Where does the 'leak' in the fountain story come from?

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At some point over the next century or so I think we will have "Vulgar English" with simplified grammar and reformed spelling
LOLWUT!

And those of us who are native speakers will have to learn to speak and write the international dialect along with our national dialects (assuming we don't get pulled along).
I think there's a snippet of Heinlein where the main character (WASP, natch) gets into some international space programme and laments having to re-learn his formerly irregular verbs (went → goed).
 
LOLWUT!


I think there's a snippet of Heinlein where the main character (WASP, natch) gets into some international space programme and laments having to re-learn his formerly irregular verbs (went → goed).
Ha!

I'm not sure regular verbs are actually that big of a problem - they're mostly vocabulary, although some of the less used ones could get regularised.

I think the very first thing to go would be the 3rd person singular verb form, eg "he likes"; even pretty advanced English as a Second Language speakers struggle with that. The other biggest issue is articles "a/an/the".

After that probably the perfect aspects. You can pretty much get by in spoken English by avoiding them, and since you can, a lot of second language speakers fall into that habit and never really learn them properly.

Of course even the simple past could fade. You can communicate pretty well in English with just time signals - "Yesterday, I go shopping with my friends" is not really ambiguous, and is, I believe, how some languages, such as Chinese, basically do things.
 
Of course even the simple past could fade. You can communicate pretty well in English with just time signals - "Yesterday, I go shopping with my friends" is not really ambiguous, and is, I believe, how some languages, such as Chinese, basically do things
Yeah many languages only have aspects but no tenses.
 
I treat English words as Chinese signs already.
That is, they have a meaning, a way to write them, and a pronunciation* that might as well be unrelated to what is written. And they can, for the most part, denote anything which carries that meaning - an object, an action, a quality, or a combo thereof. If you want to be extremely clear, you can add "ing" to note that it's a verb now, or a "-like" to account for a quality. Sword, sword-like, swording...:shade:

Also, it makes me sad to see how it goes towards even more simplification, thus losing on its ability to actually transmit information meaningfully:thumbsup:.


*Which varies by region, exactly like Chinese - Cantonese vs Mandarin or British vs Australian, anyone?
 
My grandchildren tell me off for my pronunciation of Shaman. I default to SHAH -MAN, and they insist it's Shay-man. We have this in common thanks to the mobile game Castle Crush. I called Shaman the way I did since encountering them in Runequest, and have had to wait til now to be corrected.

Also, the popular matriachal D&D race - Drow as in 'ow you hit me' or Drow like 'Crow' ?

My ancient undead wizards are litches.

If you want some British language shenanigans, ask how to pronounce Trottiscliffe, Meopham and Cholmondeley...





(Trosley, mep-ham and chummly)
 
My grandchildren tell me off for my pronunciation of Shaman. I default to SHAH -MAN, and they insist it's Shay-man. We have this in common thanks to the mobile game Castle Crush. I called Shaman the way I did since encountering them in Runequest, and have had to wait til now to be corrected.

Also, the popular matriachal D&D race - Drow as in 'ow you hit me' or Drow like 'Crow' ?

My ancient undead wizards are litches.

If you want some British language shenanigans, ask how to pronounce Trottiscliffe, Meopham and Cholmondeley...





(Trosley, mep-ham and chummly)

TBH, I've never heard anyone say "Shay-man". Granted, I normally speak Spanish in my day to day, but I consume a LOT of English content and everyone I've ever heard pronounces it "Shah-man", or more like "sha-MAN" if it's in Spanish. The only times I've ran into the "Shay-man" pronunciation is when reading about it.

I also always pronounce Drow as in Crow. And tend to pronounce "lich" with a soft "t", somewhere between "lish" and "litsh".
 
TBH, I've never heard anyone say "Shay-man". Granted, I normally speak Spanish in my day to day, but I consume a LOT of English content and everyone I've ever heard pronounces it "Shah-man", or more like "sha-MAN" if it's in Spanish. The only times I've ran into the "Shay-man" pronunciation is when reading about it.

I also always pronounce Drow as in Crow. And tend to pronounce "lich" with a soft "t", somewhere between "lish" and "litsh".
Both pronunciations are recognized in dictionaries, and that means they're both used (dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive) or were both used fairly recently (Shay-man also doesn't seem to be how it is pronounced in any other language). So both are fine, especially since there's no real risk of confusion (unlike with leak and litch).
 
My grandchildren tell me off for my pronunciation of Shaman. I default to SHAH -MAN, and they insist it's Shay-man. We have this in common thanks to the mobile game Castle Crush. I called Shaman the way I did since encountering them in Runequest, and have had to wait til now to be corrected.
Actually, it's your way in all the languages I know...and that's also how someone who was a practitioner of a shamanistic religion pronounced it, IIRC.
So tell your grandkids to shut up and listen to their elders, for they know better:devil:!
 
TBH, I've never heard anyone say "Shay-man". Granted, I normally speak Spanish in my day to day, but I consume a LOT of English content and everyone I've ever heard pronounces it "Shah-man", or more like "sha-MAN" if it's in Spanish. The only times I've ran into the "Shay-man" pronunciation is when reading about it.

I also always pronounce Drow as in Crow. And tend to pronounce "lich" with a soft "t", somewhere between "lish" and "litsh".
I've heard 'shay-man' in movies, not sure which ones... maybe westerns.

I say 'drow as in 'cow'... but I like the 'as in crow' version also... and it's a little bit closer to dero/derro.
 
My grandchildren tell me off for my pronunciation of Shaman. I default to SHAH -MAN, and they insist it's Shay-man.
Tell them that it's a Tocharian word, derived from Sanskrit, and that it originally meant a Buddhist monk. Then ramble off into a discourse about Tibetan influence in Siberia before the Russian expansion, digress onto the topic of the mummies of Ürümqi and how much they remind you of pre-18th Century Scots, then segue into the pre-colonial distribution and inferred history of the Indo-European languages.

Your grandkids will stop bothering you.

_____

P.S. /ˈʃɑːmən/
 
I've heard 'shay-man' in movies, not sure which ones... maybe westerns.

I say 'drow as in 'cow'... but I like the 'as in crow' version also... and it's a little bit closer to dero/derro.
I believe the term comes from the Orkney Island, from the word Trow, for Goblin. And it's pronounce like Cow.
 
I've heard 'shay-man' in movies, not sure which ones... maybe westerns.

I say 'drow as in 'cow'... but I like the 'as in crow' version also... and it's a little bit closer to dero/derro.

Yeah, thinking back on it I think I may have heard a British guy say "Shay-man" a few times, but don't remember where. The vast majority of times I've heard it pronounced "sha-man", though.
 
I've more often heard shaman pronounced shay-man, but I've heard it said both ways.

For drow, everyone has always pronounced it like cow. I've only ever met one person who pronounced it like crow. It took a second to realize what the hell he was talking about.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth was most often pronounced as "The Lost Caverns." :clown:
 
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