> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles"
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles"
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end.
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”
As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
Different languages went down different paths in this regard, each with their own interesting advantages and disadvantages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
I few years ago I saw a TV interview where some gen-z kid confidently stated: "the dictdionary is supposed to reflect how I talk, not the other was around."
Also known as descriptivism. That's what it do.
The tricky part is that spoken language and written language are not the same. Even if you are a descriptionist that believes dictionaries should represent how people write, it doesn't necessarily mean that the spelling changes based on how people pronounce it.
That's actually how many of the dictionary people see themselves.
A natural descriptivist.
That is in fact what the dictionary is supposed to do.
And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i".
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
I thought the rules were clear and it depends on how the word is pronounced, with a vowel or consonant sound.
I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an".
But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Some UK speakers pronounce "H" as "haitch" (with a non-silent leading 'h'), not "aitch". Which leads to "a haitch tee ...".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name
The term for this is a "shibboleth", if it's of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Should be missels then?
Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.
They're where they keep the nuclear wessels.
I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that; "missils" would be more phonetic
> I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that
Sorry? How do you think people pronounce words such as truffle / turtle / tremble / pickle / maple / rubble / etc. etc. etc.?
They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". Since the "l" sound is last and preceded by a schwa, "truffle" (or "missle") obviously cannot be considered phonetic.
> They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel".
You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the standard phonetic analysis.
You might also notice that the IPA differs from your proposed spelling in several other ways. One, the difference between "ɹ" and "r", has no relevance in a discussion of English. But the difference between "f" and "ff" is more significant, and the difference between "u" (the vowel in GOOSE) and "ʌ" (the vowel in STRUT) is of critical importance.
And this is still just a phonemic transcription. Phonetically, you'd expect the word to be [tʃɹʌfl̩], with the initial consonant matching that of "chill" and not "till".
All of these are conventions of written English. Written "tr" is pronounced as if it were written "chr". Pronounced [tʃɹ] is always spelled "tr" and never spelled "chr". The difference in vowel quality between "moping" and "mopping" is indicated, as you probably already noticed, by the doubling of the consonant written after the vowel, and this is also the reason for the double "f" in "truffle". Why do we write an extra "f" when what we mean is that we're changing the pronunciation of the vowel before it? Not for phonetic reasons.
And what do you know, there's a standard spelling of syllabic L in English too, and that standard spelling is "-le", not "-el". That spelling is phonetic in exactly the same way that using "m" to spell the initial consonant of "mat" is phonetic - it is the established mapping between the orthography and the pronunciation.