General Language Thread

If I understand correctly, North Korea imposed hangul-only quite a while ago ... and, as you'd expect, nobody there was in any position to object or disobey. Limited use of hanja can still be found in some South Korean publications and journals, but it's dwindling—especially among young people.

(I'd be grateful for any Korean-speakers who could correct me if needed.)

Since someone had mentioned Creole, I have to mention I had grown a little interested in Cajun and learned a few things among things being that Cajun French is apparently endangered

I made an abortive effort to learn Korean some time ago, and I have to day that Hangul really is easy to learn. There's no getting around practice and effort, but it's quite a bit easier than Kana or Arabic letters. Sejong was onto something.

He sure was! Unfortunately, though, Hangul is only ideal for a language like Korean with extremely restrictive syllable-formation rules. As with Japanese kana, to transliterate a foreign word with any sort of consonant clusters requires putting it through the mangler.

I guess that's a situation where his idea went too well.

He wanted a writing system specifically made for Korean that fit the language like a glove and is relatively easy to read. Which is what he got.

It's just so well suited for that one language that it naturally cannot accomodate other languages as well.

A cool video by linguist youtuber Metatron, explaining the evolution of Roman armors… in full Classical Latin (it’s the first 5 minutes).

It sounds beautiful.

Always fun to hear the radical differences in pronunciation between classical Latin and modern legal/ecclesiastical Latin.

I just learned that "goodbye" was created from an abbreviation of "God be with you."

Whoa. I did NOT know that.

I want ask for verification on the following slang entry from The Great Depression:

• "All the way" - for Sweet Tooths, it's chocolate cake of fudge

Is this use actually a thing? If so what were some examples of it used this way?

What if English had its own phonemic alphabet? Well, someone tried 60 years ago, and no one remembers.

I kinda like the system itself and it (at least partly) accounts for the countless English accents… but admittedly, implementing it as the official English alphabet would probably cause more problems that it would solve. Unless everyone also learned the latin alphabet on top of it, which would kinda defeat the point.

Edited by Lyendith on Dec 24th 2023 at 4:25:10 PM

What English really needs is diacritics.

Wee kan allredee spel fonetiklee

EDIT: That being said, it diacritics does make it shorter. Like this. Wý kan alredý spel fonetklý.

Edited by Risa123 on Dec 24th 2023 at 5:34:44 PM

You're right, but I don't know how to do that.

Well, my native language is phonetic and I have its keyboard layout. On the other hand, it means I have to press shift every time I write a digit because these characters are default in that area of the keyboard. The one I just used was 7 for example. That and z/y confusion if you switch between EN/CZ layout.

Edited by Risa123 on Dec 24th 2023 at 5:48:43 PM

Uhh, no, England, you don't get to have your own phonetic alphabet. Play nice.

There are keyboard layouts that give you access to diacritics, usually with dead keys (including one called US international that is unsurprisingly very similar to the US qwerty layout). And if diacritics gained traction in English, keyboard layouts would evolve to accommodate them (with the most common ones being directly accessible).

Well, that thing is that when it comes to English you probably cannot really refer to England any more.

I woudn't go as far as to make a new alphabet, but I would prolly do things like reinstate the thorn symbol for "th" and merge "qu" into just "Q".

English spelling, at least, has reached that unfortunate stage where anything short of a radical, burn-it-down-and-start-over-reform would probably leave the system LESS consistent than you found it! And even a radical reform would have to deal with the fact that English is a pluricentric language that has multiple "correct" pronunciations depending on your part of the world.

All that said, I would appreciate some limited use of diacritics. For example, a grave accent to distinguish "lead" (to marshal forward) and "read" (present tense) from "lèad" (the metal) and "rèad" (past tense). Or, say, an acute accent to distinguish "contrast" (noun) from "contrást" (verb).

Edited by Jhimmibhob on Dec 25th 2023 at 6:06:06 AM

I once created an alphabet largely based on the North American English consonant chart, to address this precise issue.

I've been working on a system of diacritics for English for a while. Diacritics are cool because they can accomodate different pronunciations and accents, and as such can distinguish between those who pronounce the T in often and those who don't.

Here's what I have so far, mostly based on what can be typed on an Irish-layout keyboard without resorting to the control key (but with the control key, the sky is the limit!). I haven't yet figured out a good diacritic to indicate a letter is silent; dot below would be a good example, but it doesn't work with G.

No diacritics

Dot above

A dot above toggles voice; an unvoiced consonant becomes voiced, and a voiced consonant becomes unvoiced.

Caron

A caron makes a consonant into a fricative

Letter	Pronunciation	English eẋample
č	/tʃ/	church
ǧ	/dʒ/	general
̌p	/f/	pheasant
š	/ʃ/	sugar
ť	/θ/	theory
̌x	/kʃ/	luxury (as the Monty Pythons pronounce it; see the Four Yorkshiremen sketch)
ž	/ʒ/	seizure

I have more but I should really get to bed.

Oh god, you monster. You're not going to publish that, are you?

I figure it will make a blog post.

I think you're missing ď for the voiced th sound in "this".