What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by BunScientist@lemmy.zip))
Edit: it's to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
My wife and I had a good snicker one time when I brought home edamame peas in the shell.
They were shelled, but she wanted them shelled.
Flammable/imflammable is another one that comes to mind.
Just remember
It's "its," by the way.
Bought, caught, taught, fought, thought, sought, and wrought are all past tense verbs and all rhyme. The present tense forms are buy, catch, teach, fight, think, seek, and work, none of which rhyme.
Fast can mean moving with great speed or fixed securely in place (among other things).
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
...
Very long. Highly recommended
It's because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England's first one didn't know how it worked and neither did any English speaker
So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.
And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.
Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn't speak English made choices to change it
No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.
But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.
Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.
Anyways, that's why English doesn't make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That's why pronunciation doesn't line up with spelling.
The primary accent for 2-syllable words that are used as both a noun and a verb depends on the part of speech. The noun places the primary accent on the 1st syllable, the verb on the 2nd syllable.
Examples:
The musician records a record.
The farmer produces produce.
You're not permitted to fish without a permit.
One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:
And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.
The other English thing I find super interesting is how there's a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say "The big old red wooden door" it works as a description, but if I say "The wooden old red big door" it sounds weird even though it's the same information. People aren't usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
Where, were, we're. Even native speakers have problems with this. I don't know how many times I had to correct such cases, especially with American authors.
English has way more vowel sounds than it has vowels.
Those are just words where the primary vowel letter is "a".
The terrible attempt to solve this is by using double letters, but then consistency goes out the window. There's times when "ea" is a single vowel sound like /rid/ (reed) or /rɛd/ (red). But it can also be /ɛrn/ as in earn, which rhymes with urn and burn. It can be /ˈɡɹeɪt/ as in great, where the "ea" is a diphthong and pronounced like the "a" in grate or vague. Or, for more fun, the two letters can each fully get their own pronunciation like "react" or "theatre".
We're really at the "bearn it all down and start over" stage with English. Let's just all agree to switch to español.
"Read" and "readed."
"Read" is spelled s-a-m-e? English is a weird language.
Present: read
Past: red (in the fediverse), redd (on the old site)
Obvious.
I found it! https://www.exocomics.com/193/
The digraph oo is pronounced at least six different ways:
On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced "Redding". This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).
Little details, picked up along the way.
Lead and lead as well. I got a lead on those lead undergarments you wanted. I'll lead you there later.
The English language is so retarded yet we use it for international communication, and it is too late to stop it.
Reed and Red
Reed, red. Homophones should be homographs too.
How about we go with reed and red... see, you already know how to pronounce them!
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