7mo ago

It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.

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That’s true for every language, and maybe even more so. English is dominating the world, so the chance of inglish words and idioms getting to other languages is higher than from other languages to English.
- While that's likely true now, English has been "three languages in a trenchcoat" from the beginning and survived on theft ever since. Every word entry in the dictionary lists what other language it was taken from, or who invented it, usually as a joke. (For instance one of the possible sources of OK or Okay is a joke-misspelling of All Correct.)
  
  Having English as second language, you don’t have to convince me that spoken language and spelling are only loosely related. While being dyslexic does not help either, something dies in me each time I am spelling “eye”, or “year” and struggle with the words like philosophy (fylosophy?).
  
  Smh just learn Ancient Greek:
  philosophy <=> φιλοσοφία <=> Phi Iota Lambda Omicron Sigma Omicron Phi Iota Alpha
  
  So, phi should be a single letter, right? It is single letter in Greek and other languages.
  
  Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it's transcribed with Ph is:
  At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
  And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.
  So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from the transcriber's sound of F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.
  
  I wonder if English's history has made it particularly good at adopting words?
  
  Your saying those crafty englishmen colonised, raped & pillaged everything down to the very words from everyone they encountered?

130 comments