Wait a second - “shire” is pronounced as “shear”? Damn that Frodo Baggins and his little band of half-wits…
Only if its part of a word. On its own, its still pronounced Shire.
So Buckinghamshire isn’t Buck-ing-ham-shire, its Buck-ing-um-shear.
Simple really [:D]
LOL - thanks, Bish! It seems that I may need to take eloqution lessons before I visit the UK…Things were so much easier when I was living in Auckland, New Zealand. Everyone just smiled, nodded, and told me that I had a “cute” accent!
See, I told you the English talk and spell wierd! So much for the “ENGLISH” language! Ha-ha. What is even more wierd is when the northeners leave words out all together . Eg. I’m going down pub now, or I’m going up road! Truly bizarre.
Youse guys should come ta Philly dis fall. Denn youse kin go ta da Ack-a-me, so’s you kin buy some fillum an’ take pitchers a’ da Iggles down at da Link. An’ youse kin read about ‘em in da Fillufya Inkwire. Just don’ fall on the payment!
English is probably the most complicated spelling system. English spellings often don’t match the sounds they are supposed to represent. It’s madness.
I learned German for 3 years and love its highly logical spelling-pronunciation system.
Genau so Chrisk-k!
But what isn’t spoken of is that German was ‘simplified’ more than once in the last 100 years…
English on the other hand counts among its precedents:
the languages of the Angles, Friesians & Saxons, (big clue there, Germanic tribes by the way)
then Celts, Old Norman, with major influences from Norse, Scandinavian, & others.
The Renaissance brought Medieval French, German Again, Dutch, Latin, Greek, etc.
The Gist of it is that English has always absorbed portmanteau words, leaving a rich lexical heritage of some 5 MILLION words on the greater OED.
The US Websters’ was deliberately simplified by our ‘colonial cousins’ during a ‘little local difficulty’ btw… Just sayin’
Because of all of the above;
There is ALWAYS more than one word to describe any one thing,
There is ALWAYS more than one meaning to most words.
There are at least two ways to pronounce most vowel combinations!
eg., there are 8 different ways to pronounce words containing “-ough”
So that is why even some English-born have problems articulating with words of more than one syllable & some of our ‘colonial cousins’ haven’t got a chance!
lol, obs, (teenspeak, but let’s not go there!)
Jon_a_its, by “colonial cousins” you don’t by any chance mean us do you?
Say Deah Yung Un :
Is Youse Cawlin usn’s Hamerikins Kuzins’ , Wassa matta fer youse .?
Of course not Cobbers, at least you play cricket not rounders! [;)]
?!?! OBS- short for Obviously! say whats da idear usen them big initals on us? We-al like a good edumacated guy.
But if yur gonna get all hoity totty; then I gonna take my bat and ball an go home. [*-)]
Dern snooty Brit-speakers [:P]
(Bish is totaly the exception-[A]–usually) [;)]
[t$t] Cheers all
Ye, which is more than what we do. [:(]
LOL! I would like to thank all members who contributed their vast knowledge to this thread. Really brightened a loooong day[:D] Two things I’d like to add…whether you talk with an accent is all a matter of perspective and should I even bring up the whole “football” subject[;)]
That’s true about our orthography, but it’s not impossible to learn. It just takes some mental discipline.
I like the fact that our spellings serve almost like DNA does for an organism. It helps follow the origins and evolution of a word, and of our language.
I speak, read and write German, too. True, Hochdeutsch has very consistent rules for orthography (“Rechtsschreibung”–a literal translation of the original Greek, “correct writing”), and fairly regular rules of grammar. I like that German has retained inflections, and relies on those more than sentence order, to convey meaning. So, the old example used to emphasize the importance of sentence order in English grammar–“Dog bites man” is not the same as “Man bites dog”, is meaningless in German, where the endings indicate the case and hence, the role in the sentence.
I’d like to study Japanese, which is supposed to be completely different from the Indo-European languages in practically every way. All I know of it now comes from “Shogun” and watching anime.
The color/colour of languages is an amazing thing to behold and the internet makes it even more available for us to enjoy, marvel at, learn and just ever so often poke a bit of fun at. 
Cheers All