Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
Hover tooltip text:
Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you’re good.
Bonus panel:
RSS Feed: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rss
English is a creole gone feral.
Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes… and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. Most of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.
I’m in south Florida. Doctors’ offices usually have multilingual signs. Haitian Creole always looks goofy, but you immediately realize - that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French’s oodles of rules that all matter, and English’s very simple rules we don’t follow, and said “Sa trè estipid, nou ka fè pi byen.”
mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants
Oh yeah!
that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling
Holy shit!
that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French’s oodles of rules that all matter
Can’t we just use the Finnish rule of “each letter is only pronounced one way ever” and solve all the headaches?
If we ditch latin for IPA, maybe.
Maybe.
The more likely outcome is that some words would adopt those revised pronunciations, but most wouldn’t, fracturing the rules by creating arbitrary exceptions. This has of course happened over and over and over. That is the shape of the hole we are in.
Supplement Latin with Anglo-Saxon runes. Solved.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll
Yes English is tough, though through practice comes understanding.
My favorite version of what you just did is “English is tough; it can be understood through thorough thought, though.”
You missed the opportunity to throw “thorough” in there after “through”.
there is no understanding, just repetition of what you’ve heard
Is “hiccough” pronounced the same as “hiccup?” Because if it is, I’m gonna have to put that in the same category as “colonel.”
it is, but “hiccup” is the original spelling despite people claiming otherwise
There’s an interesting history behind why colonel is spelled and pronounced how it is…
https://www.deseret.com/1996/8/4/19258272/french-italian-roots-explain-why-colonel-has-an-r-sound
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word’s history. The French word “coronel” is derived from the Italian word “colonnello.” When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first “l” sound to an “r” sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two “l” sounds or two “r” sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration “dissimilation.”
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter “r” was changed back to an “l,” making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
Pretty much any time a word is pronounced weirdly, you can blame the French.
The french word is “colonel”, it’s from latin, much like the italian “colonnello” and the spanish “Coronel”.
and lieutenant in British English.
I’m gonna have to put anyone who spells it this way into the morgue if they keep it up tbh
Spanish in Mexico gets weird with the X:
Mexico - Mejico
Xochimilco - Sochimilco
Mexica - Mechica
Necaxa - Necaksa'tis what happens when you staple nahuatl et al onto spanish
My mind was blown when my favorite 90s band “Live” was actually the live from “Alive” and not live from " Living".
I guess they didn’t learn from
LeadLed ZeppelinStupid question but what’s the difference?
One is pronounced live, the other is pronounced live.
And backwards the both say “evil”
Being alive is just not being dead. Living an income sufficient to live on or the means of earning it.
And alive is a diphtong < i > (/ai/) and living a short i, right? (I’m not a native speaker if not obvious)
english is my second language and i feel it has wasted a lot of brain memory, because i have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of each word separately and the link them together, when i could just learn one of those and know the other
Same and in most situations I can pass as an English first speaker.
I was at IKEA buying a bed frame and asked the person at the counter if she had put the slats on the bill… But I pronounced it like slates because I was sure I had seen an “e” at the end of the word and there went the illusion 🤷
This reminds me of a poem called “The Chaos” which highlights how dumb English can be as a language
There’s also “English is a stupid language” which focuses on word constructions instead of pronunciation
That’s not linguistic criticism, that’s Jerry Seinfeld’s rejected material.
Which is why grammar nazi’s need to be banished to hell
Grammar nazi’s what, though?
Opponents, obviously.
Most native english speakers have no excuse, stop being dumb.
How many native speakers actually use proper grammar when speaking? The common spoken and written language have many differences.
Also 15-20% percent of the population has reading reading disorders. So around 1 in 5 or 6 people struggle with the archaic billshit grammar.
BTW “Proper Grammar” as a concept only exists from classism and racism mostly from the late 19th century and early 20th. It has been used to suppress undersirables from climbing the social ladder. Before then spelling and grammar was more fluid. Spelling was more random and differences were accepted.
Or I could just be dumb…
Having a reading disorder is a pretty good excuse, so it doesn’t conflict with anything I said. If your education suffered due to some sort of systemic oppression, that is also a pretty good excuse. My uncle that thinks the word “our” is “are” even though he graduated from the same high school as my mom and with similar grades, is just an idiot. Thanks for trying.
Pronouncing it that way is fine. Spelling it that way, on the other hand, just ain’t.
But does it matter? If he’s around a lot of beginning language learners, it could hamper understanding, but otherwise it’s just not in keeping with conventions.
Yes. German has official grammar and orthography (though it’s only legally binding in school and for the government) since 1903.
Before that everybody wrote how they liked. If you look at original manuscripts of even well known authors, like Schiller for example, you’ll find the same word spelled differently on the same page.
Or both! You never know.
Yes! I’ve made that comment a lot; French is easier to learn than English because you only need to learn how to pronounce syllables, while in English you have to learn every single word. It’s insane.
Lol. Spoken and written French are so different they’re basically two different languages…
As a two year Duolingo slave I can attest french is in fact 3 languages in a coat.
There’s written french, official spoken french and then the soup everyone speaks because nobody cares about proper speech rules.
French is still pretty consistent once you know the syllables. If you give me a word I don’t know, I’ll still be able to pronounce it correctly. You can’t expect that with English.
Les poules couvent souvent au couvent.
Ok, it’s true that verbs have different pronunciation rules. If you know that it is the verb, it’s not an issue. But I admit that it can be tricky for new learners.
Yeah, everything’s easy once you’ve learned the exceptions!
So, heteronyms do exist, and there’s several hundreds of them. Yes, less prevalent than English, still though.
Now let’s turn around: homophones.
How do you spell [so]?
L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]? Is the author afraid of heights or authors? 🤔
Il y a plein d‘[o] [o] [o]. Good luck writing that down.
And let’s not go down the route of ambiguous verbs, where different verbs end up with the exact same conjugation, shall we. Rayions? Peignant? Moules (also plural of moule, lol)?
Oh, what about those accents? Say what you want about German Umlauts, but at least they’re consistent. Why does accent grave not change the pronunciation of a and u, but e? How do you know where to put an accent circonflexe?
Homophones don’t impact the pronunciation though, which was the main subject of the top comment (the second part anyway). And I definitely agree that French is not easy for foreigners, especially regarding spelling. But pronunciation rules are much more consistent than in English.
To summarize, my point is that going from the spelling to the pronunciation is (much) easier in French than in English. The other way around (pronunciation -> spelling) is of course much harder in French, as you said, and the French school system shows that: we just have to look at how important the exercise of “La Dictée” is.
Small note to be finicky: “L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]?” is not an issue, since for “auteurs”, you pronounce the “liaison” with “des”, whereas you don’t with “hauteurs”. But I still get your point ;)
Well, the joke is about the relation between spoken and written English, so „how do you write [o]“ is just the same joke but in reverse 🤷♀️
And none of that touches my original point, i.e. that written french is syntactically different from spoken French.
Look, I have several German-French friends with whom I took French class in high-school. They grew up with two languages, their spoken French is flawless, they couldn’t write a single paragraph if their lives depended on it.
Loic Suberville’s YouTube shorts on French vs English (and sometimes Spanish) are pretty entertaining to show that they’re all difficult as a non-primary language. :)
Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of … English, but omfg did it not gel with me.
Yeah the general lack of gendered nouns is one of English’s better traits, even if most of our words are bastardized words from other languages.
It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.
When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.
It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.
You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.
Yeah. It’s funny because I am learning Danish eight now and it makes infinitely more sense than French ever did but I think it’s because, at least to me, it’s much closer to English and a lot of it is “well we do it just cause?” and my brain is like “oh cool great! I know how to cope with that”.
Whereas learning something that is so structured like German/French it feels very overwhelming I guess in that sense. I don’t feel like I have to think about Danish because it feels very ‘normal’.
Huh, I mean, sure French is different from either English and Danish, since it’s a Romance language, but I’m not sure why you would add German to that, which is closely related to English and to Danish as well. Especially if you speak Lower German dialect you understand a lot of Danish, which has been influenced by Low German since medieval times.
Danish is actually more structured, you have less leeway regarding syntax.
A lot of my teachers (danish speakers) or miscellaneous people often comment that German is easier because of its structure or uh formulaic-ness, or that is what I tend to hear that mostly. It might just be that there are a lot of Germans or German speakers in my area.
Conversely when I was learning French it was never prescribed as difficult, just lots of memorization for the uh… forms/genders? it’s been too long I barely remember any of it to be honest, but now I see all of the French loans in Danish ಠ_ಠ
But generally my issues or frustrations with Danish stem from when modern words are prescribed as 1:1 translations when older/uncommon English words more aptly describe what is being said. Which in fairness would probably not be words a non-native speaker would have knowledge of.
I think syntactically Danish is much less complex and easier, you know, only two cases, two genders. It’s just that nobody understands shit when they open up their mouths… ¯\(ツ)/¯
https://youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Oh, and the way they count is… I mean, you couldn’t do it worse than the French if you tried, but the Danish are just „hold my gløgg… halvfjerds“ 🤡
I hate danish numbers because I flip letters/numbers a lot when I speak in English so Danish is just turbo fuck-you mode of numbers sucking ass.
And yea it does come out as … noise vaguely masquerading as “important sounds”. At least Norwegian was like “lol wtf are out doing get those shitty letters you don’t even say out of here nerds”. Swedish … Swedish scares me. I hate when there is Swedish in Danish movies because I can’t hear Swedish and read Danish without my brain melting.
There’s an I Love Lucy scene where Ricky is trying to prove he is capable of reading to their baby, and the book is filled with -ough words.
My heart goes out to anyone trying to learn this language as a second (or third or…) language.
I actually ran into someone on Reddit who thought we should embrace it. They might be here too, I don’t know.
How would one go about making a “font” that looks like the bonus panel? It’s harder to learn all the logographs but you can fit a lot of information on a page that way.
just learn chinese
To answer your question: You’d have to have ligatures for every single word in existence so that is not possible.
I wonder what character set would work best for writing the English language. I’m legitimately thinking Korean could handle it better than the latin alphabet
Oh, can you expand on that a bit? I don’t really know how Korean writing works.
