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English Language Bug Tracker

Started by Blumf, May 03, 2021, 10:57:13 PM

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Blumf

Welcome to the English language bug tracker. Please log any errors or issues you detect in official spelling or pronunciation of our flagship communication product.

#23139 Issue: 'Yacht'
Fucking stupid spelling, should be 'Yott' or something, maybe have a 'u' in it, I don't know.

#54134 Issue: 'Raze'
How is that right? You 'raise' something up, but you 'raze' something to the ground. That can't be right!

#3221 Issue: 'Gay'
Used to mean happy and now they're all doing it in our faces, and I pay my rates, I do, but will the council fix it? And these new 5p pieces...

Resolved: Won't fix

#78632 Issue: 'Onomatopoeia'
Doesn't sound like what it's describing. I had an idea for an alternative, but when I tried to say it aloud, I dislocated my larynx.

wosl


bgmnts

Raymond Luxury Yacht
pronounced
Throatwobbler Mangrove


Fucking how!?

Echo Valley 2-6809

Quote from: Blumf on May 03, 2021, 10:57:13 PM
#78632 Issue: 'Onomatopoeia'
Doesn't sound like what it's describing. I had an idea for an alternative, but when I tried to say it aloud, I dislocated my larynx.

It's a handy word if you're doing yoga upstairs and someone comes in the front door and shouts, 'Where are you?'

dissolute ocelot

"Monosyllabic is way too long."

Also, why do we need X and K?

Echo Valley 2-6809


popcorn

Prepositions - to, in, on, at, by, with, under, next to, etc. What's the difference between "I'm at the supermarket" and "I'm in the supermarket"? Or the impossibility of knowing when to use an infinitive (to eat, to run, to sleep) or a gerund (eating, running, sleeping): "I started studying" and "I started to study" are identical but "I stopped studying" and "I stopped to study" aren't.

Plurals. English grammar is bent on establishing whether there's only one of the thing you're talking about or some number between one and infinity. This established, the entire sentence morphs, shifting verbs (the cat eats; the cats eat) and pronouns (it; they; them; that; those; these), articles (cats eat; a cat eats), and more.

It's a huge amount of engineering to support an almost worthless unit of information. We'd lose nothing if we excised plurals from English. You'd just say "there is cat in the road", and when you needed to specify otherwise,  you'd say "two cat", "three cat", "some cat", "many cat", or whatever.

Uncountable nouns. It's usually clear, to the beginner student of English, why you can't count things like water or air, and why you therefore can't say something like "there are many waters in this jug". But it's not obvious why you can't count woods, or breads, or beefs, or moneys.

Uncountable things sometimes become mysteriously countable after all —  as in the foods of the world, or the beers of Belgium, or in phrases like "troubled waters" or "blue skies". It's galling for students of English to carefully order "a cup of coffee" only for the native speaker at the next table to order "a coffee".

popcorn

"a choice" and "two choices" mean the same thing.

Captain Z

Moneys/monies does have a correct use, although I can only ever think of Fonejacker's Nigerian scammer when it comes up.

zomgmouse


popcorn

Quote from: zomgmouse on May 04, 2021, 12:54:59 AM
silent k - why have it

used to be pronounced, but pronunciation changes in English and spelling doesn't.

Blumf

Quote from: zomgmouse on May 04, 2021, 12:54:59 AM
silent k - why have it

How about in an alternative spelling of 'fart', for the silent but deadly type; 'kfart' (still pronounced 'fart')

No... That's stupid.

popcorn

Quote from: Captain Z on May 04, 2021, 12:53:27 AM
Moneys/monies does have a correct use

I SAID THAT

QuoteUncountable things sometimes become mysteriously countable after all —  as in the foods of the world, or the beers of Belgium, or in phrases like "troubled waters" or "blue skies".

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

The plural of sheep is not sheeps, it is sheep.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Could be worse. At least English doesn't assign gender to inanimate objects.

Quote from: Blumf on May 03, 2021, 10:57:13 PM
#54134 Issue: 'Raze'
How is that right? You 'raise' something up, but you 'raze' something to the ground. That can't be right!
Like with a razor.

Blumf

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on May 04, 2021, 01:21:53 AM
Like with a razor.

Raise something up.
Cut someone up with a razor.

Always up, except 'raze', which is very much down.

easytarget

# 66117 Issue: Adulting
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81346575
The fuck is this twee bullshit?
The other languages are laughing at us*


*En Francais: uh-haw-he-haw-he-haw

zomgmouse

Quote from: popcorn on May 04, 2021, 12:59:02 AM
used to be pronounced, but pronunciation changes in English and spelling doesn't.

oh i know but why do we still have it

daf

Quote from: Blumf on May 04, 2021, 01:26:38 AM
Raise something up.
Cut someone up with a razor.

Always up, except 'raze', which is very much down.

also has a link with the word 'erase' * - so I always think of it like the building is getting erased

- - - - - - - - - - - -
* (probably?)

mothman

Now going to spend the rest of the day obsessing about how "I stopped sleeping" and "I stopped to sleep" are polar opposites.

touchingcloth

#w3k33p1ng477415?

If you are discrete you comprise distinct separate parts, but discreet you act with discretion. I'm not a fan of the double versus single 'e' leaping between adjective and unrelated noun like that.

bakabaka

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on May 03, 2021, 11:48:53 PM
"Monosyllabic is way too long."

Also, why do we need X and K?
K is really useful, it's C that is a total waste of space. It's either pronounced as S or K, so why not just use them rather than creating a letter that makes you guess what it sounds like every time.

At least when the Romans created it, they only pronounced it as K, so didn't need K. But we wanted to suck up to the Vikings so we pretended to need their letters even when it was bloody obvious to anyone listening that we had all the sounds covered already.

touchingcloth

Quote from: bakabaka on May 04, 2021, 10:52:06 AM
K is really useful, it's C that is a total waste of space. It's either pronounced as S or K, so why not just use them rather than creating a letter that makes you guess what it sounds like every time.

At least when the Romans created it, they only pronounced it as K, so didn't need K. But we wanted to suck up to the Vikings so we pretended to need their letters even when it was bloody obvious to anyone listening that we had all the sounds covered already.

The Portuguese alphabet doesn't have a k, but the x sounds like 'sheesh' rather than 'ecks'. What is point alphabet at all?

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Inflammable refried beans are nothing of the sort[nb]apart from the beans bit[/nb].

Quote from: Blumf on May 04, 2021, 01:26:38 AM
Raise something up.
Cut someone up with a razor.

Always up, except 'raze', which is very much down.
I hate to see you have a shave.

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: popcorn on May 04, 2021, 12:39:20 AM
Uncountable nouns. It's usually clear, to the beginner student of English, why you can't count things like water or air, and why you therefore can't say something like "there are many waters in this jug".

I've noticed shows like Casualty referring to a blood sample as "bloods".  (Also I'm wondering if it's is an Americanism because I don't remember them saying it 15-20 years ago.)

Retinend

ai invented e simpel end konsistent foom ov the speling sistem, witsh rekwajez nou njuu letez end korespondz wel te tranzkripshen juzing the intenashenel fenetic alfabet

Problem is it looks like geordie written down.

brat-sampson

Quote from: mothman on May 04, 2021, 10:39:07 AM
Now going to spend the rest of the day obsessing about how "I stopped sleeping" and "I stopped to sleep" are polar opposites.

Similar effect with remember:

Remember buying a sandwich (in the past). Remember to buy eggs. (in the future)

Retinend

Quote from: popcorn on May 04, 2021, 12:39:20 AMPrepositions - to, in, on, at, by, with, under, next to, etc. What's the difference between "I'm at the supermarket" and "I'm in the supermarket"? Or the impossibility of knowing when to use an infinitive (to eat, to run, to sleep) or a gerund (eating, running, sleeping): "I started studying" and "I started to study" are identical but "I stopped studying" and "I stopped to study" aren't.

Plurals. English grammar is bent on establishing whether there's only one of the thing you're talking about or some number between one and infinity. This established, the entire sentence morphs, shifting verbs (the cat eats; the cats eat) and pronouns (it; they; them; that; those; these), articles (cats eat; a cat eats), and more.

It's a huge amount of engineering to support an almost worthless unit of information. We'd lose nothing if we excised plurals from English. You'd just say "there is cat in the road", and when you needed to specify otherwise,  you'd say "two cat", "three cat", "some cat", "many cat", or whatever.

Uncountable nouns. It's usually clear, to the beginner student of English, why you can't count things like water or air, and why you therefore can't say something like "there are many waters in this jug". But it's not obvious why you can't count woods, or breads, or beefs, or moneys.

Uncountable things sometimes become mysteriously countable after all —  as in the foods of the world, or the beers of Belgium, or in phrases like "troubled waters" or "blue skies". It's galling for students of English to carefully order "a cup of coffee" only for the native speaker at the next table to order "a coffee".

It's interesting to me, as a fellow language teacher, to hear the most prevalent areas of difficult in teaching Japanese people (do I recall correctly?). I had no idea that they didn't conjugate for singular or plural in noun or verb.

As a teacher of Germans, re: plurals, I have a hell of a time getting them to correctly say  "I have some information for you" instead of the awful sounding "I have two/three/four informations for you". In German it is perfectly natural to specifiy whether you have one, two, or three "Informationen" (singular: "die Information", plural: "die Informationen"). Uncountable nouns don't really exist as such in German.

Regarding plurals, my German students, despite my best efforts, always say "I have 30 euro for you" instead of "I have 30 euros for you". Moreover, they often mistake singular words ending in "er" as exempt from requiring that buzzing "z" sound at the end in forming the plural: workerzzz, or eurozzz are surprisingly difficult for them to utter in flowing speech. They would say "there are 5 worker here" instead of "there are 5 workers here".[nb]While I'm on it,  the reason for this is not only that German nouns ending in "er" are invariable whether singular or plural ("the worker":"der Arbeiter", "the workers":"die Arbeiter"), but also because the phonological system of native Germans implicitly disallows any word-terminating consonant like "z" (but also "v","g", "b" and other voiced consonants) as a matter of course. To learn English properly they have to twist their ear to hear and pronounced "harsh"-seeming sounds that "ought to" be softened or left off.[/nb] This is the same mistake that my French students always made, as well, but they would make this mistake quite universally, as their phonology dictates, in most cases, that no noun change its form whether singular or plural (French homophones: "vache" ("cow"), "vaches" ("cows"); "homme" ("man"), "hommes" ("men"); "maison" ("house"), "maisons" ("houses")).



Retinend

Quote from: mothman on May 04, 2021, 10:39:07 AM
Now going to spend the rest of the day obsessing about how %u201CI stopped sleeping%u201D and %u201CI stopped to sleep%u201D are polar opposites.


If you "expand" the second "stop" into an appropriate phrasal verb e.g. "I stopped by to sleep" then it becomes apparent that "stop" and "stop" (of sentence one and sentence two respectively) are not true homonyms, but mere homophones. brat-sampson's example of the two kinds of "remember" are definitely puzzling, however, since they seem like both homonyms and homophones, i.e. to be the same word, and therefore, that the semantic distinction is made by the appearance of either gerund or infinitive verb [nb]outside of this narrow example, a mostly useless, mostly purely grammatical distinction in English, which should be fixed in the next update[/nb] which appears in its wake.

popcorn

#29
Quote from: Retinend on May 04, 2021, 04:26:51 PM
It's interesting to me, as a fellow language teacher, to hear the most prevalent areas of difficult in teaching Japanese people (do I recall correctly?). I had no idea that they didn't conjugate for singular or plural in noun or verb.

That's right (though I haven't been teaching for a few years now). Japanese doesn't even have plurals. One cat. Two cat. Many cat. It's much more efficient.

Unfortunately Japanese compensates for its elegant lack of plurals with its own needlessly complicated counting system. The word for one is "ichi", but if you're counting small animals like cats then it's ippiki, or if it's people then it's hitori, or for flat things it's ichimai. So you don't say "ichi neko" (one cat), you say "ippiki neko" (one cat). But that's dumb because you're not adding information, right? If you say "ippiki neko" then we know it's a small animal because you said neko, which is a kind of small animal, so can't you just say "ichi neko"? You dummies!

The mistake I often hear European speakers make is, eg, saying "I don't know what is this" instead of "I don't know what this is". That's another fucking hard English thing - to formulate questions you have to re-order the sentence ("This / is / a cat" vs "Is / this / a cat?"), which isn't true of lots of other languages - eg in Japanese you just say "This is cat" and then put "ka" on the end to make it a question.