Thuh yoose uv foh-net-icks kewd grate-lee improov kom-mewn-ick-ay-shuns.
Ok, maybe that's a little extreme. But some words are difficult to pronounce when you first see them because of accepted spellings. Some of this is due to the fact that the English language absorbs words from other languages. Some of it is due to the retention of traditional spelling for a word.
When I was a lad in school (during the Dark Ages, I believe), first learning to read and write, we did use phonetics. The teacher would encourage us to "sound it out." We didn't need to spell words like telephone yet so it worked most of the time.
Well, except for counting...
One (pronounced "wun")
Two (pronounced "too")
...
Eight (pronounced "ait" or "ate")
Only one of those three has a rule involved. 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' or when sounding like 'ay' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'.
I am often surprised I remember that. I think that is because I wondered about the 'gh'. It could be an "ff" sound in some words and a silent "y" in others. It's a good thing we were so young. It's easy to tell a small child that it's "just the way it is... remember it."
They gave us a few rules for spelling that helped but most of the hard words required that you to just remember how something was spelled.
Hmmm... if you recall something it's called "remembering", if you forget it it, is it "dismembering"? Wait, that falls under vocabulary, not spelling.
People think it is just English but it happens in other languages. It just happens English is the only one I know well enough to converse in.
And now texting is tossing out all the rules...
[1381/1382/1251]
A Night Unremembered
13 years ago
6 comments:
It's a strange language thruff and thruff.
speaking of absorbing words, here's a factoid I learned yesterday: the word "trek" is one of the few English words borrowed from Afrikaans.
trek as in travels and venture? been around a long long time
They say english is of the most difficult languages to learn, that and russian
i before e I do remember but don't remember the ay part... makes sense though
shoot misread that about trek
While in Greece, I said something about English being hard to learn, and was quickly corrected that Greek was harder.
Don't know if it's true or not, but Greek has had a very long time to evolve and muddy up and change pronunciation and whatnot. Slavic languages seem like they'd be harder than English, as do the east Asian languages...
But what do I know, the most I can muster of any other language is "beer, please."
trek as in travels and venture? been around a long long time
They say english is of the most difficult languages to learn, that and russian
i before e I do remember but don't remember the ay part... makes sense though
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