It's pretty cruel, particularly for non-native English speakers, that 'lose' and 'loose' seemingly switched spellings, meanings and pronunciations with each other when no one was looking

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• themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The bigger problem is that lose should rhyme with pose or close.

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  • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Don’t get me started on ough and ead.

    The lead soldier kneaded dough in the bough brush while they read the book that they previously read while taking a furlough in the rough.

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    • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I read this and all I could think of was “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”

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    • Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How can the soldier knead anything if he’s made of lead?

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    • moistclump@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      youtu.be/0hGaSQyygRQ?si=chuCUpT-xXMXA18F

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  • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hoes drop their clothes.

    Who the hell decided that close is pronounced the same as clothes?

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    • darkdemize@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No one? They aren’t pronounced the same in any accent that I’m aware of.

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    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They sound pretty close to me. We can close this issue.

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    • SandLight@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t know that they sound that different, but I definitely pronounce them differently in that my tongue is in a different party of my mouth for both of them. When I say clothes, my tongue is near touching my front teeth, where as close is more just below that ridge behind my teeth, so farther back.

      I’m from the center of the U.S. for reference.

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    • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They aren’t universally, just in certain dialects. I pronounce the “th” just like with “clothing.”

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  • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I would lohz my shit if we had to pronounce it that way.

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• Diddlydee@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They never did. Their spelling, meaning, and pronunciation are the same as they have always been.

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• jimmy90@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  english is a very silly language that’s evolved so you can do almost anything with it

  it’s a risky strat but it seems to have worked

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• ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  they are very different in my mind. perhaps because i first came across them in their respective contexts through reading.

  even when speaking, to me, lose rhymes with booze and loose rhymes with goose.

  this has never been a problem for me, personally.

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• NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  May as well combine words with the same pronunciation into one word and call it Simplified English (/s)

  Honestly tho, this is one of the features of Simplified Chinese, which created the infamous “fuck vegetables” (干菜类).

  It’s meant to say “dried vegetables” (乾菜類 in TC), but 乾→干. Meanwhile, there exists 幹→干 as well, which means “fuck”.

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  • Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So this is where I find cucumber?

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  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Fuck as in curse or as an action?

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    • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Used in this context? Action. But it can mean both.

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• vaper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Loose rhymes with noose. I can’t think of a word that’s spelled and pronounced like lose so you have me there.

  choose lose cruise booze fuse

  all rhyme lol

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  • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Words pronounced like lose? That’s easy. Close

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    • Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Close is way closer to clothes than it is to lose. And close is more like gross.

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    • thelasttoot@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Lose rhymes with clues, not close.

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• emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean yeah ‘loose’ could probably be pronounced like ‘choose’ and it would still make sense, but it absolutely wouldnt make sense for ‘lose’ to be pronounced like ‘moose’ or ‘goose’. Im not sure what you even mean when you say they switched meanings either because thats just false.

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• db2@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They didn’t, except among the ignorant and autocorrect.

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• corvett@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Loose rhymes with Goose

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  • Okami_No_Rei@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There’s a moose loose in the hoose.

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• cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s a miracle I know it, and having to teach someone how to read and spell was an eye opener for me trying to explain “this is like this except for this one word because… Reasons and sometimes there’s a variation like this because…reasons” so many times.

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  • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Agreed, I am teaching my second son to read.

    I am having the same conversations as when I taught my first to read.

    “ok, this word is a ‘sight word’ because it doesn’t make the sounds you expect. It says won, but it looks like it says on-e”

    Image

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  • Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Mostly the “reasons” just boil down to etymology. We spell things the way the languages we stole them from spelled them.

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  • teft@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Having to explain to my spanish speaking friends why an english word is spelled one way but pronounced another entirely different way gave me the same experience. So many times i have to tell them: “i don’t know english is just weird.”

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  • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Usually the reason is either because some jerks intentionally changed certain spellings to look more French (“receipt” didn’t have a “p” originally, for example), or just because English is such a mongrel language with words taken from various other languages with different spelling and pronunciation rules.

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  • Kidra@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I once had a roommate from Chile and he asked what the difference in pronunciation was for “juice” versus “Jews”. I’m still not sure I properly got the difference across…

    Also the difference between “to rob” and “to steal” was an interesting thing to think through and then explain.

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    • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I can see why he’d have trouble with those two, because Spanish doesn’t have the English “z” sound. They’ll both sound the same using Spanish pronunciation .

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• Jerb322@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Trust me, it is equally frustrating for most Americans…or almost, anyway.

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• over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There’s too to two different ways to pronounce and spell many words.

  Fuck, that’s three!

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  • AnAustralianPhotographer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Steady up over their they’re there.

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    • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Don’t phuck with my head, I’m two drunk!

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    • Badland9085@lemm.ee [bot] ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Those three sound completely different to me, as far as how I’ve been pronouncing them goes. “Their” doesn’t have the extra lagging e sound (as in the e in err) in “there” where I curl my tongue upward at the end. “They’re” preserves the ey sound in “they”, just concatenated with an r as in err sound.

      When I say, “They’re there,” people can make out what I’m saying, though as more people seem to tell me that these are just homophones, maybe they’ve just been relying on context.

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• can@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What about the words that are only different in tone.

  Content and content

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  • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It is read like lead, not read like lead.

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    • tyler@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Or lede for that matter

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• Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Are you familiar with “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité?

  Deep breath:

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos

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  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I believe the generally accepted scientific term for the English language is “clusterfuck”.

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    • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      *kloostaphux

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  • corvett@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This guy was British, rhyming “via” with “choir”

    Previous, precious; fuchsia, via; Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir

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    • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think he was Dutch - but they do tend to speak “better” English than the English.

      The difference in UK/US (amongst other first language English nations) pronunciation is something I know effects hip-hop lyricism (i.e. rapping) as different pronunciations mean some words only rhyme in your own dialect.

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    • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “Made” and “bade” supposedly not rhyming confused me, how is “bade” supposed to be pronounced?

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• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  English is idiosyncratic as hell. Didn’t someone famous call it “not a language but 3 languages in an overcoat.”

  Adding to this specific instance is that even native speakers spell things wrong. They loose their keys, etc.

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• finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wait, if they swapped meanings and then swapped spellings then doesn’t that mean they’re the same as before?

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  • ShepherdPie@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Grrr! English strikes again!

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• cholesterol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  *purpoose

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• Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If we start now, we can probably switch the pronunciations of Aristotle and chipotle within a generation.

  Chip-ot-el

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  • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    No, go the other way, it’s closer to Aristotle’s name in the original Greek. Ah-ree-stoh-teh-lees.

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• TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  both come from the same root

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• deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Obviously the plural of foot is feet, so the plural of book should be beek.

  Or one sheep should be a shoop.

  There’s also the English Vowel Shift. Which means words either side of it are inconsistent.

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• spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Only online and since I hear the words I read it is really fucking annoying.

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• 2030TimeTraveler@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Looser wearing lose clothing?

  🤔

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• sepi@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lose lips think chips

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• whotookkarl@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lowe’s loose lows lose loss.

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s been years since I’ve seen people misspelling lose as loose, but I do remember when it was pretty common to see.

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  • Default_Defect@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I see it multiple times daily. Whats your secret?

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• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The audience can’t seem to differentiate commas from; well, every other punctuating mark. What are you hoping to achieve, here?

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  • mrunicornman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why did you punctuate like this?

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