Wizard of Id by Parker and Hart for April 17, 2014

True. But try Russian.

Is Rodney reading the speech balloon? He wouldn’t be able to tell you’re from your based on pronunciation.

Sorry, youruc language.

I tried to tell my teachers the same thing.

Many things in English are illogical, but the your/you’re distinction is very clear if you think about it for half a second.

Hardly. I’m 55 and have been reading comics since childhood.

I will put any eccentricity of the English language up against some French verb conjugations any day of the week. Any francophones out there remember the tense known as “plus-que-parfait du subjonctif”?

your= yore you’re = yure or yoore. way different when spoken.

This joke was used in B. C. a few weeks ago. Is Hart getting senile?

Language isn’t designed to be logicalit ain’t designed allIt’s just the outgrowth of attempts to communicateLet the words land where they fall

She too had to try on two tutus.Pour salve on the poor pore.You’re wanting your merchandise now?They’re over there by their baggage.You’re sure your ewe is over by the yew bush?

-ones who complain that English is illogical are those too lazy to learn it-Are you including those of us who are native born and those of us who teach it in that statement? Lots of us realize that English lacks logic, and the reason is that some of it consists of words brought in from other languages that follow their own ‘logic’. -A lot of words from German are now part of English and their spelling, possessive forms and so on might follow the rules of their language of origin.

Yes..It’s not just pronouncing English, it’s use of English..Why do we “drive” on a Parkway,and, “Park” in a driveway?Or, why do we call them “buildings” when they’re already finished building them? Shouldn’t we call them “builts?”

A junior HS English class ‘composition’ required something like a thousand words back in 1951, and the best I could come up with was a story that I modeled after the Mark Twain style of ‘telling’.. Got me the embarrassment of reading it in fronta the class, and an attempt of a beating by members of the football team, “because I waz too dam smart for my britches” (somewhat similar the problem young blacks face from their dumb-ass peers of today) but one doesn’t make LtCol by working at mill-jobs in a small town and dying early of the chemicals and work-dangers of the same. A small win for me, but not really heart-felt.

I’ve heard that Hungarian & Finnish are also agglutinative languages!

One of the problems is that English spelling usually indicates the origin of the word instead of its sound. Which means that a great deal of its spelling is based on the declensions of the source language. From Latin, for example, you have some suffix endings for which the 1st vowel is commonly pronounced by the schwa: able, -eble, -ible; -ant, -ent, -int; -ance, -ence, -ince; -ate; -ete, -ite - et cetera…, et cetera…, et cetera.

Added to this is the tendency of English to have not changed spelling for the last 500 years, even though it had a huge pronunciation shift. The “ough” of though, through, cough, rough, plough, ought, and borough used to sound the same, but now they sound like the ‘o’ in go, the “oo” in too, the “off” in cough, the “uff” in suffer, the “ow” in flower, the “aw” in saw, and the ‘a’ in above, respectively.

“What manner of beast hath made such a nest?”, indeed!

If you’re an English speaker, try this sentence, “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

Didn’t BC just do this bit?

“”http://appliedabstractions.com/2010/02/04/english-is-tough-stuff/“>English is Tough stuff” (by Gerard Nolst Trenité).

the difference between your and you’re should be as obvious as the difference between his and he’s

B.C. did exactly the same joke.