Re: Off Topic: English Grammar, Spelling, colloquialisms, etc.
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Apr 10, 2012
- 4581 views
... she meant "many" instead of "mini" (they are pronounced differently) ...
Ever visited Christchurch or Johannesburg?
I'd like to visit Christchurch (despite the name), not so much Johannesburg.
What you said earlier, Derek, about different pronunciations in different countries (to make this simple, lets say english-speaking usa, UK, NZ, Oz, and some of India and Malaysia and SA), got me thinking about a scenario in which people who program in Eu got togther to meet in real life, and couldn't understand each other speaking the Eu keywords, but understood the written code perfectly.
As a professional coder, I can't recall a situtation where I've had to discuss code verbally without having a copy (on-screen or on print) of the code in front of me. Admittedly, I've never been to a hacker space.
Would it be decided how to pronounce anything in the interest of easier and speedier communication? If i pronounce "cat" as "cow", wouldn't it make for tedious conversation to understand not feeding "cow" milk to infants? If i had a horrible southern drawl, and pronounced "while" as "wall", and had a wonderful 3D drawing program with a wall() function, wouldn't you get tripped up sometimes in discussing the program? They do that here. What if i had a hydrology program and pronounced "well" as "whale"? They do that here.
Tedious perhaps, but hardly insurmountable. One could just use body language and hand gestures while speaking to clarify.
If this were done over the telephone, this is still easy to deal with. Simply add on more verbage.
E.g. feline cat milk vs dairy cow milk, do-while-loop type while vs graphical wall function, constructed and drilled wells vs mammalian whales.
Once upon a time, dictionaries carried one way of diction, so that anyone saying that word spoke it as anyone else, and communication was possible. Now, dictionaries are being modified to include all possible ways of saying a word, to make it possible to decrypt what someone else is saying, but they don't specify a correct diction any more.
What time period was this? Would this be before or after the spelling of English was standardised? Which standard?
