On 03/01/2015 10:16, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:01 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
Chris Angelico wrote:
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:54 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
And how does this strange language called English fits into your rules
and (no) special cases scheme?
http://www.omgfacts.com/lists/3989/Did-you-know-that-ough-can-be-pronounced-TEN-DIFFERENT-WAYS
I learned six, which is no more than there are for the simple vowel
'a' (at least, in British English; American English has a few less
sounds for 'a').
What is this thing you call "American English"? :-)
I wouldn't want to put an exact number of distinct accents in the USA, but
it's probably in three figures. And it used to be said that a sufficiently
skilled linguist could tell what side of the street an English person was
born on, that's how fine-grained English accents used to be.
"American English" is the category compassing all of those accents
common to the USA. There are certain broad similarities between it and
British English, just as there are similarities between Dutch and
German; and there are certain commonalities across all accents of
American English, allowing generalizations about the number of sounds
made by the vowel "a". :)
I used to get very confused watching the old westerns. The child when
talking about "more" and "paw" wasn't referring to possibly an
adjective, noun or adverb and a part of an animal, but what we would
refer to in the UK as "mum" and "dad" :)
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
