The bigger problem is that lose should rhyme with pose or close. Loose is fine.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Don't get me started on ough and ead.
The lead soldier kneaded dough in the bough brush while they read the book that they previously read while taking a furlough in the rough.
I read this and all I could think of was "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
Didn’t even have to click. Great poem
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How can the soldier knead anything if they're made of lead?
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Hoes drop their clothes.
Who the hell decided that close is pronounced the same as clothes?
No one? They aren't pronounced the same in any accent that I'm aware of.
Edit: I'm dumb. I was reading that as the "nearby" close and not the "shut " close.
You're probably thinking of the pronunciation of close as in 'close to you'
I was thinking of the pronunciation of close as in 'close the door'
Which is pronounced the same as clothes.
Those still aren’t pronounced the same. The th in clothes isn’t silent.
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Okay as a non-native speaker who struggles with consonant clusters this is both the best and worst thing I learned today.
Hey we may have our language rules pulled from 30 different other languages and applied seemingly at random, but at least we don't have to memorize the gender of every inanimate object in the world!
I've taken 5 years of German and self studied some Russian and Spanish, and goddamn that gendered noun shit is really, really hard for native English speakers.
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They sound pretty close to me. We can close this issue.
I don't know that they sound that different, but I definitely "pronounce" them differently in that my tongue is in a different party of my mouth for both of them. When I say clothes, my tongue is near touching my front teeth, where as close is more just below that ridge behind my teeth, so farther back.
I'm from the center of the U.S. for reference.
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they are very different in my mind. perhaps because i first came across them in their respective contexts through reading.
even when speaking, to me, lose rhymes with booze and loose rhymes with goose.
this has never been a problem for me, personally.
And here's me, another non-native speaker, just learning that booze doesn't rhyme with goose.
oh, no, no, no! booze and a goose should never go together!
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I mean yeah 'loose' could probably be pronounced like 'choose' and it would still make sense, but it absolutely wouldnt make sense for 'lose' to be pronounced like 'moose' or 'goose'. Im not sure what you even mean when you say they switched meanings either because thats just false.
May as well combine words with the same pronunciation into one word and call it Simplified English (/s)
Honestly tho, this is one of the features of Simplified Chinese, which created the infamous "fuck vegetables" (干菜类).
It's meant to say "dried vegetables" (乾菜類 in TC), but 乾→干. Meanwhile, there exists 幹→干 as well, which means "fuck".
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english is a very silly language that's evolved so you can do almost anything with it
it's a risky strat but it seems to have worked
Loose rhymes with noose. I can't think of a word that's spelled and pronounced like lose so you have me there.
choose lose cruise booze
all rhyme lol
Words pronounced like lose? That's easy. Close
Close is way closer to clothes than it is to lose. And close is more like gross.
I was joking, close would only be pronounced similar to lose if it were spelled clues.
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They didn't, except among the ignorant and autocorrect.
What about the words that are only different in tone.
Content and content
It's a miracle I know it, and having to teach someone how to read and spell was an eye opener for me trying to explain "this is like this except for this one word because... Reasons and sometimes there's a variation like this because...reasons" so many times.
Agreed, I am teaching my second son to read.
I am having the same conversations as when I taught my first to read.
"ok, this word is a 'sight word' because it doesn't make the sounds you expect. It says won, but it looks like it says on-e"
Mostly the "reasons" just boil down to etymology. We spell things the way the languages we stole them from spelled them.
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Trust me, it is equally frustrating for most Americans...or almost, anyway.
Read rhymes with lead, and read rhymes with lead, but lead doesn't rhyme with read and lead doesn't rhyme with read.
There's ~~too~~ ~~to~~ two different ways to pronounce and spell many words.
Fuck, that's three!
Steady up over ~~their~~ ~~they're~~ there.
Don't phuck with my head, I'm two drunk!
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Wait, if they swapped meanings and then swapped spellings then doesn't that mean they're the same as before?
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Are you familiar with “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité?
Deep breath:
I believe the generally accepted scientific term for the English language is "clusterfuck".
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If we start now, we can probably switch the pronunciations of Aristotle and chipotle within a generation.
Chip-ot-el
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Okay TIL that these aren't pronounced the same.
English is idiosyncratic as hell. Didn’t someone famous call it “not a language but 3 languages in an overcoat.”
Adding to this specific instance is that even native speakers spell things wrong. They loose their keys, etc.
It's a lose/loose situation
Obviously the plural of foot is feet, so the plural of book should be beek.
Or one sheep should be a shoop.
There's also the English Vowel Shift. Which means words either side of it are inconsistent.