[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

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

[-] 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 0 points 1 year ago

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 36 points 1 year ago
[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The important takeaway here is that it took a long time before it was actually good. They had to try a bunch of different sorting algorithms before they found one that really worked and let you see your small subs just as much as your big ones.

It might take a while here too unfortunately.

[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Find a text-to-speech program that supports Australian English and get it say "queso" and "care-sore". Then compare each of those to a Spanish speaker saying "queso". Decide for yourself which one sounds more like the original.

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THE MAGIC E (lemmy.world)

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 1 points 1 year ago

Huh, maybe your instance is defederated from kbin.social? Maybe??

I still don't fully get how it works.

[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

The word "alone" comes from a compound of "all" + "one".

!Etymology@kbin.social

[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

About 85% of my reddit browsing had been on pretty niche subs, so I'm still using reddit to engage in those communities (of those that haven't shut down). I'm trying to contribute to the equivalents here too, but the engagement is still on reddit for now.

The other 15% was just the occasional trip to /r/all to see if there was anything interesting going on there, to which the answer was usually... no. That's pretty much been replaced by here now.

[-] Savirius@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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"!

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Savirius

joined 1 year ago