OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

Surely you are joking? The latin characters may have been phonetic in Latin, but they certainly aren't in English!

Jeroen Belleman

I can see a new-to-me word and say it about right, enough that other people will usually recognize it and can write it down.

granbazzle

That depends on their major.

You are assuming that he will allow a election to depose him. He may not need to challenge the result of the next election because there may not be one.

Well, nobody does that. But he has common sense, a good start.

He wants to kill the absurd, bloated California High Speed Rail project. Rightly so.

You're not wrong. I've encountered several datasheets with key information omitted; basic stuff like pin-outs (yes, pinouts!) missing. Incredible. :(

English place names keep tripping me up.

"Cholmondeley".

Jeroen Belleman

Well, I don't want to toot my own horn, but compliment accepted! :-)

Well, if the Dems are going to put up another pair of candidates like Biden and Harris, there's little point anyway.

Nobody can pronounce that.

My favorite fictitious English town is Loose Chippings.

It’s the name of Tennessee Tuxedo’s walrus sidekick.

Another good one is “Featherstonehaugh” (*)

There’s a real one called Little Snoring.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) Pronounced “Fanshaw”.

Generally pronounced as 'chumly' believe it or not!

There's also a Lower Upnor.

What?? You mean they burned all those houses down for nothing?

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 01:14:55 -0000 (UTC), Phil Hobbs wrote: <snip>

Some real towns:

Cukcoo, Va Short Pump, Va Frog Level, Va

Jim

Boring, Oregon.

Waterproof, Louisiana

It is unlikely that they will become more intelligent. They will get a lot more practice in communication, but since the medium they use to communicate isn't well-adapted to the job the skills they are acquire will be as crippled as the medium they are stuck with using.

It would help more if the government poured money into solving the problems that the writing system creates, rather exposing more people to a flawed system for longer.

They weren't in Latin either. The critical point is that most written language uses a limited character set, which can be roughly matched up to the numbers of phonemes used in the spoken language.

UK English has 44 phonemes, American English has 40. The difference is in the diphthong count, and diphthongs are written as paired vowels.

The original phonetic alphabets may well have been phonemic in the languages they were devised for, but that was a long time ago, and they've been adapted to represent many different languages since then.

It's the language of scientific publication, as Latin used to be.

As a chemist I had to learn German to read Beilstein (for organic chemicals) and French for the Nouveau Traite de Chimie Minerale (inorganic chemicals).

The other half of the problem was bird flu. That isn't going to go away.

If you kill off enough infected chickens the problem will go away for a while, but vaccination is the only long term answer, and Trump doesn't have the attention span to manage that.