won't be pronounced the same in, e.g. 100-200 years, which will result in future generations effectively losing easy access to the prior knowledge.
  - selcuka 1y ago
    > since pronunciation tends to diverge over time, it will create a never-ending spelling-pronunciation drift Once you switch to a phonetic respelling this is no longer a frequent problem. It does not happen, or at least happens very rarely with existing phonetic languages such as Turkish. In the rare event that the pronunciation of a sound changes in time, the spelling doesn't have to change. You just pronounce the same letter differently. If it's more than one sound, well, then you have a problem. But it happens in today's non-phonetic English as well (such as "gost" -> "ghost", or more recently "popped corn" -> "popcorn").
    - 1y ago
pjc50 1y ago
The thing is that English takes in words from other languages and keeps doing so, which means that there are several phonetic systems in use already. It's just that they use the same alphabet so you can't tell which one applies to which word. There are occasional mixed horrors like "ptarmigan", which is a Gaelic word which was Romanized using Greek phonology, so it has the same silent p as "pterodactyl". There's no academy of the English language anyway, so there's nobody to make such a change. And as others have said, the accent variation is pretty huge.

theoreticalmal 1y ago

My favorite variation of this is “oughtn’t to’ve”