31 y/o white passing mixed w/ Black monster woman from the Netherlands. Artist (occasionally). Writer (again, every so often). Prone to camera sniffing behavior, one of them θΔ folk.

AD: @blimpjackal


kda
@kda

which is home to the most unserious, goofy languages on the planet,

(You can't unironically tell me that you, personally, can take English seriously. You can't.)


VeraLycaon
@VeraLycaon

I mean come on, definite and indefinite articles that work the exact same way? Cases expressed on said articles, rather than on the words themselves? Using the perfect aspect for the passive voice? Making comparisons by using not just a special form of an adjective, but adding a whole, separate, specific particle for that purpose too? Preposterous.


jaidamack
@jaidamack

English is a garbled mess of stolen words and cobbled together syntax, that's all well and fair, but I refuse to take shit from European languages either. German's lack of grasping the distal/proximal relationship and splitting verbs across long, wandering sentences is its own brand of derp. Language is a grubby mess of spirited belching, nobody's got an upper hand here.


TheBlueSkiesAbove
@TheBlueSkiesAbove

everyone else: what do you call the things that fly in the sky?

The fucking French:

les o i s e a u x

everyone else: and how do you pronounce that...?

The fucking french, again: "wa•zo. putain."


kda
@kda

at least some of their horrid orthography can be attributed to the actively bad decisions of specific people. English just emergently broke its entire orthography by doing The Great Vowel Shift immediately after deciding on how most words would be spelled.


VeraLycaon
@VeraLycaon

I mean look, out here in Holland we had a similar thing going on (to the point where some of the changes our language went to actually directly mirror those of English) but we at least had the sense after WW2 to change our spelling so we wouldn't be doing shit like spelling "mens" as "mensch" even though nobody had been pronouncing the final /x/ for at least a century.


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in reply to @jaidamack's post:

in reply to @VeraLycaon's post:

Huh, yeah, that does kinda make me wonder what could be done in terms of orthographic reforms in English that'd make things more sensible while remaining dialect-agnosticness (agnosticity?) — clearly stuff on the diaphoneme level as opposed to the phoneme level, but beyond that, huh.

There're definitely some ngraphs which could be fixed vaguely straightforwardly. "ough" comes to mind.

"ough" is definitely one of them, yeah - getting to the finer details is a bit tougher when especially with a language as widespread as English it's hard to make changes without running into some dialect that just had a meaningful difference flattened out (hell, Dutch hasn't been immune to it either with more archaic dialects spoken in seaside towns and further inland away from most major cities), but even then, we made our own organization about it together with Belgium and later Suriname to coordinate things at least.

Yeah. …the governance situation for that kind of thing would also be incredibly difficult to sort out for English. Even just on a hypothetical "What's the fairest way of apportioning influence over the process?" level, let alone practical considerations beyond that.