Me: "German is complicated."
English: "Hold my beer!"
Forgot bough.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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me_irl
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Taught should be replaced with trough.
How many words are there for "the" in German? And I need to learn about parts of speech and verb tenses to get it right? And I have to know the "gender" of every fucking noun in the language to have even a chance of getting it right? That's literally just for the word "the".
Yeah, English isn't all that bad.
English is hard, but can be taught through tough thorough thought though
What of the most venerable Thot?
From elsewhere in the Spiderverse
Cough bough bought fought trough caught dough...
And now they all look wrong!
Draught or is it drought? I can’t remember.
Two different things!
Draught is another spelling of draft, and is used to refer to the dept of the vessel under the waterline.
Drought is an extended period without sufficient rainfall.
Dont forget draft as in movement of air and draught beers
Then theres also draft and drafty if, but then there’s drafters (drawers, but not drawers and definitely not draws (for the southern folks here)).
Almost anywhere you see a "gh" in an English word is a holdover from Old or Middle English. Those letters were originally pronounced as a kind of "back of the mouth scratchy cough-hack sound." Hard to describe in words, it's not a sound found in English anymore, because the Norman French didn't have it in their language when they conquered Britain. The spellings hung on long enough that they were made permanent by the printing press, but all of the different pronouciations come from various forms of French.
Almost, because I remembered the example word "ghost". English previously commonly spelled this word "gost" (or in Old English, "gast"), but Flemish typesetters felt like putting an h in there to match their word, "gheest". Because there really weren't spelling rules until typesetters started working, and we got a good number of modern spelling rules from them, after Caxton brought a press to London in 1476.
They can all go fuck themselves for making english spelling so damn inconprehensible
Except they kind of didn't. When books were handwritten by scribes, every scribe used their own local variation of spelling to suit the wealthy buyer who had commissioned them. Later, it was in the best interest of typesetters for books to be readable by the most number of (wealthy literate) people, because they were creating more books on spec to be printed first and bought later, instead of creating each one bespoke for the buyer.
But ... then as now, there were all sorts of different dialects of English across Britain. People in the north pronounced things differently from people in Wales, Cornwall, London, etc. This was even a known problem at the time: what spelling to use when your book had to be saleable across so many different pronounciations? A lot of it was kind of an arbitrary choice, with most of the spellings matching London speech, and some matching northern speech.
I have to imagine that even at the time, there were people who read available books and wondered "Why did they spell it like that?" It's because printing made books "global" in a language and spelling landscape which was very "local".
Please do not take my comment too seriously.
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO
I asked nicely Ó╭╮Ò
I’ve said the wrong thing again.
Now different lives I lead
My body lives on lead
The last two lines may read
Incorrect 'til said
"Hi Guy, Try Thai High Pie. AYE Bye!"
English. Not "American."
Fine, that's not my cup of tea.....
Read read read
Read and lead rhyme but read and lead don't
Sure they do, ones a metal, the other is in charge.
What are the three different meanings there?...
I know there's: Interpreting symbolism to understand the meaning (to read), and there's the past tense of having done that (having read) - but what's the third meaning of read?
Pfft, get a load of this fella, they don't know about the third 'read'.