Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
English's acceptance of old world spellings and superfluous letters. Everything should be spelled phonetically and consistently, and we should change the alphabet to get rid of confusion. Here's my suggestions:
So naū anē budē kan prōnoūns anē ūrd imēdēetlē, and nō ūun ūil sā unuyr nām rong. Yis haz Ben mī Ted Tok.
Hmm, could probably use a long a letter. Tok doesn't feel right. Maybe the French ê?
I'm not sure about the NG sound. Maybe J is also a vowel, and G accented is NG? I'm open to suggestions. Sugjestxunz.
Edit: also dates. It should be YYYY/MM/DD. Categories should always go from least to most specific.
On that subject, even though it's not language specific, we should have thirteen four week months with names that make sense. Every date of every year is the same day, planning ahead and due dates are simple. It makes 364 days, so new years day and leap year are extra special holiday days, nobody works or buys anything. If you have an emergency on one of those days, and can't make it til Sunday the first, yo either call an acquaintance who can help, or lose and die. Sorry mate. Buy three days worth of food on Saturday the 28th of Thirtember. Hope the power doesn't go out. Or move the free day to July, which is now called September.
I agree with the regional accent issue, but I don't like the choice of example. Body on its own is clearly an o, but anybody is much more commonly a u sound. That's less a regional thing and more just language evolving over time.
I'm far more interested in the changing of c and x to being actually useful letters, as opposed just replacements for other letters that we can easily change from reading to speaking. The y thing isn't entirely necessary, but we used to use it as a th, as in ye olde inn, and TH is a weird combo of you think about it.
G and J should get their shit together too.
While I'm not liking your phrase "bad regional accents" I do think you have a point. There are many, many different English accents and to attempt to capture that in the orthography is too much hassle and detail. The "dictionary pronunciation" is really more of a proto pronunciation than actual dialect-ized speech. It is a generalization and standardization and to an extent "the correct" way to say something Which is prescriptive, ugly and discriminatory and quite likely also racist. But there really is a need to simplify and standardize instead of capturing every tiny nuance of all dialects.
In my mind the best way to do this is just pick what you believe to be the most standard English accent and use that. Acknowledge that there are countless dialects. But this is the standard.
I think I agree with much of this. I'll have to come back later and re-read more carefully but by and large this looks great.
But good luck getting English teachers onboard.
There actually already exists an international phonetic alphabet, which can be applied to English as well and is used in teaching English. Here. It would actually be pretty cool to see this used more in writing.
Every single one of these is straight cancer with no redeeming qualities.
The complexity of English is a beautiful thing, driven by its rich heritage of influences. The language is complex because the culture and etymology are complex. It's supposed to be.