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Leonard Ritter
26 comments
Fabian Giesen

@lritter @aeva apropos of nothing, take long-existing English words, pronounce every letter with "gh" as German "ch" and a lot becomes clear

night -> nicht -> nacht
light -> licht
knight -> knicht -> knecht
enough -> enuch -> genug
laughter -> lauchter -> (ge)lächter
daughter -> dauchter -> dochter/tochter [see also dottir etc.]
weight -> weicht -> (ge)wicht
right -> richt ((ge)recht, richtig, ...)
neighbor -> neichbor -> nachbar
sight -> sicht

etc.

@lritter @aeva apropos of nothing, take long-existing English words, pronounce every letter with "gh" as German "ch" and a lot becomes clear

night -> nicht -> nacht
light -> licht
knight -> knicht -> knecht
enough -> enuch -> genug
laughter -> lauchter -> (ge)lächter
daughter -> dauchter -> dochter/tochter [see also dottir etc.]
weight -> weicht -> (ge)wicht
right -> richt ((ge)recht, richtig, ...)
neighbor -> neichbor -> nachbar
sight -> sicht

9 August at 6:32 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Fabian Giesen

@lritter @aeva it's all those Germanic-root words with the ch sound Modern English no longer really has. Back when English orthography crystallized that old pronunciation was already on the way out but it's still the root of all those spellings of words that are now hella confusing because they have little to do with how they're actually said out loud today.

9 August at 6:34 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva

@rygorous @lritter what! is german just a substitution cipher, a few deleted spaces, and substantially less french?!

9 August at 6:54 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva
Leonard Ritter

@aeva @rygorous der mond
die sonne

(very rare in a lang that the sun is feminine)

9 August at 6:56 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Fabian Giesen
aeva

@rygorous @lritter I feel like I probably would have had a better shot at not failing german class if I knew this back in school

9 August at 7:18 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Leonard Ritter

@aeva @rygorous well there's still the grammar which is abysmal. iirc german used to have much simpler grammar until the romans inspired changes in conjugation

9 August at 7:20 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva

@lritter @rygorous I always get the feeling that language just gets worse over time, but I can't ever tell if that's actually the case or just the third hand opinions from linguists. like what do they know they weren't there either

9 August at 7:31 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Irenes (many)

@aeva @lritter @rygorous "worse" is... language definitely acquires more interesting wrinkles over time

9 August at 7:37 | Open on adhd.irenes.space
Leonard Ritter

@ireneista @aeva @rygorous just an intuition but i feel there's a push-pull between at least two different factions: the "save energy, move mouth/hands less" faction (you see their handiwork everywhere), and the "we recognize elevated status in society by the use of multisyllabic technical terms under the guise of aiming for enhanced expressive precision" faction.

in addition, language is not only used to foster understanding, it's also used for demarcation. youth slang is mostly this.

9 August at 7:44 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Mrs Beanbag

@aeva @lritter @rygorous Dutch and Norwegian have both been purposefully simplified on government initiative, in the mid 20th century, mostly removing a lot of pointless gender stuff. also as someone who just speedran Duolingo's Danish course it's kinda wild how all the Germanic languages start to just sound like dialects/strong accents once you get used to listening to it.

9 August at 10:40 | Open on ieji.de
Fabian Giesen
Fabian Giesen

@aeva @lritter like the whole chain shift is a fun curiosity when you see it written but considering it's an actual systematic change in pronunciation that happened fairly consistently throughout the first millenium BC, where therefore speakers must have fairly consistently drifted in their phonetics across a fairly large region, is just bizarre to think about

9 August at 7:24 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Leonard Ritter

@rygorous @aeva globally we're also drifting away from "english with an accent" towards various legit alternative vernaculars; various versions of pidgin english, and jamaican as a mature offspring. which has traceable irish roots. :)

9 August at 7:32 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Janne Moren

@aeva @rygorous @lritter
It's really just Swedish but without the beautiful intonation.

9 August at 7:10 | Open on fosstodon.org
James Widman

@aeva @rygorous @lritter see also norwegian for many words that are basically english-with-a-different-accent

9 August at 7:37 | Open on mastodon.social
R💽nflaix

@rygorous @lritter @aeva thanks for pointing it out! It had never made so much sense until now!

9 August at 7:07 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva
James Widman

@aeva @lritter why is no one talking about þe mouþfeel

9 August at 7:24 | Open on mastodon.social
Leonard Ritter
James Widman

@lritter @aeva i just noticed that if you rotate þ clockwise 90 degrees it kinda looks like that (the curvy part of "þ" kinda looks like the tongue sticking out and the vertical line represents the teeth)

9 August at 7:32 | Open on mastodon.social
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