One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called “double V” in that language. Why did English opt for the “U” instead?
You can hear the French pronunciation here if you’re unfamiliar with it:
https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/
V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be “Double V” and not “Double U”. In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet:
- …
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
It’s obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m just curious why we went the way we did!
Cheers!
So to put it in plain words:
The English are an illiterate bunch of alcoholics who base their entire language on the way it’s pronounced when you’re in the pub.
While the French are a stuck up bunch of pretend aristocrats who based their entire language on the scripts of the court.
How would you explain the Japanese? I’m only curious because something that draws me to the language is its “common sense” approach to pronunciation.
Super basic example: か ka が ga
When they import words from other languages the phonetic interpretation makes so much more sense to me. This actually drives me away from learning a lot of European languages.
Ever looked at Finnish? I know a lot of people say of a lot of their own languages that “we say things like they’re written”, but we really do. There’s like one phone (linguistics term, not telephone) in the language. It’s the velar nasal that is in the word “language”, ironically. Other than that, purely phonetic. You can put any word in front of me and I’ll pronounce it the same way any other Finn would, where as in English, asking “how do you pronounce that” is common as hell.
Anyway, look at some of these examples:
A horse = hevonen [ˈheʋonen]
Peasoup = hernekeitto [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo]
Come = tule! [ˈtuˌle]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Finnish
Cool! Are there different Finnish accents? Geographic, socioeconomic, or otherwise?
Accents are really to do with pronunciation more than the words. Like a person speaking the King’s English with a heavy Russian accent is still using the same grammar and words.
Finnish has dialects.
Same thing with Nordics in general, even though Scandinavian languages aren’t related to us in the slightest. (They’re more like cousins of English.) The reason I mention it is that all Nordics pretty much use a concept called “book-languages”. It’s the standardised spelling and grammar. Dialects can vary quite a bit, to the extent that I might have more trouble understanding someone slightly drunk with a heavy dialect from the other side of Finland than I would understanding a light Scottish accent.
There’s also Finnic languages in general. Karelian is one. It’s to Finnish what the Scots language is to English.
But everyone understands the “book language”, although no-one really speaks it. Newsanchors, politicians, etc, arguably, but even they use a bit of informal expression from dialects sometimes.
But you don’t see news readers with heavy accents, unless it’s for comedy. My city used to have a news cast with a reader who had the strongest Turku dialect.
The differences are mostly tribal (Finland had “tribes” before the national movement), if you look back far enough. But yeah, geographic, really.
Ah, I get it. Really interesting, thanks!
Japanese does have plenty of exceptions regarding kana -> pronounciation, though it’s better than English. Tons of readings for kanji is also a thing (particularly with proper nouns being crazy).
For just kana orthography vs pronounciation example, n before certain things gets pronounced like an m (see 新聞 しんぶん shinbun -> shimbun).
‘i’ and ‘u’ frequently get devoiced (classic example is です desu sounding like dess). 靴下 くつした kutsushita is a fun one. Even my wife didn’t realize the devoicing as a native speaker.
There are more than I’m forgetting at the moment, but those are the common ones.
For kanji you have 百 hyaku (hundred) 二百 ni-hyaku (two hundred), so three hundred 三百 should be san-hyaku, right? Nope! San-byaku (with that n -> m transition here, too). There are tons of these.
I wasn’t trying to suggest the entire language has no irregularities. Only that in my mind if you take English “story” → “sutori” things like the “su” make sense because if you listen to yourself say it, you are making a “su” sound rather than just “s.”
Even the “shinbun” → “shimbun” part makes sense to me because it’s rather difficult to pronounce the former properly.
Though it has irregularities it seems much, much more logical than English or Spanish. Also, I just don’t like conjugating everything all the time (that’s more of an argument toward learning Mandarin but Japanese is still way simpler than conjugating in Spanish in my opinion).
Gotchya. I thought others might be interested in some quirks of japanese as well which is why i wanted to share
Wow, not really off the mark.
Upper class English spoke French in Shakespeare’s time, seeing the English language as the tongue of the commoners, lower class folk.
Part of what made Shakespeare’s plays different - he brought comedy similar to Moliere’s into English.
Thank you. That was helpful