3 ms·
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple
by arkensaw 1y ago
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
- pessimizer 1y agoAlmost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.
- arkensaw 1y agoTouche
- normie3000 1y agoCall me a douche, but the e in "touche" is silent, whereas that in "touché" is voiced.
- arkensaw 1y agoI was lazy, I didn't do the accent.
- jleyank 1y agoThe food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
- onestay42 1y ago"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)
- magarnicle 1y agoUsually English will try to come up with a single, Latin-or-Greek-derived word for compound ideas like this, which is another bad habit. So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.
- 1718627440 1y agoMedicine terms in German also use Latin or Greek, since this is the subject language, so this is a bad example.
- bmacho 1y agoMaybe in speech they are similar, but not in writing. The underlying construction is as different as it can be. English puts " " between words, and German does not.
- arkensaw 1y agoEnglish gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse. I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
- detaro 1y agoa) the title of the regulation is not equivalent to the law (unsurprisingly), onestay42's translation is clunky but a lot closer b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.
- 1y ago
- usrnm 1y ago> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions. Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
- 1718627440 1y agoDoes that mean, that "compound word" counts as a single word? And how do I distinguish between "a" "compound" "word" and "a" "compound word"?
- usrnm 1y agoDepends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually. Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
- 1718627440 1y agoI don't know, I think German laymen have a unambiguous understanding. "der Schiffskapitän" = 2, "des Schiffes Kapitän" = 3 Sure, linguists can dissect everything and should, but how does the English laymen perceive it?
- ochrist 1y agoIn Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.