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That’s because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question “when you boat go water?” is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.
Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn’t incentivise you to learn. It’s something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.
The word for yacht is jacht in Dutch, so that one’s easy.
What makes it slightly harder is that jacht can also mean hunt.
However, the hardest part of learning English when you’re Dutch is trying not to sound like Mark Rutte.
Louis van Gaal has entered the chat.
It’s easier than Dutch at least
Lol absolutely not
Dutch is a normal, sane language like any other
English is a clusterfuck. Simple on the surface but a complete mess underneath
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
I think “Eunuch” might be a worse offender of this
Not really, the only thing that is harder to pronounce is the ‘ch’
I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it’s easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
As a Hungarian I can confirm. We mostly read words letter-by-letter. No weird shit like “rebel” and “rebel” sounding different because one is a noun, other is a verb 🤡
Or “queue”, are you drunk, English? And the native speakers’ favourite mixups, “there” and “their”, “it’s” and “its”.
You can blame the French for “queue”, it was like that when we got it.
Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。I mean, that’s just because Europeans (and places Europeans colonized) are not used to tonal languages. I started leaning mandarin recently, and while the tones take some getting used to, they are quite clear to differentiate
As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word “yacht” is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: “The Chaos” (poem)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
It’s way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
I think there are at least three versions from the original author, IIRC.
Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
And for a foreigner, this is actually helpful.
Fuck censorship.
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of “Simone Giertz” from Sweeden whose name’s pronunciation sounded like ‘yecht’ to me.
Think I found the version Lemmy really wants
This sound like someone who only speaks English would say.
Yeah, it is an extremely typical native English speaking monolinguist take. They always manage to find examples that are common in basically all languages and assuming it is some esoteric English language quirp.
Bitch please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
I see your Danish and raise you a German bureaucracy:
Rindfleischettikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
It means: Law for the transfer of the task of the monitoring of the labelling of beef.
Hottentottententententoonstelling in Dutch. It means hottentot tent exhibition
Elektriciteitsproductiemaatschappij or basically electricity producing company.
I prefer “angstschreeuw” as word to annoy foreigners with. 7 consonants in a row!
I mean, ‘sch’ is basically one consonant
Fascinating- I don’t speak Danish but I can _almost_read that. Enough to assume it has to do with thyroids and lymph nodes.
It is a medical word for getting tested for breast cancer. I didn’t bring it up because it is a difficult word to understand, but because it is difficult to pronounce correctly without stumbling over it. Yacht is not difficult in any way since our word for yacht is also yacht and because the spellings and sounds are pretty common in for example German, which is another language we are being taught from an early age.
Of course, all languages and their difficulties are relative depending on where in the world you live, but if you’re European, especially western European, then it is pretty silly to be impressed that people can pronounce yacht.
Having a long word like skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse is a lot more tricky since it’s a bit of a tongue twister to pronounce and if you aren’t well versed in Danish, you will also not know when or how to pronounce each letter, as several of them have different sounds or no sounds at all at different places in the word. That is why I brought it up.
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän. Actual word for an actual job that existed until 1991. Welcome to German.
eh people always point to German but they just use compound words more often. if you know the parts that make up the word it shouldn’t be hard to parse.
that makes german easier than most other languages, for example french, where they just invent new sounds to fuck with foreigners and use a new or loanword for any complex situation, instead of just compounding the information
German is wild! I never managed to get I to stick.
What does that mean
Skipper for steamship companies on the Danube.
“Sentinel lymph node examination.” Probably not a word that comes up much day-to-day.
Nope, but it does come up if you get tested for breast cancer.
Point is, that yacht isn’t a difficult word at all. Especially not if you’re European, since the word for yacht in many European languages is… yacht.
I think it’s a Germanic vs. Latin-based thing, since “yacht” is Germanic in origin.
true, but most European languages will pronounce it “ya-cht” and not… “yot”
I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O’s in the middle.
It’s a medical term or word or whatever. But it is not easy to pronounce at all. That’s the thing with Danish. We have a lot of letters that are silent or changes sound depending on what letters they are next to and sometimes just because.
Even if you have skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse broken down for you, I doubt you’d be able to pronounce it correctly because several repeat letters in that word are pronounced differently and some of them are silent.
Words like: ord, ost, mos, mos and orden all have vastly different ways of pronouncing the o and mos and mos are completely different words with completely different pronunciations where you can literally only tell which one it is based on context in the text. By themselves, you will not know.
Every language has their little quirks like that, but everybody knows how to pronounce yacht as yacht is the word for fancy boat in many languages. The post above is basically like being impressed that a foreigner knows how to pronounce “okay”.
I googled. I understand none of the results but it looks like that’s an actual word 🤯
I’m so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn’t.
Imagine bad language on the internet.
Capitalism is ruining our greatest gift, language.
We have a whole ass generation growing up having to learn to use weird euphemisms for everything and anything remotely controversial and it’s totally normal to them. If I were really conspiracy-minded I would be screaming how “They” are doing this on purpose so they can better control us… but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
This is absolutely correct. It’s so tiring to hear people constantly misattribute the fundamental consequences of the machine itself to some mysterious cabal of operators.
But for the rest, eh. Always has been. Kids have always been censored by parents and authority figures. They find their way around it and evolve the language with each new generation.
For example, the youths have taken to the words “raw dog” in the funniest way. It’s some kind of reverse euphemism for “without the help of drugs” - the most offensive way possible to say something innocuous and wholesome.
Like, “I raw dogged my date last night” means “I decided to stay sober despite my insecurities”
I’m terrified of the impact the onset of LLM’s will have on our already failing education systems and willfully ignorant culture, but not because of the censors.
rawdogging implies more than to just stay sober. You can rawdog an exam, which just means you enter with no learning. You can rawdog a meeting, meaning no preparation, you can rawdog a dish, meaning no recipe used. Rawdogging is much more philosophical than people attribute it to
I’ve never heard raw dogging meaning to stay sober.
The first I heard it, long ago, was referring to sex without a condom.
Fascinating! The more you know. Thanks.
Yeah, I’m typically fine with language changing over time, and yeah you’re right it’s just how language evolves.
I guess my fear here is that the methods and means for changing language right now might not be evolution as much as de-evolution in this particular intersection of culture and technology.
When kids naturally develop ways to express themselves, it leads to new generations of minds coming up with new art and expressions.
But I’m not at all sure what the LLM’s and internet culture and the state of politics is going to do to a generation of kids already growing up in an anti-intellectual environment, with growing popularity of phrases like “just put the ___ in the bag” or “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” etc. It really worries me, because a lot of what makes us special as a species is our ability to take complex sets of ideas and concepts and make them into quantifiable abstractions through language, letting us manipulate complicated topics in our minds.
If you don’t have adequate language skills, you’re going to have a harder and harder time performing essential human functions, or even just communicating with others.
if the Zeitgeist is dumbing down, you as an intellectual will stick out like a sore thumb, and you might lose the ability to communicate your ideas efficiently. So, if you are not actively promoting knowledge, you are just complaining into the void like the rest of us
It’s to prevent an algorithm from deranking the content, not to prevent humans from seeing it. Obviously pointless on the Fediverse, but many people do it on other social media platforms.
And the algorithm is programmed to follow particularly American puritanical values, as they are aimed at the American consumer market, but of course on account of the universal nature of the internet, we all get to enjoy the results of it now.
No shit!
