this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago

Of course not. It's spelled "phonetic." Phonetically is spelled "phonetically." 😌

[–] cholesterol 36 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

The word 'monosyllabic' isn't monosyllabic.

The word 'alphabetic' isn't alphabetic.

The word 'palindrome' isn't a palindrome.

[–] Dasus 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Those are all heterological words, just like "phonetic".

Autological (or homological) would be words like "pentasyllabic", "unhyphenated" and "writable.".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Does the word heterological describe itself?

[–] Dasus 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Uffff, right in my autism.

Luckily the internet helps with that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox

The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the meaning of "heterological" where it was previously well-defined, by modifying the definition of "heterological" slightly to hold all nonautological words except "heterological". But "nonautological" is subject to the same paradox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from that of "autological". A similar slight modification to the definition of "autological" (such as declaring it false of "nonautological" and its synonyms) might seem to correct that, but the paradox still remains for synonyms of "autological" and "heterological" such as "self-descriptive" and "non–self-descriptive", whose meanings also would need adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing English of the Grelling–Nelson paradox entails considerably more modification to the language than mere refinements of the definitions of "autological" and "heterological", which need not even be in the language for the paradox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is comparable to that of Russell's paradox for mathematics founded on sets.

Tldr "does the set of all sets contain itself?"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Haha, I'm sorry. It was definitely a set-up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

This just makes me mad lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Same, always fascinated me when I first learnt it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

The fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

[–] wjrii 27 points 2 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 19 points 2 months ago

The word "Onomatopoeia" sound more complicated than what it means.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

The word "Abbreviated" is actually quite long.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

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” just because the Romans were lazy.

Blame your lack of education, not the Phoenicians!

Edit: I apologize— I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy. I was trying to be sassy and playful, and went overboard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I didn’t intend for this to come so bitchy.

Linguistics and not-bitchy... What are you trying to be, a descriptivist?!?!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Uh oh, it sounds like you're

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago
[–] radix 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I need a mnemonic to remember how to spell "mnemonic."

[–] kambusha 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My Normal Enemy Munches On Naked Ice Cream

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I need you to write all my mnemonics.

[–] AffineConnection 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

ChatGPT came up with

Memory
Navigation
Enhancing
Methods
Of
Name
Integration
Coding.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

wtf? yes it is. you just don't know enough about words

[–] RHSJack 4 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] teft 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Ah that's interesting, I didn't know that.

Still, the IPA is really helpful when trying to discuss pronunciation with someone who has a very different accent to ourselves.

As a New Zealander I find some US phonetic spellings baffling.

[–] AffineConnection 3 points 2 months ago

IPA is also useful for cleaning and drinking.

[–] Zerlyna 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetik”

[–] breakingcups 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] VindictiveJudge 3 points 2 months ago

Three syllables, so it would be fo-ne-tik.

[–] aliceblossom 2 points 2 months ago

This is not correct. English is simply not phonetic and therefore it's impossible to spell any English word phonetically.

[–] AffineConnection 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

funneddic (US)
funnettic (UK)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That's transposing it how we sound to them, though!

If the above were pronounced in a baseline kiwi accent the U would just get deeper. The vowel shift goes the other way if I'm to recreate their pronunciation using my own accent:

Fehr ned ik (US)

Foe net eck (UK)

[–] BodePlotHole 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] BodePlotHole 1 points 2 months ago

Boom. #nailedit