• mindbleach@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.”

    • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • mindbleach@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.