quatre-vingts

Chickenstalker , 10 months ago

The French is the reason English is a clusterfuck of inconsistent grammar and spelling.

elscallr , 10 months ago

Well and German, and some other Latin languages, and a bit of Nordic/Slavic languages, and all the other languages whose pockets English rifled for loose vocabulary.

I love the language, honestly, I love how completely and unapologetically a clusterfuck it is, but it’s a clusterfuck.

some_guy , 10 months ago

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language

You are the person I’ve been waiting to recommend this book. It’s fascinating. It was wild to see everything explained. It all has very good reasons for being completely insane, but it gave me a much deeper appreciation for why it is as is.

And for those of you too lazy to read a book, here’s a podcast interview with the author:

99percentinvisible.org/…/corpse-corps-horse-and-w…

Echrichor , 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

DragonTypeWyvern , 10 months ago

Normally I don’t support English imperialism, as the root of the majority of the modern world’s evils, BUT

Cheshire , 10 months ago

On a similar note: In German, “seven hundred fifty three” would be said as “seven hundred three and fifty”.

At least it’s consistent - starting at “thirteen” , which is “three ten”, up to ninety nine, which is “nine and ninety”, the multiples of ten come last.

It is pretty annoying, though, when a number like 123’456’789 is spoken as 132-465-798, though.

Apparently, it’s because in old Germanic, the numbers were spoken “backwards” (one hundred twenty three being spoken as “three and twenty and hundred”), and we only partially reversed that.