• cholesterol@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The word ‘monosyllabic’ isn’t monosyllabic.

    The word ‘alphabetic’ isn’t alphabetic.

    The word ‘palindrome’ isn’t a palindrome.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Those are all heterological words, just like “phonetic”.

      Autological (or homological) would be words like “pentasyllabic”, “unhyphenated” and “writable.”.

      • Ech@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        My favorite is ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’, which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Uffff, right in my autism.

          Luckily the internet helps with that.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling–Nelson_paradox

          The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the meaning of “heterological” where it was previously well-defined, by modifying the definition of “heterological” slightly to hold all nonautological words except “heterological”. But “nonautological” is subject to the same paradox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from that of “autological”. A similar slight modification to the definition of “autological” (such as declaring it false of “nonautological” and its synonyms) might seem to correct that, but the paradox still remains for synonyms of “autological” and “heterological” such as “self-descriptive” and “non–self-descriptive”, whose meanings also would need adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing English of the Grelling–Nelson paradox entails considerably more modification to the language than mere refinements of the definitions of “autological” and “heterological”, which need not even be in the language for the paradox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is comparable to that of Russell’s paradox for mathematics founded on sets.

          Tldr “does the set of all sets contain itself?”

  • BodePlotHole@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I mean, aren’t we using mostly Latin letters and sounds to spell non-Latin words?

    There’s a phonetic English alphabet out there. Some Scottish poet commissioned it years ago.

    It is named after him. But I am an uncultured swine and can’t remember who it is at the moment.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    9 months ago

    I don’t even know what “spelled phonetically” is supposed to mean in English. As far as I’m concerned that language is just a jumble of vowels that all sound the same but generate long arguments about how to pronounce things “correctly”.

    • Zerlyna@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetik”

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Kind of. The IPA doesn’t show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.

        • livus@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          Ah that’s interesting, I didn’t know that.

          Still, the IPA is really helpful when trying to discuss pronunciation with someone who has a very different accent to ourselves.

          As a New Zealander I find some US phonetic spellings baffling.

  • wjrii@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Sure it is. English just has multiple generations of “phonetic” that overlay, and are not consistent with, one another. It has, if you will, codebases that were forked, re-forked, and then occasionally merged back in after developing on their own for a few centuries, and no official steering committee was ever established. There is semi-official documentation, usually from self-appointed pedants, but even that adjusts as more features are merged in willy-nilly and workarounds emerge.

    English spelling is hard not because it lacks any logic, but because this entire language is a case study in modularity and extensibility at all costs.

  • gregorum@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Yes it is if you understand that “phonetic” is derived from the Phoenician civilization/culture, and that phenoms and phenology naturally derives the ph- sound from the “ph” not the letter “f” just because the Romans were lazy.

    Blame your lack of education, not the Phoenicians!

    Edit: I apologize— I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy. I was trying to be sassy and playful, and went overboard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy.

      Linguistics and not-bitchy… What are you trying to be, a descriptivist!!!

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.

      The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.

      The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

      So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.