Savirius

joined 1 year ago
[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

See also the Christmas carol "Joy to the world, the Lord is come."

[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"Think of it like a dice roll: You either roll or 6, or you don't, so basically it's 50/50."

[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Brazilian Portuguese speakers change 't' and 'd' to 'ch' and 'j' respectively before 'i' and 'e' sounds. For example, the word 'de' meaning 'of/from' is pronounced more like 'juh'.

This happened in Japanese too, where the original "ti, tya, tyo" became "chi, cha, cho"! These are all types of palatalisation, which is one of the most common types of sound change across languages.

[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fun fact: when the boroughs of West Ham and East Ham merged in 1965, some of the suggested names by the public included Hamstrung, Hamsandwich, Smoked Ham and Hamsweetham.

They settled on the new name Newham, which, y'know, is elegant and all, but it's disappointing once you know they could've been a sandwich.

[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
 

If anyone's wondering how this "magic e" nonsense happened in the first place:

In the Middle English period, short vowels in open syllables were lengthened, so /ha.tə/ became /haː.tə/. Then, the schwa was lost, thus /haːt/. Now, the only audible distinction between hat and hate was the vowel length, and so the on the end was reanalyzed as a length marker; words that never ended with an /ə/ like whit /hwiːt/ were respelled as white to show the vowel length.

With the Great Vowel Shift, hate shifted from /haːt/ to /heːt/, and in the last couple of centuries to /heɪt/. Now, final shows a mostly-consistent transformation of the preceding vowel, perfect for flummoxing second-language learners!

[–] Savirius@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To explain: /eː/ and /oː/ exist in Australian English, but they're the vowels in SQUARE and NORTH respectively, so Australians don't naturally associate them with foreign /e/ and /o/. If you can force an Australian to say "care-sore", it sounds remarkably like Spanish "queso"!