Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:54 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And how does this strange language called English fits into your rules
>> and (no) special cases scheme?
>>
>>
http://www.omgfacts.com/lists/3989/Did-you-know-that-ough-can-be-pronounced-TEN-DIFFERENT-WAYS
>
> I learned six, which is no more than there are for the simple vowel
> 'a' (at least, in British English; American English has a few less
> sounds for 'a').
What is this thing you call "American English"? :-)
I wouldn't want to put an exact number of distinct accents in the USA, but
it's probably in three figures. And it used to be said that a sufficiently
skilled linguist could tell what side of the street an English person was
born on, that's how fine-grained English accents used to be.
> Consider "cat", "bay", "car" (that's the three most
> common sounds), "watch", "water", "parent" (these three are less
> common, and American English often folds them into the other three).
There's a joke about how people from certain parts of the US suffer
from "hat attacks" (heart attacks).
> Now have a look at Norwegian, where the fifth of those sounds
> ("water") is spelled with a ring above, eg "La den gå" - and the sixth
> is (I think) more often spelled with a slashed O - "Den kraften jeg
> skjulte før". Similarly in Swedish: "Slå dig loss, slå dig fri" is
> pronounced "Slaw di loss, slaw di free". Or let's look at another of
> English's oddities. Put a t and an h together, and you get a
> completely different sound... two different sounds, in fact, voiced or
> unvoiced. Icelandic uses thorn instead: "Þetta er nóg" is pronounced
> (roughly) "Thetta air know".
English used to include the letter Thorn too. Among others. Little known
fact: at one time, ampersand & (as in "and") used to be included as a
letter of the alphabet
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-alphabet
> And the whole notion of putting a dot on
> a lower-case i and not putting one on upper-case I is pretty
> illogical, but Turkish, as I mentioned in the previous post, uses the
> dots to distinguish between two pronunciations of the vowel, hence
> "aldırma" which would sound somewhat different with a dot on the i.
>
> (You may be able to see a theme in my example texts, but I figured
> it's time to see what I can do with full Unicode support. The cold
> looks of disapproval never bothered me, anyway.)
>
> ChrisA
--
Steven
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
