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I before E
superluser
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(I hope this is the right forum for this)
Given Tycho's recent message, I thought I'd share this old chestnut:
`I' Before `E' Except After `C'
Yeah, English just sort of gobbled up all its words from Latin and Germanic languages, which have virtually no connection in terms of orthography or pronunciation, and as a result, words may follow one scheme for spelling and another for pronunciation, dooming schoolkids for years to come.
Anybody got any other examples of how English is the whorehouse that Tycho correctly describes it as? (other than English is Tough Stuff, of course)
Given Tycho's recent message, I thought I'd share this old chestnut:
`I' Before `E' Except After `C'
It's a rule that is simple, concise and efficeint.
For all speceis of spelling it's more than sufficeint.
Against words wild and wierd, it's one law that shines bright
Blazing out like a beacon upon a great hieght,
It gives guidance impartial, sceintific and fair
In this language, this tongue to which we are all hier.
'Gainst the glaceirs of ignorance that icily frown,
This great precept gives warmth, like a thick iederdown.
Now, a few in soceity choose to deride,
To cast DOUBT on this anceint and venerable guide;
They unwittingly follow a foriegn agenda,
A plot hatched, I am sure, in some vile haceinda.
In our work and our liesure, our homes and our schools,
Let us follow our consceince, sieze proudly our rules!
Will I dilute my standards, make them vaguer and blither?
I say NO, I will not! I trust you will not iether.
For all speceis of spelling it's more than sufficeint.
Against words wild and wierd, it's one law that shines bright
Blazing out like a beacon upon a great hieght,
It gives guidance impartial, sceintific and fair
In this language, this tongue to which we are all hier.
'Gainst the glaceirs of ignorance that icily frown,
This great precept gives warmth, like a thick iederdown.
Now, a few in soceity choose to deride,
To cast DOUBT on this anceint and venerable guide;
They unwittingly follow a foriegn agenda,
A plot hatched, I am sure, in some vile haceinda.
In our work and our liesure, our homes and our schools,
Let us follow our consceince, sieze proudly our rules!
Will I dilute my standards, make them vaguer and blither?
I say NO, I will not! I trust you will not iether.
Yeah, English just sort of gobbled up all its words from Latin and Germanic languages, which have virtually no connection in terms of orthography or pronunciation, and as a result, words may follow one scheme for spelling and another for pronunciation, dooming schoolkids for years to come.
Anybody got any other examples of how English is the whorehouse that Tycho correctly describes it as? (other than English is Tough Stuff, of course)
superluser on
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Like "overlook". Pronounced the same, spelled the same.. can mean two different things.
Or my favorite one:
"Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present."
edit: another one I remember is "Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present."
:sigh:
actually isn't overlook differently stressed? as a noun you stress over but as a verb you'd stress look.
i guess that's just sentence placement intonation though.
I can overlook the construction of a house.
The blinding sun made me overlook the nails on the street.
Oh, yeah! Then there's Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, though that's English being a dirty thief and more of a grammatical quirk that happens in multiple languages.
As I overlooked your post, I realised that perhaps you may have overlooked the fact that 'another one' as a description for your second example isn't technically true. :P
On a similar vein, I enjoy the phrase (shown without capitals or punctuation - that was the challenge I was given when I first encountered it):
"john where jim had had had had had had had had had was correct"
whoops.ctrlv.jpg
I'm not remembering it quite right; here there's just an implication of either killing or mugging; in the original, it was implicit.
But the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his, and him, but
Imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
Correction: English is itself a Germanic language, so it didn't really "gobble up" words from Germanic languages. It already had them. The words that it added were mostly from Romance languages such as Latin, French, and Spanish.
There actually has been a lot of interesting stuff written on English pronunciation rules, but I'll spare you. English is not, really, any more difficult or inconsistent than most other languages, despite the commonly stated (and mistaken) fact that "English is the hardest language to learn".
http://lexiconmegatherium.tumblr.com/
The current English grammar isn't that complex, but we do have a pretty good number of irregular words due to hopping around between German and French.
But although it's aggravating that spelling and pronunciation seem to have only a casual relationship, it's a treasure-trove for diachronic linguistics— There's a thousand years or more of history hidden in some of those words.
I agree - I find the variances to be really interesting.
However, there are definite rules for how spelling relates to pronunciation. It just happens that sometimes you're not sure which rules apply to which word.
It's like the Gallagher skit, only vaguely clever.
If you ask me, "definite" and "not sure" don't really go together :P It remains true that there is no way to know how to pronounce a word based on its spelling alone, although you could narrow it down to a few possibilities. While I'm sure there are that sort of uncertainties in most languages, English is an uncommon offender.
Not that I mind, again, speaking linguistically :P
And are we limiting ourselves to just English here? I've got a bone to pick with the Chinese "simplified" characters.
Shit like that resulted in "doom" being prounced differently in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_book
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The British can take their "manoeuvre" and shove it into a silly goose. Given how much the brits profess to dislike the french, it's ironic how much French has influenced british english.
Yup, all three come from the same root.
almost every language is a mongrel of various previous and neighbouring languages, shifting and distorting over time through immigration, dialect, conquest, mandate, attempted organization, etc.
English is pretty easy to learn to speak casually, and fairly difficult to learn to write properly, due to its lack of any supervising body with any real mandated authority, but most languages are similar in both those regards.
the difficulty of a language has far more to do with its relative difference from your native tongue than anything inherent about the language, especially if there are fundamental differences like different alphabet or pictorial letters or tonality and so on. English is very tough for a Mandarin speaker, and pretty easy for a German speaker.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Is that actually incorrect? You can repeat the same word twice if they fulfill two different functions.
yeah it's totally incorrect.
"the problem is, is that" repeats the verb twice, when only one verb is necessary. "the problem" is the subject, "is" is the verb, and "that X" is a noun clause acting as the subject complement, or whatever it is you call it after a linking verb is used in the predicate.
It works for dialogue and conversations, because dialogue and coversations are hardly if ever grammatically correct. If you wrote plays where everyone spoke perfect grammar, it'd be pretty dry and uninteresting.
This isn't really what she does, though. She just talks right through it. It actually sounds more like:
"The problem isis that blah blah blah."
Obviously, it's not the worst thing that's often said in spoken English, but I do, personally, find it annoying.
It tends to be a part of a street name more than a stand alone word. It's not often you hear someone refer to walking down the avenue as opposed to walking down the street.
Wait what? I've always said it the first way. Though I guess there's very little difference between the two.
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