Me: "German is complicated."
English: "Hold my beer!"
English is hard, but can be taught through tough thorough thought though
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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me_irl
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Taught should be replaced with trough.
having both "through" and "throughout" is an add choice, too.
From elsewhere in the Spiderverse
Cough bough bought fought trough caught dough...
And now they all look wrong!
Draught or is it drought? I can’t remember.
Two different things!
Draught is another spelling of draft, and is used to refer to the dept of the vessel under the waterline.
Drought is an extended period without sufficient rainfall.
Dont forget draft as in movement of air and draught beers
Then theres also draft and drafty if, but then there’s drafters (drawers, but not drawers and definitely not draws (for the southern folks here)).
Oh yeah save drafted into the military
Almost anywhere you see a "gh" in an English word is a holdover from Old or Middle English. Those letters were originally pronounced as a kind of "back of the mouth scratchy cough-hack sound." Hard to describe in words, it's not a sound found in English anymore, because the Norman French didn't have it in their language when they conquered Britain. The spellings hung on long enough that they were made permanent by the printing press, but all of the different pronouciations come from various forms of French.
Almost, because I remembered the example word "ghost". English previously commonly spelled this word "gost" (or in Old English, "gast"), but Flemish typesetters felt like putting an h in there to match their word, "gheest". Because there really weren't spelling rules until typesetters started working, and we got a good number of modern spelling rules from them, after Caxton brought a press to London in 1476.
They can all go fuck themselves for making english spelling so damn inconprehensible
Except they kind of didn't. When books were handwritten by scribes, every scribe used their own local variation of spelling to suit the wealthy buyer who had commissioned them. Later, it was in the best interest of typesetters for books to be readable by the most number of (wealthy literate) people, because they were creating more books on spec to be printed first and bought later, instead of creating each one bespoke for the buyer.
But ... then as now, there were all sorts of different dialects of English across Britain. People in the north pronounced things differently from people in Wales, Cornwall, London, etc. This was even a known problem at the time: what spelling to use when your book had to be saleable across so many different pronounciations? A lot of it was kind of an arbitrary choice, with most of the spellings matching London speech, and some matching northern speech.
I have to imagine that even at the time, there were people who read available books and wondered "Why did they spell it like that?" It's because printing made books "global" in a language and spelling landscape which was very "local".
Please do not take my comment too seriously.
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO
I asked nicely Ó╭╮Ò
I’ve said the wrong thing again.
Wouldn't it have been nice though to have a local English printer set spelling to their local style rather than a foreigner setting spelling to their foreign tastes?
How many words are there for "the" in German? And I need to learn about parts of speech and verb tenses to get it right? And I have to know the "gender" of every fucking noun in the language to have even a chance of getting it right? That's literally just for the word "the".
Yeah, English isn't all that bad.
The thing with cases for nouns in German is that after you surpassed the first hurdle in understanding them, it just makes so much sense. If you place languages on a spectrum from syntactical to context based, you find Latin basically on the far side of syntactical. Almost everything regarding relations of different parts of the sentence can be cleared up by suffixes, whole subordinate clauses are packed into 2 words without any comma. English on the other hand is very much dependent on context. The word order is paramount, there are like 30 tenses which are not concerned with time, but relation to other actions or dozens of case-by-case rules and meaning is often inferred. But the upside is that it's studiply easy to reach a level where you can hold a normal conversation on the streets, especially when you already speak a Roman language. It's just very inefficient and far less unambiguous. While German is not as syntactical as Latin, it's much closer to it's roots. Gendered nouns should be a thing of the past and I see my prescriptivism leaving my soul every time I talk about them.
Forgot bough.
Looks like they're just using t words, so no cough, rough, borough, or brought, either.
Now different lives I lead
My body lives on lead
The last two lines may read
Incorrect 'til said
English. Not "American."
Fine, that's not my cup of tea.....
What of the most venerable Thot?
Rhymes with rot
Read read read
Read and lead rhyme but read and lead don't
Sure they do, ones a metal, the other is in charge.
What are the three different meanings there?...
I know there's: Interpreting symbolism to understand the meaning (to read), and there's the past tense of having done that (having read) - but what's the third meaning of read?
Pfft, get a load of this fella, they don't know about the third 'read'.
"Hi Guy, Try Thai High Pie. AYE Bye!"