English Language - what "Does your head in" ??

[Audax67]

C.f. Buñuel's film of cheese mites. There's organic for you.

[Bmblbzzz]

...
Down-side: Of course spelling affected in a negative way by ubiquitous auto-correction, the dreadful and patronising spawn of the spell-checker… What modern person can be bothered to a) turn the feature off b) check and struggle with further automatic features to edit the word or phrase to its correct version and c) be bothered to look it up if uncertain?

But why would an autocorrect function change lose to loose? They're both common English verbs...

Jonathan

It might not change one to the other, but it will often prompt lose when you want loose, and vice versa. As to why they're so easily confused, it's probably at least in part because the difference in spelling is in the vowel, but the difference in pronunciation is in the consonant. Also, loose is far more common as an adjective than a verb.

[Jdsk]

From another thread:

...
Anthelios it's called if you're looking for it, if (a) it exists in the UK and (b) you can stand mixed Latin and Greek roots.
...

I think that both roots are from Greek:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anti-#English
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/helio-#English

Jonathan

[Audax67]

From another thread:

...
Anthelios it's called if you're looking for it, if (a) it exists in the UK and (b) you can stand mixed Latin and Greek roots.
...

I think that both roots are from Greek:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anti-#English
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/helio-#English

Jonathan

Well, I will be dipped in σκατά. Apollogies to their marketing lizards
.

[Jdsk]

: - )

Jonathan

[Jdsk]

From another thread:

I’ve long spelled things as I’ve pronounced (prenounced) them and hence didn’t do wonderfully at sckool.

The first vowel sound in pronounced isn't either a short e or a long e. It's a schwa.

Jonathan

[Audax67]

From another thread:

I’ve long spelled things as I’ve pronounced (prenounced) them and hence didn’t do wonderfully at sckool.

The first vowel sound in pronounced isn't either a short e or a long e. It's a schwa.

Jonathan

And in case anyone wants to know why a neutral sound would be called a schwa it's because שווא, pronounced a bit like chva*, is Hebrew for void. And if you want to know why a word from Hebrew would be used to describe sounds in English be my guest, the answer is probably here and the night is young. I believe it's something to do with Frenetics, an eastern sect akin to Dervishes (dirty lie).

* not to be confused with chav, one who might well have a שווא between the ears

[Cowsham]

Label
Table

Why?

[Audax67]

Centuries of evolution.

[Jdsk]

Label
Table

Why?

I haven't looked this one up, but I suspect "locking-in", rather than anything deep.

It's probably because of the standardising effect of printing. Spelling used to be very variable. But when printing arrived the printer had to make a decision. And some of these decisions seem to have been arbitrary.

The same general effect also occurred with Webster's dictionary and US English. He had to decide one way or the other and that then became the standard.

Recommended reading: Crystal's "Spell It Out":
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/dog ... -spelling/

Jonathan

[Audax67]

It's probably because of the standardising effect of printing. Spelling used to be very variable. But when printing arrived the printer had to make a decision. And some of these decisions seem to have been arbitrary.

Jonathan

When the Académie Française were bringing out the first edition of their dictionary, a typesetter ran out of è blocks on one page and slipped in an é instead, probably thinking that no-one would notice. As a result, generations of school kids were beaten about the head for writing évènement (event), as it sounds and should be written, instead of événement as it stood in the dictionary. It was only in the 20th century that the Académie allowed that the "new" spelling, évènement, was permissible, but ruled that the "old" spelling was nevertheless not wrong; while in fact the "new" spelling was how it had always been written until they screwed it up.

If they'd been writing the rules during Watergate, bugging one's political rivals would suddenly have been legal and Nixon would have finished his term.