What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by BunScientist@lemmy.zip))
Edit: it's to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
My wife and I had a good snicker one time when I brought home edamame peas in the shell.
They were shelled, but she wanted them shelled.
Flammable/imflammable is another one that comes to mind.
As carved into history by Dr. Nick:
English has many contronyms.
Just remember
Pretty sure the past tense of "lead" is actually "led."
Unless of course you're referring to the type of metal, lead, which I guess the meme isn't clear on.
Pretty sure there’s a chemical element named “lead”
It's not saying anything about past tenses in that meme, it's just saying that each word has two different pronunciations that rhyme with the other.
What's not clear? It's written right there!
It's all about led vs lēd.
It's "its," by the way.
This is the grammar thing I fuck up the most, and I don't call people on it because I'm pretty sure I don't know how it works. Autocorrect changes it & I just say "oh, whoops", and it still looks wrong...
it's means "it is". It is really not difficult, just pretend you are Data and swear off contractions.
Here's a shortcut: test if you could drop "his" into the same spot and have it make sense. (And of course you'd never write hi's or his's.) If "his" would work, "its" would work.
bought, caught, taught, fought, thought, sought, and wrought are all past tense verbs and all rhyme. The present tense forms are buy, catch, teach, fight, think, seek, and work, none of which rhyme.
Spanish is awesome. All its verbs in their regular form do end in "-ar", "-er" and "-ir".
Fast can mean moving with great speed or fixed securely in place (among other things).
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
...
Very long. Highly recommended
The primary accent for 2-syllable words that are used as both a noun and a verb depends on the part of speech. The noun places the primary accent on the 1st syllable, the verb on the 2nd syllable.
Examples:
The musician records a record.
The farmer produces produce.
You're not permitted to fish without a permit.
One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:
And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.
The other English thing I find super interesting is how there's a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say "The big old red wooden door" it works as a description, but if I say "The wooden old red big door" it sounds weird even though it's the same information. People aren't usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.
Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions
I before E, except after C!
As long as you don't count the word caffeine. Or protein. Or species. Or seize or heinous or leisure or weird or feign or their or reignite or any of the other 923 words that are exceptions to this rule lol.
Where, were, we're. Even native speakers have problems with this. I don't know how many times I had to correct such cases, especially with American authors.
Pretty much only native speakers have problems with this, I see this type of mistake far less frequently with those who learned English as an additional language.
"Read" and "readed."
English has way more vowel sounds than it has vowels.
Those are just words where the primary vowel letter is "a".
The terrible attempt to solve this is by using double letters, but then consistency goes out the window. There's times when "ea" is a single vowel sound like /rid/ (reed) or /rɛd/ (red). But it can also be /ɛrn/ as in earn, which rhymes with urn and burn. It can be /ˈɡɹeɪt/ as in great, where the "ea" is a diphthong and pronounced like the "a" in grate or vague. Or, for more fun, the two letters can each fully get their own pronunciation like "react" or "theatre".
We're really at the "bearn it all down and start over" stage with English. Let's just all agree to switch to español.
"Read" is spelled s-a-m-e? English is a weird language.
Wait until you hear about how we pronounce colonel!
We pronounce it the same as the linux colonel.
Present: read
Past: red (in the fediverse), redd (on the old site)
Obvious.
The English language is so retarded yet we use it for international communication, and it is too late to stop it.
Reed and Red
The digraph oo is pronounced at least six different ways:
Are the first 2 lines really different?
Genuine question from a non native speaker.
Brooch and mooch.
But, aren't these the same sounds as boot / proof / boost etc.?
On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced "Redding". This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).
Little details, picked up along the way.
Read and readed
Wind as in air moving and wind as in a pathway with twists and turns.
I've never been a fan of read/read/red They're too popular to all be comingled like that.
Just place read/read with Peruse/Perused
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