this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Memes

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I always want to pronounce the American versions of these words phonetically when I see them.

And what the heck is going on with the US pronunciation of “buoy”? None of those syllables are in that word.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Buo-y

Apparently we have the Dutch to blame for that one, as the verb form is apparently descended from Spanish.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I still don't understand the English insistence on borrowing words from other languages, yet refusal to standardize spelling into ways that actually make sense within the language.

So I still blame English for being silly with their transliteration.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Blame the French actually, they invaded and screwed everything up beyond repair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Funny thing about those "French" people.

William the Bastard of Normandy was the grandson of a fellow named Rollo the Viking.

Rollo had conquered the French northern coast and wrecked so much shit the French king just offered to make him a vassal, and give him more land in the process, if he protected the land he'd taken from other Viking raiders. This area would develop a hybrid culture from the mixing of the Germanic invaders and French population.

English, already a bastardized Germanic language, combined from the spoken languages of Germanic invaders who would come to be known as Anglo-Saxons and the native population, got further hybridized by a French Viking who actually spoke a French-Germanic dialect known as Norman.

Tl;Dr

Sea Germans hate linguistic purity, and English's problems are all their fault.

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