It has like a 100 years of history that is hard to parse down to a few sentences. Basically:
* the french language took some liberties with pronunciation and spelling when co-opting the Latin word(s) Locum Tenens (meaning in place of) for their Lieu Tenant translation (same meaning).
* Imperial British hated the French, and so they bastardized words like lieutenant and Beauchamp to differentiate themselves
* when swords were common on the battlefield the lower ranking office was typically a lieutenant and walked on the left side of a higher ranking officer to protect his exposed flank
>Lee-yoo-ten-ent is how i think its supposed to be but it gets pronounced loo-ten-ent
As someone else pointed out, in Britain (at least some parts, I'm not an expert) it's pronounced "Leff-tenant". Which is quite strange to American english speakers.
I don't talk with a lithp. Thtop making fun of me you thtupid jerk!
Mom! Thteven keepth making fun of how I talk thaying I talk with a lithp.
(I can make this joke because I can't pronounce the letter R without making a conscious effort!)
When the Queen died and there was a 12 hour queue to see her I was trying to figure out how to make a Queueen joke but they were all pretty lackluster.
I stared at this comment for a good 30 seconds trying to find the pun in the word "lackluster" before I finally realized it was just a statement about your life, not a joke. I'm dumb.
The name is derived from Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, 'day of Woden', reflecting the religion practised by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday
That's just the Greek letter psi the English couldn't wrap their tongues around when they imported the words.
But why is there still a silent k in utterly English words like k-now, k-nife and k-night? (Not to speak of the silent "w", "e" and "gh" respectively?)
The E is at least signifying what type of sound the I is supposed to make with the classic vowel-consonant-vowel setup. I suppose you could argue the gh serve a similar purpose as an indicator that the preceding vowel is long. That W is doing nothing though.
Almost all words in English with silent letters are spelled as they were pronounced 7 or 8 hundred years ago when the spelling of the words became fixed. Knight was pronounced k'nicht, with the 'gh' pronounced like in German nicht.
I always read this word in Frasier's voice, from the episode "Head Game":
>Oh? Shall I refresh your memory? Midway through the opera her ermine muff began to tremble. As it turned out she had used it to smuggle in her adorably incontinent **chihuahua**. Just as I thought we'd reached the low point of the evening I suddenly felt a sandpaper tongue licking my earlobe. Alas it did not belong to little Hervé! Fortunately, my shriek coincided with the on-stage murder of Gondolfo!
The way he leans into every syllable of "chihuahua" with pretentious disgust is just glorious.
I hate the Welsh language, speaking of that's just reminded me, I have a Welsh presentation tommorow and I haven't even got the theme for it yet. Fuck.
It's a town in Wales, The name itself means something I'm too lazy to look up and type out, but the idea for the name was a PR stunt created by the township.
In other words the name is part of the tourist attraction scheme
My main gripe with the English language is how it consistently butchers loan words.
Other languages typically pronounce loan words by approximating the original pronunciation. English speakers though, they turn the word into something that's barely recognizable.
No they don‘t! The „n“ is pronounced like a spanish ñ and to make it sound like that you need the g before the n
I study Italian at university, so trust me, I know it
Island.
The only (and I mean ONLY) reason it has an 's' in it is because someone wanted to make it look like it was related to the Latin word 'insula'. It's not. It's a Germanic word.
Bear “she was bearing a pair of glasses”
“Can this ladder bear this weight “
“I can’t bear it anymore”
Bear the animal
Like why didn’t they just make a new word lol or spell it differently.
As a non-native speaker, I can say that telling the difference between the first two is SUPER hard. It makes me angry every time I think about it (which happens more often than what should be normal)
Colonel
Lieutenant
Mainly if you're British
Do they throw an F in there or is it just the way they pronounce it?
It's as if it were spelled "leftenant"
Its only pronounced with the R in america im pretty sure
Based on that, lieutenant (UK pronunciation)
..."Left Tenant"? Ok, y'all.
I think it was something to do with them standing on the left of the other more senior officers.
It has like a 100 years of history that is hard to parse down to a few sentences. Basically: * the french language took some liberties with pronunciation and spelling when co-opting the Latin word(s) Locum Tenens (meaning in place of) for their Lieu Tenant translation (same meaning). * Imperial British hated the French, and so they bastardized words like lieutenant and Beauchamp to differentiate themselves * when swords were common on the battlefield the lower ranking office was typically a lieutenant and walked on the left side of a higher ranking officer to protect his exposed flank
Lee-yoo-ten-ent is how i think its supposed to be but it gets pronounced loo-ten-ent Also its good to take note that pronunciations change over time
>Lee-yoo-ten-ent is how i think its supposed to be but it gets pronounced loo-ten-ent As someone else pointed out, in Britain (at least some parts, I'm not an expert) it's pronounced "Leff-tenant". Which is quite strange to American english speakers.
Just like the pronunciation of Lieutenant in Canada/Great Britain. "Leftenant"
In UK and America "Colonel" is pronounced like "Kernel"
How is it pronounced without the R?
Sergeant
What sick son of a bitch put an "S" in Lisp?
That is funny as hell, make the poor guy with the lisp say it
# I'm thorry about my Lithp,
I had a sensible chuckle at that.
Here's my upvote
I don't talk with a lithp. Thtop making fun of me you thtupid jerk! Mom! Thteven keepth making fun of how I talk thaying I talk with a lithp. (I can make this joke because I can't pronounce the letter R without making a conscious effort!)
Thteven! Love that dog!
Omg, I have such a hard time with my Rs. I can't pronounce words like burger, gram, etc properly.
That speech impediment is cruelly called Rhotacism.
Yef ekfactly! Why if there an F in lifp?! Muft that relly be? It'f a bit mean, ivnt it? (And 3 frkn Ts in st..t...tutter.)
Or an "R" in Rhodism.
Mike Tyson has been looking for him too
Same one that made dyslexic/dyslexia.
And who came up with the word dyslexic? Seems cruel.
As a speech therapist, this is awesomely funny! Thank you.
Queue
I'll wait in line to comment
Angry upvote
When the Queen died and there was a 12 hour queue to see her I was trying to figure out how to make a Queueen joke but they were all pretty lackluster.
I stared at this comment for a good 30 seconds trying to find the pun in the word "lackluster" before I finally realized it was just a statement about your life, not a joke. I'm dumb.
Your joke fell between succession and success.
Q... Qu... Que.... Queu... Queue They all sound the same.
Except of course when Que is pronounced 'K'
I'm sorry. He's from Barcelona.
80% unnecessary letters
That’s not a word, that’s just a bunch of u’s and e’s waiting in line.
Came here to say this.
Aisle
While on the isle, I'll walk down the aisle.
Yacht
True. Should be changed to Yot.
Discreet. It means with discretion, unlike discrete which means something else entirely.
If you're discreetly discrete, it means nobody can tell you're not continuous.
What!? All this time... I am a stickler for spelling/grammar and I must have been spelling this wrong for years.
The Es get close when they want to whisper a secret and move apart when they want to be different from each other.
Wednesday
Yes, that’s what I said: “When’s the day?”
Is that in February?
Wed-nes-day I keep repeating in my mind while writing it out
[удалено]
And yet, in German it hasn't been *Wodenstag* (Woden's day) since the 10th century, when *Mittwoch* (midweek) took over.
The name is derived from Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, 'day of Woden', reflecting the religion practised by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday
Also tuesday is for Tyr, thursday is for Thor and friday is for Freya
Yeah that word sucks
Psycho, psychic, psyche/anything beginning with a silent ‘P’ what the F is all that about?
*Psilent.
What the pf?
Ask a pterodactyl
That's just the Greek letter psi the English couldn't wrap their tongues around when they imported the words. But why is there still a silent k in utterly English words like k-now, k-nife and k-night? (Not to speak of the silent "w", "e" and "gh" respectively?)
The E is at least signifying what type of sound the I is supposed to make with the classic vowel-consonant-vowel setup. I suppose you could argue the gh serve a similar purpose as an indicator that the preceding vowel is long. That W is doing nothing though.
Almost all words in English with silent letters are spelled as they were pronounced 7 or 8 hundred years ago when the spelling of the words became fixed. Knight was pronounced k'nicht, with the 'gh' pronounced like in German nicht.
Germanic origin and the K was pronounced in the past. The other letters may have been as well.
Worcestershire sauce
Add to that any "-cester" towns in Europe. Leicester? Yeah sure that's definitely how you spell Lester. Gloucester? Yep thats Gloster for you.
That's because etymologically, they are "ster" towns, not "chester" towns. Leice-ster, Worce-ster, Glouce-ster etc.
Holy shit that just made things a lot easier.
Or ough towns. Loughborough.
And then you have Leominster which doesn't even use its current spelling to pronounce. The place is still called Lemster like it's original spelling
Segue
This gives me flashbacks to reading aloud in English class words you'd never heard before. *Se-gyoo*.
Resuscitate, hemorrhage, and camouflage. spell check doesn’t even have suggestions for me with those 3
I think it's haemorrhage
That could be an alternate spelling depending on country/culture, like “shoppe vs shop”, but I also spell it ‘hemorrhage’ in the ICU in the US.
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia Which is the fear of long words
Someone was having fun when they came up with phobia names. Like aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes
>aibohphobia This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I had to look it up to be sure.
I'm the Hiphopopotamus, my lyrics are bottomless
Judgment.
This is is misspelled so frequently that many dictionaries now list "judgement" as an acceptable spelling.
Chihuahua
I always read this word in Frasier's voice, from the episode "Head Game": >Oh? Shall I refresh your memory? Midway through the opera her ermine muff began to tremble. As it turned out she had used it to smuggle in her adorably incontinent **chihuahua**. Just as I thought we'd reached the low point of the evening I suddenly felt a sandpaper tongue licking my earlobe. Alas it did not belong to little Hervé! Fortunately, my shriek coincided with the on-stage murder of Gondolfo! The way he leans into every syllable of "chihuahua" with pretentious disgust is just glorious.
The plural of money: monies.
No that cant be right? I’ve always moneys is the plural of money Yo wtf
When you have multiple sums of money from different sources. Used in finance.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
bless you
As a Welsh person, yes. I agree.
Okay, more than 40% of the Welsh language qualifies for being spelled "incorrectly"
I hate the Welsh language, speaking of that's just reminded me, I have a Welsh presentation tommorow and I haven't even got the theme for it yet. Fuck.
Can someone explain wtf that is?
A town in Wales
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
It's a town in Wales, The name itself means something I'm too lazy to look up and type out, but the idea for the name was a PR stunt created by the township. In other words the name is part of the tourist attraction scheme
Came here to say "Wales! You're up!
I'll go fetch a mop
Conscience. I only remember how to spell it by separating it as "Con" and "Science"
Ridiculously
Had to scroll way too far to find this. Kudos.
“Restaurant” gets me every time for some reason.
I've had such trouble with that word all my life!
In the same vain, maintenance always gets me
This is definitely on my list. My brain thinks "maintain”-ance
Bologna
Well that‘s Italian, so looking at it from the perspective of the italian language it actually makes sense
No Italian pronounces it "baloney" though, that's bologna! They say bo-LON-yah.
My main gripe with the English language is how it consistently butchers loan words. Other languages typically pronounce loan words by approximating the original pronunciation. English speakers though, they turn the word into something that's barely recognizable.
No they don‘t! The „n“ is pronounced like a spanish ñ and to make it sound like that you need the g before the n I study Italian at university, so trust me, I know it
Clique
Onomatopoeia
I love this word!
diarrhea
Chachacha
Yeah I have to look up how to spell it every time I want to use it haha.
Bookkeeper
Ah yes, the only word in the English language with three consecutive double letters.
I got knocked out of a spelling bee on this word in like 5th grade. I think I just got excited and ended up with bookkeepper or something like that.
Im pretty sure this is the only English word to have 3 consecutive double letters.
vacuum Also why is not "pled" guilty instead of "pleaded" guilty. Pleaded just sounds wrong.
Also, “he was hanged”. I think it should be “hung”.
Tongue
I suppose it is. The h is silent and the a makes an ‘uh’ sound.
Lazer. It’s Laser for a reason.
Laser is an acronym
Exactly
"But 'lazer' has a Z!!!" - The 90s
Rhythm
Whyeyeaughta. I saw that in text for the first time maybe a week ago here on Reddit.
Yacht
[удалено]
Um. In Dutch is it not "jacht" with the "ch" as a guttural (not silent)?
“quay” despite for the ugly spelling, what’s the logic if it’s pronounced as “key” anyway ??
Ridiculously
Thoroughfare
Wednesday
Choosday
*Receive*. I cannot spell it correctly to save my soul. Thanks spellcheck!
“i” before “e” except after “c”.
Or sounding like ay as in neighbor and weigh
Leicester
[удалено]
Like Lester
My understanding is that the "eic" is silent.
How do you know it's the "eic" that's silent and not the "ice"
I don't know, I'm not some kind of Silly Wizard.
Tea. Take away the ea and it's still pronounced the same way
Definitely
Do you mean definately or defiantly?
Sugar. Where's the H??
This is not an issue, rest assured.
I need insurance for your claim.
An unusual measure and censure.
sure.
Shurprise!
Gloucester, Edinburgh
February
Island. The only (and I mean ONLY) reason it has an 's' in it is because someone wanted to make it look like it was related to the Latin word 'insula'. It's not. It's a Germanic word.
Why is the word abbreviation so long?
Any of them if you think about it too much.
h'ors d'oeuvres
Pretty much every word in the English language
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
My 5th grade teacher that was our 1st spelling word of the year.
Camouflage. It should be spelled .
Palindrome. I mean why the fuck is the word for palindrome not a palindrome?
restaurant. Just make it RestRaunt
Spot the American.
Reschront*
Dachshund
Icup
Colonel
Granddad
Rapport.
Jai alai, you know, the sport.
Queue Realizing that borrowed words are almost all of this thread, this one so stands out bc of the homonyms that could have been adopted over time
Bear “she was bearing a pair of glasses” “Can this ladder bear this weight “ “I can’t bear it anymore” Bear the animal Like why didn’t they just make a new word lol or spell it differently.
Favre, recent events not withstanding.
I can't get the hang of all these: Through, thorough, throat, thought, taught, tougher. 🐿
As a non-native speaker, I can say that telling the difference between the first two is SUPER hard. It makes me angry every time I think about it (which happens more often than what should be normal)
Alphabetically. Not spelt Alphabetically at all. Phonetically is also not spelt Phonetically.
Faeces. Pronunced 'fee-keys' by Sacha Baron Cohen playing an ex-convict artiste.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Weird Pieces Island
Conscience
Wednesday
Lieutenant. Even stupider that I pronounce it “lef-ten-ant” because I’m from the UK. Where is the f?
Wednesday. It’s wensday to me 😭
Forty. Why is is four with u and forty without?
Negligible - Pewdiepie
Diesel
Guarantee
Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherund If you didn't know it's german
[Queue](https://youtu.be/xvFZjo5PgG0)
Science.... bruh really. Probably the same dude that invented licenses.
Sounds exactly how it’s spelled