h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh and it wasn't just the Danes who came round to thinking that this was indeed the best place in the world to live It was a load of Germans as well (angles and saxons perhaps...)

To illustrate the inconsistencies of Ehlish pronunciation, I came upon this gem some time back in the dim and distant past...

Pronounce the following..

GHOTI




Solution:
GH as in enough
O as in women
TI as in station



Got it???



'G'

So where are the Danes now?

Denmark

So many people love using ghoti as an example, but strictly speaking it is, of course, fallacious. It never could be pronounced '' because English does have some rules, amongst them being -
/gh/ is only ever pronounced [f] word final
/o/ is only ever pronounced [i] between a lateral approximant and a bi-labial fricative (and in not many other places than in women, either)
/ti/ is only pronounced [sh] in that construction.
So many things may be left to chance in pronunciation and spelling, but Mr. Shaw was stretching things a bit with that one, and I dare say he knew it

You are wrong about the danes, they are not just in denmark etc, a lot of them stayed in britain, breeding with the local peasantry, (and so did the picts, vikings, romans, celts, jews, germans, french, etc), and thus when you talk to anyone whose grandfather was born in england, and whose family have always lived in the same town as granddad, you are talking to someone who is a mix of all of the above. If you look at the americans, they are even worse at this than the english, cos they have added africans, spaniards, mexicans, and lots of others to their mix. This is partly why racism is such a silly idea (the otherone being that 98% of out dna is identical to gorillas, and 99% is identical to all other humans).

Right here!

As an American myself, I can vouch for that. I'm a combination of Scottish, Irish, German and American Indian. It's always interesting to me to discuss that kind of thing with my wife, who is 100% Japanese. It is yet another reason why racism is such a ridiculous concept. It reminds me of the film Bullworth where Warren Beatty suggested that "we just keep f*****g until we're all the same color."

And another quote I heard from somewhere along the same lines:

"The sooner we all interbreed until we all look like Phillippinos, the better."

Americans are more sensitive to their mixed heritage because it is so recent, but it's easy for Brits to see themselves as a single people. I think it is worth noting, however, that the most successful civilizations in Western history mixed with foreign peoples quite readily, beginning with the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish, then British, and the Americans. Meanwhile, inbred royal lines produced Henry VIII (syphillitic), George III (foamed at the mouth), and Prince Charles (live long, and prosper).

Possibly with Henry VIII it was over-breeding that was the problem, rather than in-breeding?

Defintely one reason Britain and then America became successful was by being a safe haven for talented people who were driven out of their own countries, as well as having sufficient resources and industry to put the ideas of those people, and their native engineers into practice. Being able to avoid invasion by foreign powers helps as well.
To some extent, I suppose that's down to being lucky with geography, as is the fact that once people had spread to the respective nations, there wasn't really anywhere else obvious left to move to at the time.

I thought H8 only managed to produce 3 sprogs (legitimate ones) - infertility was the cause of his frenzied wife-consumption

Ok - so how about over-*attempted*-breeding.?

Yeah, alot of different folks came into England:

The Vikings, most of them danish (Denmark was quite a ruling power back then)
The Normans, well, actually the normans are settled vikings
The angelos (What are they called?), who originated in jutland (denmark)

But, OK, we didn't have our fingers in neither the Romans nor the Germans.

BTW: Remember when americans speak of columbus as the first european man in america... Guess where the viking 'Vinland' (Wineland) is located.

OH yeah, we also traded with/raided in india, egypt, spain, and we seiged paris and london, when we nedded a little cash.

Love being a norseman

At least when people from other countries did invade us, (apart from the bulk of the Romans, and the odd Viking raiding party) they seemed to have liked it so much that they stayed here.

I am not sure the Danish have very good reputations though - or the Scandinavians generally. They mowed all the trees down in Norway and Iceland. And as for Ikea...

(These points just put in to keep the forum on my page and to provoke discussion)

~sniff~

Though I've enjoyed the last few posts (being half Dane myself ), I would like to interject one quick on-topic comment.

One of the greatest authors the States has produced, T. S. Giesel (aka. Dr. Seuss) wrote one of his early books about the vagracies of pronounciation. The extremely relevant title was "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough"

Well, enjoyed them except for the deforestation part.

The point about the invasions every few decades was not that it was military invasions, but that in england specifically, britain generally, and also america, there is a regular influx of people from a particular community, who group together when they arive, and thus there has developed over the last 2000 years or so an atitude in the english that the new community adds to the richness of the whole community, and that the new words and ideas that they bring with them cause a regular reevaluation of the assumptions of the resident community, hence the cultural acceptance (generally, ifyou don't count a few xenophobes) of second and third generation immigrants as being english. Combined with the defeat (partial, but improving) of the idea that you must know your place and stay there, in the industrial revolution, this has lead to a generally enlightened environment for individuals.

That is indeed one of the primary reasons for the richness of the language. Those words that didn't come to us through conquest came to us through trade. When we discover a foreign word that describes a concept we need in our own language, we borrow their word for it. It also adds to the confusion, as we borrow them in their foreign form (except we will put it into Roman letters, if it wasn't already) and spell them as the foreigners did. English has never been considered a "pure" language anyway, so we certainly don't mind others contributing to it.

The French go exactly the other way with this. They actually have had governmental action to stop American words like "le t-shirt" and "les jeans" from entering what they think is such a beautiful, romantic language. I think they only think it is because they have nationwide hay fever... accounting not only for their nasal intonations but for their inability to hear how silly they sound.