General > General Technical Chat
No, you didn’t “reach out”, you CONTACTED them
<< < (21/26) > >>
tooki:

--- Quote from: Monkeh on September 25, 2021, 02:01:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on September 25, 2021, 01:59:31 pm ---What I find curious is how fragile the British psyche must be, given how so many Brits take every opportunity they can to bash on American English (and American things in general).

--- End quote ---

Perhaps Americans just don't understand the concept of a good ribbing.

Not that eti's any less of a ranty snob.

--- End quote ---
Oh, we do. I’m not even counting those. It truly does shock (and disappoint) me how often it happens in earnest.
bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: magic on September 25, 2021, 06:23:06 am ---That's not even close to the top reasons.

The first thing is that written English is not really phonetic. Same letters, same pairs of letters, even same sub-words are pronounced/written differently depending on context.
Then is the bizarre pronunciation of all 'i's and 'y's in obvious loanwords which sound similar in continental languages.
16 tenses, gotta be kidding me.
Lack of singular pronouns besides "I", apparently :P

--- End quote ---

I've studied a bunch of languages and English is just as "weird" as any other language. The inconsistency of its spelling has historical reasons. There was never a regulating body of writers and academics to establish, but specially to update the spelling of the language as its pronunciation evolved, like you find in other languages.

Take the word night, for instance. It was pronounced the same as the German word nicht, somewhere in the past. But as its pronunciation evolved to [neit], and then [nait], no one cared to update it. The k in know was pronounced in the days of yore, but now that it is silent, people still write it because tradition.

There were attempts at reforming the English orthography most notably by guys like Noah Webster, the one of the Webster's Dictionary, however. But to no avail. Au contraire, his influence resulted in differences between American and British spellings, such as color/colour, center/centre, etc, adding even more confusion to the chaos.
themadhippy:
Bloody septics claiming to have invented english,just like they claimed to have invented the electric lamp,the computer , friendly fire  and 101 other things that us brits done first.
TimFox:
The Roman alphabet is an efficient code for spelling Latin, and was later applied to other European languages with different codings, sometimes requiring extra diacritical marks.  English inherited inconsistent spellings from words adopted from disparate sources.  Artificial spelling rules, such as the Hepburn Romaji romanization of the Japanese spoken language, can be efficient but radical changes in extant orthography with the same character set are highly unlikely.
Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: eti on September 23, 2021, 12:31:36 am ---
   might like to consider this for a second: if part of an English family emigrated to America in the 1800s, then years later, their descendants flew back to England, from America, and demanded instant English citizenship, can you see how that would turn out?

"But my great great grandfather was English, so I'm entitled, and technically I'm almost English by ancestry"

Yeah? NO.

--- End quote ---

   What's your point?  AFIK, the same applies whether the descendants were American or not; or if the originating country was England or any other country.

   I'm not aware of any country that would allow immigration or citizenship based solely on someone's far removed ancestry.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod