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Strewth the spelling of English is weird!


old man emu

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  • 4 months later...
  • 1 month later...

Eye have a spelling checker

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques for my revue

Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

 

Eye strike a key and type a word

And weight four it to say

Weather eye am wrong oar write

It shows me strait a weigh.

 

As soon as a mist ache is maid

It nose bee fore two long

And eye can put the error rite

It's rare lea ever wrong.

 

Eye have run this poem threw it

Eye am shore your pleased two no

It's letter perfect awl the weigh

My checker tolled me sew.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I did not reply to Spacey's post Feb 13, because I am not Red759, I am red750, and you cannot use the abbreviation Red, because there is now a new member who has selected that user name. Back when I chose that username, capital letters were not used for user names, email addresses, etc.

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Particularly when alongside height, why is it not pronounced hate, or spelt hight?

 

Here's another odd one - "spelt"

This use of the word "spelt" as a noun, meaning a variety of cultivated wheat, is not in dispute, however its use as verb can give rise to disagreement. The debate over the correct spelling of words first began when Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, followed by Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. While people in England preferred Johnson's spellings, Webster's simplified variations became increasingly popular in the United States.

 

The "-t" often replaces "-ed" in verbs, of perhaps it is the other way around. "Spelt" is correct in Anglo-Australian English, but American English has it as "spelled" However, at the end of the horse racing season, many horses are "spelled" - rested in Australia.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 5 months later...

There was a model plane magazine where the editor tried to introduce SR1, which meant spelling reform 1. It was to use the "e" in a consistent way. So you would write about the book you had just red.

Personally, I agreed with the idea but I didn't like reading it  in practice. It never took off.

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  • 3 months later...

Pronouncing the same letter in different ways has been solved in some languages with little symbols above the letter.

I'm glad that english uses none or very few of these. Punctuation slows me down enough as it is.

BUT imagine you are teaching english and the word "up" is the topic.... Cheer up, stuff up, etc. What does the "up" mean?

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30 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Cheer up, stuff up, etc. What does the "up" mean?

When you put a verb - cheer - with a preposition - up -  to express an idea or action, you have created a phrasal verb. These phrasal verbs cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts alone, but must be taken as a whole. We understand what is meant by the pair because we have learned that the two parts make a single, inseparable idea. 

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