One of the tricky things with English is that we often have words that can be combined to form different words.
Like greenhouse. It’s a combination of green + house. But a greenhouse is something very different from a green house. Autocorrect may cause some people to make this mistake, but generally, the concepts are understood to be different.
On the other side of things, there’s things like “alot” which is mistakenly used so commonly that my autocorrect didn’t even care that I typed that (and it’s not just because of the quotes!).
Then there are words like login, which as a noun is definitely one word, but as a verb, should almost definitely be two words (“log in to this website”, but “this is my login for the website”)…but “login” seems to be universally recognized as standard for a verb, even though we don’t say loginned for the past tense (we still say “logged in”).
And of course, there are other words that are commonly paired together that we don’t often see with the space removed, like “Takecare”, “Noway”, or “Ofcourse”. These could all be potential candidates for the “alot” treatment. What makes “alot” special?
So what causes “Please login to the website” to be “correct”, but “I workout everyday” to be incorrect? (And maybe everyone is “wrong” about login, or everyone is right about “workout” and “everyday”, and the compound word is an acceptable alternative to the versions with the space)
I feel like this would be better in an AskLinguists community here… maybe there’s an active one that someone could point me to? But I’m still curious to see what people think
French is in a different language family. One nice thing about French is that, even with all the silent letters, it tends to be more consistent than English. The same letters should make the same sound (or the same silence) in any context…at least more often than English.
So if you know how “llon” in papillon is pronounced, you’ll probably be able to pronounce bouillon.
Whereas if you know how “ough” sounds in “rough”… you’re fine with “tough”, but might have trouble with:
Those have all stopped looking like words to me though. <== This one too
Yes. Surely it has to be easier for me (who grew up learning a germanic language,) to learn another one of them. I occasionally like to watch these Youtube videos on why for example English has a handful of ways to pronounce “ough”. I still think the French are crazy people for writing l’eau and pronouncing it “oh”, when it’s literally the one vowel missing in that word. Or coming up with insane concepts like a silent letter “x” in the plural words… But you’re right. I remember there was almost always some rule to it.
loic.suberville on Instagram does a whole lot skits about how weird French is (and English, too). You might enjoy some of his content!
Nice, thanks. Will do.