3 ms·

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

• levosmetalo 13y ago
  Yeah, the reform of Vuk Karadžić[1] few centuries ago has made wonder for ex-Yugoslawien languages that made them truly phonetic. One simple rule: "Write as you speak, speak as you write" allowed children to be fully literate as soon as they learn the alphabet. Of course, there are edge cases where something is written differently than pronounced, but are edge cases that accounts for less than 0.001% of the words, and can safely be ignored. If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
• sampo 13y ago
  And 'jilet' is 'razor' in Turkish :-)
  • dsego 13y ago
    Gillette? We write žilet, because j is pronounced like y in croatian.
• vacri 13y ago
  English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord. If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.
  • dsego 13y ago
    Is this "losing the root" really such a big issue? The etymology is recorded for people who want to study such stuff.