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Category: English
Why do the same letters in English have radically different pronunciations in different words?
There are, not so much rules, but tendencies for why letters are pronounced so crazy-different in different dialects of English, and so differently from Early Middle English. Unfortunately you need to go through a lot of historical phonology to make sense of it. Fortunately Wikipedia has a decent summary of both the historical phonology, and […]
Spelling: Why can’t we officially remove silent letters from English words and otherwise make English more consistent?
It’s not just that the words came from languages where the silent letters used to be pronounced. It’s also that silent letters were reintroduced by pedants, to remind people of the languages they came from, though they had long since passed out of pronunciation. Latin debitum went to French and Middle English dette (via *debte). […]
Why does the word ‘correlation’ have two r’s?
The Latin prefix for “with” was con-, but like other Latin prefixes, its final consonant changed to match the following consonant. So com-pare, col-late, cor-rupt. The prefix in- does the same: im-port, il-literate, ir-relevant. Now, another variant of con- was co-, before h and vowels: co-herent, co-agulate. English generalised this version of the prefix into […]
English (language): Why do we use the past tense to show our politeness?
To give a pragmatics answer to why you would use either a conditional model or a present model in questions, to begin with: In many cultures, and English is one, indirect requests are considered more polite than direct requests. An indirect request implies a direct request, but it gives the listener the (fictional) option of […]
Why does the pronunciation of the letter ‘J’ vary so much throughout different languages?
Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?) Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, […]
How widely were German, French and English each used as languages of science in the Europe of the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Greek linguists at the time mostly did German, and some did French. Of the main antagonists, Psichari only wrote in French—but then again, he lived in France. Hatzidakis mostly wrote in German, though he could write in French if he had to. When I was studying in Greece, I heard distant echoes of a “German […]
Why are “there” and “their” spelled differently, despite being pronounced the same way?
Cutting to the chase: The default answer is that English words are spelled differently because they used to be pronounced differently, just before English spelling was fixed in aspic with the invention of printing (inconveniently timed to partway through the Great English Vowel Shift). In Late Middle English, there was [ðeːɹ], which is not a […]
In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?
Roman alphabet digraphs were invented with the digraphs Latin used to represent Greek aspirated letters: <ch th ph>. So <ch> was available very very early on to languages using the Roman alphabet, to represent new sounds. Palatal sounds are notoriously unstable phonologically: once /k/ goes to [c] (as it did in late Latin), it can […]
Why doesn’t English have diacritics?
Been thinking about this question for a little while. I don’t have a firm answer, but I do have some idle chatter. tl;dr (a) English does not have consonant diacritics because England isn’t in Eastern Europe.English does not have vowel diacritics because (b) initially neither did French, and (b) by the time diacritics could have […]
History of Australian English
This post is not about Greek, although there are parallels with a couple of phases of the history of Greek. I picked up Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English, while in Sydney. It’s a history of Australian English for the general audience, written by Bruce Moore, a lexicographer at the Australian National Dictionary […]