Showerthoughts @lemmy.world Zerlyna @lemmy.world 3mo ago

The word "phonetic" is not spelled phonetically.

34 comments

Of course not. It's spelled "phonetic." Phonetically is spelled "phonetically." 😌
The word 'monosyllabic' isn't monosyllabic.

The word 'alphabetic' isn't alphabetic.

The word 'palindrome' isn't a palindrome.
- Those are all heterological words, just like "phonetic".
  
  Autological (or homological) would be words like "pentasyllabic", "unhyphenated" and "writable.".
  
  Does the word heterological describe itself?
  
  My favorite is 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia', which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD
- The fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
Sure it is. English just has multiple generations of "phonetic" that overlay, and are not consistent with, one another. It has, if you will, codebases that were forked, re-forked, and then occasionally merged back in after developing on their own for a few centuries, and no official steering committee was ever established. There is semi-official documentation, usually from self-appointed pedants, but even that adjusts as more features are merged in willy-nilly and workarounds emerge.

English spelling is hard not because it lacks any logic, but because this entire language is a case study in modularity and extensibility at all costs.
The word "Onomatopoeia" sound more complicated than what it means.
The word "Abbreviated" is actually quite long.
wtf? yes it is. you just don't know enough about words
- Thank you. OP just wants /r points. lol. We give lots of points here. THis is the place where the points don't matter and nobody wins anything.
I need a mnemonic to remember how to spell "mnemonic."
- My Normal Enemy Munches On Naked Ice Cream
  
  I need you to write all my mnemonics.
- ChatGPT came up with
  
  Memory
  Navigation
  Enhancing
  Methods
  Of
  Name
  Integration
  Coding.
I don't even know what "spelled phonetically" is supposed to mean in English. As far as I'm concerned that language is just a jumble of vowels that all sound the same but generate long arguments about how to pronounce things "correctly".
- This is why the IPA is useful.
  
  Kind of. The IPA doesn't show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.
  
  IPA is also useful for cleaning and drinking.
- Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetik”
  
  So pronounced phone-tick?
  
  funneddic (US)
  funnettic (UK)
  
  This is not correct. English is simply not phonetic and therefore it's impossible to spell any English word phonetically.
I mean, aren't we using mostly Latin letters and sounds to spell non-Latin words?

There's a phonetic English alphabet out there. Some Scottish poet commissioned it years ago.

It is named after him. But I am an uncultured swine and can't remember who it is at the moment.
- The Shavian Alphabet!
  
  Boom. #nailedit

34 comments