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English breaks my brain... How is some languages end in -an, but others end in -ese, -ish, etc... [Open Discussion Thread on Languages and their Quirks] (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/casualconversation@lemm.ee

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I mean:

English

Russian

French? (how did this happen? France --> French?!?)

Chinese

And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔

Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain...

Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the "Ph" and decided to use an "F"? 🤔

Okay idk how language even works anymore...

[This is an open discusssion thread on languages and their quirks...]

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[–] ZDL@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

French. Vietnamese (via the French influence) when transliterated. Italian (where in Greek-origin words you can see either being used). German (same as Italian, though over the years some words got formally modified from ph- to f-, but words like Philosophie is still spelled that way). Spanish and Portuguese too, though far more rarely than in Italian (where it is in turn far more rare than in French). Polish and Hungarian too, IIRC.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Italian and Spanish subbed ⟨PH⟩ with ⟨F⟩ ages ago; examples here and here. Portuguese stopped using it in 1911 (ACL / "European" standard) asd 1943 (ABL / "Brazilian") standard.

In Portuguese it was part of a wider wave of orthographic reforms, that also got rid of etymological double consonants and ⟨Y⟩. A lot of people were hilariously annoyed, example stolen from Wikipedia:

Imaginem esta palavra phase, escripta assim: fase. Não nos parece uma palavra, parece-nos um esqueleto (...) Affligimo-nos extraordinariamente, quando pensamos que haveriamos de ser obrigados a escrever assim!

Imagine this word phase, written like this: fase. It doesn't resemble us a word, it resemble us a skeleton. (...) We get profoundly afflicted, when we think that we would be required to write it like this!