What did you have for lunch or dinner today?
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@scottalanmiller I have, unfortunately. Just like in Kentucky, the town of Versailles is always called Versales. People should know better.
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@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@scottalanmiller I have, unfortunately. Just like in Kentucky, the town of Versailles is always called Versales. People should know better.
That's because that's the local name, though. That's different. Paella is always paella because it is not a local name. But if you made the city of Paella, Kentucky and they pronounced the town pay-ella, that would be correct, but eating paella there would be eating "pie-aya" in "pay-ella".
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@scottalanmiller said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@scottalanmiller I have, unfortunately. Just like in Kentucky, the town of Versailles is always called Versales. People should know better.
That's because that's the local name, though. That's different. Paella is always paella because it is not a local name. But if you made the city of Paella, Kentucky and they pronounced the town pay-ella, that would be correct, but eating paella there would be eating "pie-aya" in "pay-ella".
Most British people pronounce it with L instead of Y sound, sort of like how they pronounce the H in Herbs. Even though they're only some 30 km or whatever from Spain and France. 90% of all Spanish speakers pronounce LL like the semi-vowel "Y" (or J if you are familiar with and of most languages other than English and French), exceptions are Spanish in Chile which in some cases does pronounce it like an L, and some other small areas of South America that pronounce it like ZH weirdly, and parts of Spanish speaking in the Philippines. It's ironic too because some Brits also go out of their way to use the non-Catalan pronunciation of Barcelona (like Barthelona).
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@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@scottalanmiller I have, unfortunately. Just like in Kentucky, the town of Versailles is always called Versales. People should know better.
Once when looking at a map of Connecticut with someone from Connecticut, I pointed out Versailles saying something like "Maybe if we go through Versai", and he said "What?", I repeated it pointing specifically at the name, and he said "Oh, it's pronounced Versales." I just said "Yeah, I don't think so."
I ran into a very similar problem in Kansas, there's several places pronounced strangely, like El Dorado, they pronounce "El Doraydo" and will constantly incorrect you if you pronounce it correctly. And there's an area of Wichita called Delano, as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You guessed it, how everyone else in the world says it is wrong, it's "Duh-layno"
Then again there's a lot about Kansas I don't understand, like how the highways have the most inexplicably short merging lanes where people slam on brakes, every time I've driven into Kansas from another state the first thing I've noticed is the long lines to exit because of merging lanes, on top of they put stop lights at the top of cloverleaf interchanges to make sure that you are able to defeat the entire purpose of them existing, not to mention the merge lines on those tend to be no more than a car length or two.
In addition to... people stop and begin to turn without being in turning lanes, or stop abruptly and turn into parking lots from roads as slow as humanly possible as though the street will explode if they go over 1mph. And instead of saying "You're welcome" they just say "Yeah" or "Uh-Huh". One weirder thing I noticed is a strange number of people, but by no means even a majority, but a small enough minority to where it stands out to me, when they say Good bye on the phone, and only the phone, they'll say "mmmm bye"... a lot of sex shops next door to churches. One way signs pointing two different directions when there's a median, this one is just needlessly stupid.
And finally the belief that everyone in almost every state has: the weather changes so much if you just wait 5 minutes it'll be different, that's what makes our state unique even though almost every other damn state says that.
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@tonyshowoff Right! To all of that. I don't care if its a local pronunciation or not, if its obviously a word from a different language then respect that language and don't look like an idiot.
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@tonyshowoff ... "You're welcome" they just say "Yeah" or "Uh-Huh". One weirder thing I noticed is a strange number of people, but by no means even a majority, but a small enough minority to where it stands out to me, when they say Good bye on the phone, and only the phone, they'll say "mmmm bye"...
Western Pa
or yup, later, seeya
You'll find this a lot here too. Yinz isn't the only idiosyncrasy.
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@tonyshowoff keep in mind the entire state of Kansas is named the same thing as the state of Arkansas but mispronounced! Being unable to pronounce their own names is the basis for their identity!
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@tonyshowoff said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
And finally the belief that everyone in almost every state has: the weather changes so much if you just wait 5 minutes it'll be different, that's what makes our state unique even though almost every other damn state says that.
LOL, it is SO true. EVERY state says that. Even the ones where the weather is totally predictable and rarely changes.
Surprise people... when you get rain, it comes right after there not-being rain. That's how we keep it from not raining 24x7x365!
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@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@tonyshowoff Right! To all of that. I don't care if its a local pronunciation or not, if its obviously a word from a different language then respect that language and don't look like an idiot.
I'm from Covington, NY where we mispronounced our own language!
Actually that may not be true. Studies show that American English is closer to the English at the time of the establishment of the colonies than British English is, by quite a margin. And many things that we say that don't sound like "proper English" are actually us keeping the language more stable while Britain went off and developed new ways to say things recently.
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@scottalanmiller said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@tonyshowoff Right! To all of that. I don't care if its a local pronunciation or not, if its obviously a word from a different language then respect that language and don't look like an idiot.
I'm from Covington, NY where we mispronounced our own language!
Actually that may not be true. Studies show that American English is closer to the English at the time of the establishment of the colonies than British English is, by quite a margin. And many things that we say that don't sound like "proper English" are actually us keeping the language more stable while Britain went off and developed new ways to say things recently.
How do you record something like that? phonic diagrams?
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@Dashrender said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@scottalanmiller said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@tonyshowoff Right! To all of that. I don't care if its a local pronunciation or not, if its obviously a word from a different language then respect that language and don't look like an idiot.
I'm from Covington, NY where we mispronounced our own language!
Actually that may not be true. Studies show that American English is closer to the English at the time of the establishment of the colonies than British English is, by quite a margin. And many things that we say that don't sound like "proper English" are actually us keeping the language more stable while Britain went off and developed new ways to say things recently.
How do you record something like that? phonic diagrams?
There is a lot of study into it. There is a bunch of science and research behind it. A lot of it comes from studying poetry and when people have written that X rhymes with Y and how that moves over time. They did the same things for Latin and have reconstructed real Latin rather than the fake Hollywood "sounds like Latin" that we are used to.
Vini Vidi Vici, for example... the V sounds like a W in Latin. But modern Latin speakers don't say that, because they are normally speaking a modern construct of Latin to sound like we "think" it should sound rather than as it did.
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Bread and olive oil. Yum.
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@scottalanmiller said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
@tonyshowoff Right! To all of that. I don't care if its a local pronunciation or not, if its obviously a word from a different language then respect that language and don't look like an idiot.
I'm from Covington, NY where we mispronounced our own language!
Actually that may not be true. Studies show that American English is closer to the English at the time of the establishment of the colonies than British English is, by quite a margin. And many things that we say that don't sound like "proper English" are actually us keeping the language more stable while Britain went off and developed new ways to say things recently.
I studied English language history at University as a minor, including learning Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English. Contrary to what most people think, Shakespeare spoke Early Modern English, as is "Ye Olde" which is pronounced "The Old". American English is actually closer to the English spoken by Shakespeare or at least in his time since we can't know for sure exactly what he sounded like. Most of the differences from American and the billions of British accents happened in the 18th and 19th centuries. So when in Shakespeare In Love you hear RP, East London, and Cockney accents, these are basically as accurate giving them 1920s Chicago gangster accents...nyaa see, copper! I'll get into more about it in a second...
@Dashrender said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:
How do you record something like that? phonic diagrams?
Well, this is a bit more complex, but the most evident thing to see is how in Britain, essentially all accents are non-rhotic, meaning they don't pronounce R at the end of a word unless the next word starts with a vowel. If English was always spoken this way, or was spoken this way prior to standardisation of spelling by noted crazy person Samuel Johnson, then words like "there" would be spelled more like "thea". A few minor American accents also have this feature, and both share in another bizarre feature of adding -r where a word actually ends in a vowel, this is more obvious in many English accents where they'll say "Africar" instead of "Africa."
English is also a Germanic language, and like all Germanic languages it went through a series of changes that the Grimm Brothers (among others) noted happened, and through this we can work backward to see how different accents and Germanic languages themselves were pronounced by the resulting changes. They changed at different paces and in some places changes which happened in some either didn't happen in others or are continuing to happen today. It's not as easily noticed because unlike English, all other Germanic languages have updated their spelling as their languages changed -- many English language scholars and general users think complex spelling makes their language unique and adds words to the language which is not only stupid but the exact reverse of how words are added.
English would have just as many words if there were more consistent spelling, and ironically you don't see many people other than Samuel Johnson arguing all the dozens of meanings of the words "set", "run", etc all need different spellings, but that's the logic. English speaking intellectuals often have and in the past certainly had a huge complex with their language, often denying it was a Germanic language at all, in fact I've heard English speakers claim their language comes from Latin.
But this isn't just a rant about spelling reform, rather it's an example of how we can see how words were pronounced to an extent. A simple example is "gh" which was at one time pronounced like the "ch" in German or similar to the "ch" in how Scottish people say "loch". Knowing this shows how words like "light" in English are directly related to words like "licht" in German. However during the Great Vowel Shift, which happened to some degree in all Germanic languages but to the highest degree in English, when long vowels (long as in duration, "long" and "short" vowels in English tend to mean "front" and "back" vowels in all other languages on the entire planet; so short i as in feet, was pronounced twice as long as long i feed. It's subtle in English but matters in Old English and in many other languages.). Most Germanic languages updated this, so Ice, spelled "is" before the French changed it, which was pronounced something like "Ees" in English in German, they updated it to "Eis" in German. This means that while they're pronounced the same, they spelling is vastly different.
And believe it or not the messed up spelling, created by several events other than the Great Vowel Shift, for example the Norman invasion of England, they added silent letters where English previously had no silent letters at all. This is because of their spelling rules. So for example English did not use the letter "v" as a consonant, instead "f" was used, so "Love", "Have" were spelled "Luf" and "Haf" (depending on conjugation). The Norman French didn't do this, so they changed those to "v", but in Norman French spelling rules words cannot end in "v", so an "e" was added, and a U and V were the same letter, so if a vowel version of "V" (now written U) was next at a consonant version of "V" (still written "V") they wrote it as O, so Luf becomes Love. This same rule applies with N and M, so "cum" became "come", really it was spelled like that.
We can use this as well to understand a bit about how English was pronounced, at least in areas where Norman French monks where.
Samuel Johnson who created the first notable English dictionary also added a lot of letters, and prior to him English was a bit more free floating, which helped show accent differences to a degree. Johnson was one of these people who had a huge complex about English being a Germanic language and never stopped hating it. He made up false etymologies, such as saying that "island", "aisle", "debt" were all originally from Latin, they weren't, so he changed their spelling it look more like similar Latin words, intentionally adding false etymology, making that stupid "complex spelling shows etymology and thus meaning" argument really nonsense... as though children learning to read also speak Ancient Greek, Latin, and Norman French. Nevertheless, these words were spelled "iland", "il", and "dett" before they were changed.
And finally, people, primarily monks early on but later writers, also described the sounds of their languages and accents, either intentionally or in some cases by making fun of the way other people spoke, this was especially common in Ancient Greece. By making comparisons to other languages and certain words we are able to make out even more details we can confirm with all the other stuff. So while we can't know exactly, precisely how English was spoken, we can say with pretty good certainty how the writer heard it, and that means British English is really the least English in the history of English since the Norman invasion.
There's even more insanity than that, but that's the basics, and while Shakespeare would have been more comfortable with how many Americans spoke (so long as they're not on the east coast with all the contact with the British) rather than his own countrymen, though it wouldn't have been exactly the same, the primary difference would have been that perhaps, though unproven, Shakespeare pronounced -ng simply as -n, but many Americans do that too.
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I had Phở for dinner
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I made angel hair with vodka sauce for dinner.
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I had black olives and coffee. That is all.
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Making pasta for the kids.
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Had brownies for lunch. Not a lot of healthy food in this house.
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Had roast lamb dinner today, yum yum
- not forgetting the mint sauce either! -
Just had vegetarian BLTs.
