The word ‘monosyllabic’ isn’t monosyllabic. The word ‘alphabetic’ isn’t alphabetic. The word ‘palindrome’ isn’t a palindrome.
The word "phonetic" is not spelled phonetically.
Submitted 8 months ago by Zerlyna@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
cholesterol@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Dasus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Those are all heterological words, just like “phonetic”.
Autological (or homological) would be words like “pentasyllabic”, “unhyphenated” and “writable.”.
sik0fewl@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Does the word heterological describe itself?
ech@lemm.ee 8 months ago
My favorite is ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’, which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD
Ghyste@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
wjrii@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sure it is. English just has multiple generations of “phonetic” that overlay, and are not consistent with, one another. It has, if you will, codebases that were forked, re-forked, and then occasionally merged back in after developing on their own for a few centuries, and no official steering committee was ever established. There is semi-official documentation, usually from self-appointed pedants, but even that adjusts as more features are merged in willy-nilly and workarounds emerge.
English spelling is hard not because it lacks any logic, but because this entire language is a case study in modularity and extensibility at all costs.
mudmaniac@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The word “Onomatopoeia” sound more complicated than what it means.
gregorum@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Yes it is if you understand that “phonetic” is derived from the Phoenician civilization/culture, and that phenoms and phenology naturally derives the ph- sound from the “ph” not the letter “f”.
Blame your lack of education, not the Phoenicians!
milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy.
Linguistics and not-bitchy… What are you, a descriptivist!!!
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 8 months ago
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 8 months ago
Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It's the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called 'aspiration'.
The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn't have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as "pi" and "phi". Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as 'Ph', 'Th' and 'Ch'.
The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish "Loch". This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French 'phonétique' vs Spanish 'fonético'). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of 'ph' being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.
So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Someone knows history
gregorum@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Phexactly
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The word “Abbreviated” is actually quite long.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 8 months ago
wtf? yes it is. you just don’t know enough about words
RHSJack@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Thank you. OP just wants /r points. lol. We give lots of points here. THis is the place where the points don’t matter and nobody wins anything.
radix@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I need a mnemonic to remember how to spell “mnemonic.”
kambusha@lemmy.world 8 months ago
My Normal Enemy Munches On Naked Ice Cream
livus@kbin.social 8 months ago
I need you to write all my mnemonics.
AffineConnection@lemmy.world 8 months ago
ChatGPT came up with Memory Navigation Enhancing Methods Of Name Integration Coding.
MudMan@fedia.io 8 months ago
I don't even know what "spelled phonetically" is supposed to mean in English. As far as I'm concerned that language is just a jumble of vowels that all sound the same but generate long arguments about how to pronounce things "correctly".
livus@kbin.social 8 months ago
teft@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Kind of. The IPA doesn’t show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.
AffineConnection@lemmy.world 8 months ago
IPA is also useful for cleaning and drinking.
Zerlyna@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetikalee”
aliceblossom@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is not correct. English is simply not phonetic and therefore it’s impossible to spell any English word phonetically.
livus@kbin.social 8 months ago
Foe net ick.
BodePlotHole@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I mean, aren’t we using mostly Latin letters and sounds to spell non-Latin words?
There’s a phonetic English alphabet out there. Some Scottish poet commissioned it years ago.
It is named after him. But I am an uncultured swine and can’t remember who it is at the moment.
aliceblossom@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The Shavian Alphabet!
BodePlotHole@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Boom. #nailedit
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 8 months ago
Of course not. It’s spelled “phonetic.” Phonetically is spelled “phonetically.” 😌