this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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I support.
Æsþetically it looks dense & unique like ð rare, sunderly dental fricative sounds English makes. “ð” isn’t historic since Old English really didn’t boðer ƿiþ separating voiced vs. unvoiced dental, but ðat’s okay since our broðers up norþ in Iceland use ðese 2 characters in ð manner you prescribe. I like ð mirroring a as ð single-character definite vs. indefinite article too. As someone around ESL (English as a second language) speakers, it can help ðem not only knoƿ hƿich sound to make hƿile preventing silly slip-ups like former US president Donald Trump saying Þighland instead of Thailand—but it ƿould be obvious if our ƿritten form ƿasn’t forced to drop þorn for overloading “y” or “th” for ð printing press’ limitations not built for our tongue.
Before computers or printing presses, ƿe didn’t have spellcheck—so folks spelled ƿords as ðey sound. Having less digraphs favoring more single characters is considered more ergonomic; Dvorak, ð keyboard layout, has “ht” on the home roƿ of ð dominant hand to shoƿ just hoƿ dominant ðis digraph truly is for typing English.
Look, english spelling is already a mess for me to parse (non-native speaker). If y'all start using this other alphabet, I'm just not gonna bother reading.
"Oh no! Anyway" kind of comment, but I must protest somehow.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty shitty way to behave on a website with a large number of non-native English speakers.
I think the real shitty part is the English itself, not letter changes.
We could do the nice thing and make an easier language the standard? Spanish maybe? Could also do German. /s
I vote for a Klingon/Dothraki hybrid for the global language.
Do you think it's shitty for black people in America to use African American English dialect on public forums where non-native speakers could see it? Same deal, just different levels of familiarity. Nothing is forcing anyone to engage with this post, but a lot of people seem to feel a strong enough desire to enforce social conformity that they go out of their way to complain about someone doing something different.
No. Not same deal. One is dialect with slang, which is readable, and which you can just easily look up if you don't know.
The other is using letters that even most native English speakers can't parse.
Also, comparing this person's nonsense to an ethnic group's way of speaking is highly offensive. I hope you realize that.
I couldn't read OP's post so I looked it up and now I can. All it takes is a little effort, which if you're not willing to expend you can simply move on.
Sure African American English (which is not just slang, but an entire dialect with a different set of grammatical rules) is common and recognizable to most native English speakers now, but there was a time when it was just as inscrutable to them as OP's post.
I get that you think you're being progressive by getting offended on others' behalf, but all you're really doing is using that ethnic group's struggle as a rhetorical device to shame me for having a dissenting opinion. I am comparing them because they are alike in a way that is relevant to my point, not because I think they are identical.
What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about?
I vaguely recall you saying you were Jewish in an earlier comment, if you're actually black then I apologize. If not then perhaps you can try asking someone who is African American if they find what I said "highly offensive."
You see OP's use of Old English as worthy of derision, so you interpreted my comparison as belittling towards AME. I don't share your aversion to esoteric forms of expression, so my comparison is entirely without malice.
Yes. I am Jewish. And being from a minority ethnic group, one with more than one language that has developed due to centuries of forced isolation and relocation (Yiddish and Ladino), I know what it's like for people of privilege to take your particular ethnic language and use it to make points that have nothing to do with it.
It has nothing to do with "being progressive" and everything to do with having been in this position myself, so I know why it's offensive.
Thank you for explaining, I'm sorry for being insensitive. I already explained that I meant no disrespect towards AME. I disagree that the point I made has nothing to do with it. AME was at one time esoteric among the general US population, and that is the only way I'm saying that AME and OP's use of Old English letters are alike.
Is merely using AME as a comparison insensitive or are you just being polite?
I thought you were saying you support allowing many types of language and would not restrict any on this site, which doesn't seem insensitive.
I think they meant they were being insensitive by claiming I was just virtue signalling. Which is fair enough. They apologized.
I don't think we'll agree on this point, but I do appreciate the apology. Thank you.
Ban ñ from Spanish! My language does not have this character!
Non-native speakers tend to mess up dental fricatives in speech as is. This usage is a good reminder as a character for a sound your language doesn’t have… a lot of languages “th” is pronounced as English “t” which implies aspiration like in Thomas. It is just like learning any other non-Romantic language & is literally in Icelandic—not some made-up character.
ᚻᛠᛏᚢᚱᛋ᛫ᚷᛟᚾᚾᚫ᛫ᚻᛠᛏ
Translation: häturs᛫gonna᛫hät
I know what this says because of ultima underworld
Ðey do be like ðat sometimes
This was a little easier than reading finnegans Wake but not much. Definitely more humorous though. Thank you.
De nada
Why do you persist in writing "ð" rather than "ðe" for "the"? And... Do you really say æsþetic and not æstetic? Where are you from to do that?
FWIW, do not support, even as a brother up north. English spelling is broken but there are more glaring problems to fix first.
Why should the indefinite article, “a”, a single character but the definite article, “the”, takes 3 chars? You know those that created our more modern English decided to respell could with -ould just for symmetry with would & should (Old English was cūþe, with our boy thorn for a dental fricative ending)—so it isn’t like words never changed to look nicer. Middle English often wrote the “the” as þͤ. /ðə/ is the normal transcription. “ð” without specially markers seems fine: single char for a very common word while indicating that it is a voiced sound (meaning not the unvoiced þ).
Aesthetic comes from Greek αἰσθητικός. θ is an unvoiced dental fricative (also the symbol in IPA) just like our boy þ (descended from the Futhark ᚦ). All transcriptions of English dialects I found show it with the “th” in pronunciation… so if you aren’t using a unvoiced dental fricative, you would be the weird one. 🙃
I would agree that fixing the vowels should be a higher priority. But English does not fit a five-vowel system like most Latin languages whose letters were shoehorned onto English. The only way to fix it (ignoring the dialectal splits) would be to either invent an entirely new writing system or going back to the system prior to Latin script adoption since the old system more properly encoded English sounds with few diagraphs & many more vowels to work with. In the latter case you would go for the Anglo-Saxon runes brought to the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons, & Jutes. With modernization, I would support this too tho 😅
Right, so you're just arbitrarily changing words. That's very nice.
In recent years tho & thru have been increasingly more common than though & through. Common words tend to do this—the is a top-10 usage word in English. Makes sense.
Look on how you go from Latin ET/et to &. Turns a common word into a single symbol. Or similar a (and an) coming from Old English ān with cognates in Old Frisian, German, Norse, Saxon, and Gothic with forms like “ein” further being reduced.
If there is a historical precendence for this happening, there is no reason to assume the language’s writing would not, could not, or should not evolve similarly.
I have no problem reading text that uses these characters, but hƿich and hƿile really bother me.
https://youtu.be/nfVEvgWd4ek
They are weirder ones for sure since they look like Ps without extra training. But just slapping two Vs or Us together like the Romans is a hack compared to the historic ƿ (from Runic ᚹ).
But even stranger is why on Earth were “hw” flipped by printing press folks after hundreds of years with the h first due to pronunciation… I wouldn’t be surprised if the voiceless labial–velar fricative went out of fashion based the new spelling to where many (maybe most) speakers don’t differentiate between “w” & “wh”.
I was talking about the beginning "h", not the ƿ. Because there are people who pronounce it like that.
I know—but they used to spell the h first too. Almost everyone used to pronounce it ʍ as well, hence my theory that the pronunciation stopped after the wild choice to do a spelling reform
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_labial%E2%80%93velar_fricative
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#W