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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Oh I’m sure me saying that is interesting from your POV. But I’m agreeing with your point, English does it totally wrong for sure.

    And if the -er sound is as rare as you say, then I guess the pronunciation is just implied.

    I don’t know exactly why (nor do I care enough to dig into the history of this detail) American English went with “lee-tur” or more casually, “lee-dur”(almost exactly like the word “leader”, but if they had home with spelling it correctly, than it would’ve been pronounced differently.

    So it was one thing or the other was gonna be different, simply because we actually do have that sound that makes the spelling look wrong to us.

    I think I did get a little offended by the jest, but not consciously or intentionally.

    I have learned about the relative rarity of the -er sound in most places. It’s very common in this language, so that’s surprising to me.


  • I just admitted I did that, appreciated you calling me on it, then write a paragraph explaining I’m working on changing it, and I still get accused of boasting about it?

    As for the descriptive vs prescriptive part, I’ve heard of it only as it came up in discussions of another concept (philosophy and religion. They were talking about using one type versus the other as it related to their point, but I didn’t know exactly what they meant, because that wasn’t what was being discussed directly). So yes, I’ve heard of it, but no, I wasn’t really aware of the meaning of it because the concept at hand wasn’t linguistics. Sorry, that wasn’t clear. All I was trying to say was that I’ve heard of the concept, but hadn’t learned what it was about yet. That was probably a poor choice of words.

    Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn’t (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word. Yes, that falls under prescriptive here. This doesn’t exactly apply to languages that don’t use an alphabet.

    You can throw that opinion straight in the trash if you want. But until I find good reasons to think otherwise, that’s just a statement of the ideal way to spell, if we were still forming the language.


  • No it’s conscious.

    I probably should have said something about it being true with the languages I’ve heard more often.

    Things like Spanish, French, Italian… Basically things near where American English came from.

    I was and am fully aware that other languages will possibly sound different. The way I said it did sound ignorant though. And with the previous reply, I was assuming they were coming from a European POV. All of that was wrong.

    Anyway, add in the “in languages I’ve heard/am familiar with” to that.

    I’m aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically. I’ve got it open in a tab waiting for my next free moment. I’ve spent this one replying.

    But you were right to call me out about the order of sounds part. I was assuming a bit. I’m not used to phrasing comments for international audiences 😅. Usually I’m talking to people that would share my perspective and familiarities. In my area I didn’t run into a lot of people that haven’t been from around here. I should get better about this, but changing my own perspective is a challenge. I’m trying.



  • If we’re talking about the order the sounds are made, “liter” is more correct. I never understood why Europeans spell the “er” sound as “re”. It’s just now how the sound works.

    My take is that spelling should reflect the sound. In any language. For every word, every time.

    American English makes a ton of errors in this regard, you’ll get no argument from me there (for example any word with “ough” or “augh” is automatically spelled wrong).

    I’m sure tons of other examples in pretty much every language make the same mistake. But as far as I can tell, there is no good reason the spelling shouldn’t be a representation of the exact order of sounds that make up the word.

    All that to say, even when hearing people who speak all manner of different languages use the word “liter”, not one has ever pronounced it “litre”.

    Honestly it should be more like “ledur” for most Americans. We don’t have a habit of the actually making the proper “t” sound very often. But I’m getting into a whole different argument, so I’ll leave that kinda rant for a different time.



  • You know what…

    I went and looked this up because of this comment. I had never heard of “it” being used like that.

    I’ve only ever heard it being used to specify something specifically as a non-person, or more generally a “being”. So I thought it was literally defining it as a non-being.

    So TIL. I wasn’t trying to be prejudiced, I have literally never heard of “it” being anything other than specifically a non-living object.

    So thanks for the chance to learn something interesting today.





  • You can really change that to “should” instead of “can”.

    They literally defend a pedo prophet. I don’t know how exactly they justify that, but I don’t really care. I will actively hate them for this one detail and feel pretty fucking justified.

    When you actively go out of your way to be terrible, you intentionally choose to be considered low class until you wake up and choose a decent path.

    Just be decent. That’s not a high bar to clear. Muslims and Christians fail this test. Probably a lot of others, but staying on topic of the post context here.