din wrote:What I think is what happened is that they just borrowed -ing, and add it to other English borrowings to make them more English than they already are. I seriously see strange -ing coinages on a daily bases.
It goes the other way too. I work upstairs from a "Bureau dé Change". Morons! Look at mé, I'm writing en fránçaïs. Would anyoné like a baguetté? Clearly, French people just add accent marks to random vowels to show how French they are. It's a cultural thing that non-French people will never truly understand.
Oöh, look how Germän äm! Would yoü like a ßrätwürst?
Non mérci! Just the baguetté, s'il vous plai't?
Yeah, there is a wedding photo studio I pass every day called Angé. I guess they wanted a French name, and "ange" is a nice happy weddingy word, but it doesn't look French enough without an accent on it.
clawgrip wrote:Yeah, there is a wedding photo studio I pass every day called Angé. I guess they wanted a French name, and "ange" is a nice happy weddingy word, but it doesn't look French enough without an accent on it.
zompist wrote:I wonder how many verbs there are like "crochet" where a silent final looks weirder in the past tense. The only one I can think of offhand is rendezvoused, but there must be more.
debuted
also, not relevant to silent consonants but still about weirdness of regular past tenses: the past tense of the very few verbs that end in -a gives you -aed, which is ugly as hell. Common one I can think of is subpoenaed ... but when talking of flash or photoshop one sometimes needs to use alpha as a verb. Past tense alphaed. doesn't that look weird? alphaed.
It occurred to me, rereading this now, that various noun verbing gets us around the rarity of verbs in -a so we can have more fun with the ugly: He's pretty ganjaed up.
You've hakuna matataed me for the last time, buster.
or even the dreadful: - Earth is a many-seaed and thoroughly Gaeaed planet wherein California is a many-sequoiaed state, and Hawaii one where you can get very badly aaed.
also, not relevant to silent consonants but still about weirdness of regular past tenses: the past tense of the very few verbs that end in -a gives you -aed, which is ugly as hell. Common one I can think of is subpoenaed ... but when talking of flash or photoshop one sometimes needs to use alpha as a verb. Past tense alphaed. doesn't that look weird? alphaed.
It occurred to me, rereading this now, that various noun verbing gets us around the rarity of verbs in -a so we can have more fun with the ugly: He's pretty ganjaed up.
You've hakuna matataed me for the last time, buster.
or even the dreadful: - Earth is a many-seaed and thoroughly Gaeaed planet wherein California is a many-sequoiaed state, and Hawaii one where you can get very badly aaed.
(Help, there's smoke pouring out of my ears.)
There's a bit of a problem with those -a verbs here when we add -ing onto them. We need an epenthetic /r/ because otherwise 'Ew, vowels are touching!' Epenthetic /r/ comes after any instance of prevocalic /ə aː ɜː ɛː ɪə oː/ (RP equivalents /ə ɑː ɜː eə ɪə ɔː/) regardless of spelling, with the only exception I know of being 'yeah' /jɛː/. So it would be natural for us to pronounce 'alphaing' as [ˈæɫfəɹɪŋ], as though it were <alphering> or <alpharing>. And the spelling <alphaing> would probably make us think [ˈæɫfæɪ̯ŋ] or [ˈoːɫfæɪ̯ŋ] first.
I learned that with weirdvowel-final words verbed you put an apostrophe instead of the e: alpha'd, subpoena'd, sea'd... and so on.
Well, I've seen such spellings before, but google and dictionary.com both strongly suggest that at least for "subpoena", the past tense/participle is normally spelled "subpoenaed".
