this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 76 points 7 months ago (26 children)

That annoying character in The Land Before Time is not named Sarah.

Her name is Cera. As in CERATOPS.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (23 children)

English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.

Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.

As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But when you shared that lesson out loud for the first time, did you pronounce it correctly?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Chill dude boke warm?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I thought it was "for all intensive purposes" until I finally came across it while reading, and I was reading a book a week for well over a decade at that point. That's just the way it's pronounced down here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

One step closer to the origin: “to all intents and purposes”. If I use that, people are definitely going to look at me weird.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for this.

I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used..

In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How on earth were you reading 1000 pages a day of anything? Even if you read at the extremely fast rate of 45 seconds per page of a book, that's still 12.5 hours a day of actively reading to get to 1000 pages.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Exactly that; I spent essentially all of my time reading. In class, between classes, after school. I had no friends because I’d changed schools and was close enough to graduation to not be worth making new friends I wouldn’t keep contact with. So I read a lot. The librarians even gave me another card so I could inter-library-loan more stuff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Wow. And I thought I was an avid reader

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