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You can change the spelling of one word in the English language to match how they are pronounced. What word do you pick? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by ericbomb@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

395 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm picking "Colonel" needs to be respelled to match how it's pronounced.

Try to pick a word no one else has picked. What word are you respelling?

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[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linguistics would teach that it is the orthography that is flawed. The English language has many vowel sounds, more than most languages. But as you demonstrate, the orthography "lumps" many of them together. Which, again, is why I think English orthography is awful.

There's a great article at Wikipedia, scroll down to the "Vowels" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology

There's a link the the article above to this page, which I don't suggest viewing on your phone. It has a great effort to document vowels across dialects of English, scroll down again to the huge table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects

Be careful, the linguistics "rabbit hole" is deep (but fascinating)!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, I really like the IPA and I wish it were something that was taught in high school. It would be great if people were competent at reading it and could maybe use it to explain how something sounds. It's hard enough that English has such flawed orthography. Then you add the fact that there are dozens of English dialects and it only makes things more complicated.

Do you know about Dr. Geoff Lindsey's YouTube channel?

https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do not know about that channel. I will check it out, thanks!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

His topics are really interesting, hope you enjoy them like I did.