Comment by yantrams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yantrams | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Whenever I come across these quirks, I can't help but think of how extremely codified the grammar of Sanskrit(and other Indian languages that are influenced by it) is to handle situations like this.

Visarga Sandhi is one example comes to my mind. It is primarily used to handle the negative cases. For example, devoid of people is 'Nirjan' which is built using 'Nih'(No) and 'Jan'(People), whereas 'Nishchal' which means devoid of motion comes from 'Nih'(No) and 'Chal'(Motion). I'm not exactly sure but the rule probably goes along the lines of - When amalgamating "Uh" sound with Hard Sounds(Ka, Cha, Ta, Tha, Pa) you add a 'Sh' sound as in Nishkalmash, Nishchal, Nishchinth etc whereas when amalgamating with Soft sounds(Ga, Ja, Da, Dha, Ba) you add a 'Rr' sound as in Nirbhay, Nirday etc.

You have hundreds of these rules that deal with all kinds of transformations, sometimes simple rules like Ka => Ga, Cha => Ja etc. and sometimes more complex rules which are conditional on the consonant sounds that precede the object of transformation(Namah + Te => Namaste). Lot of them feel arbitrarily imposed but they just feel right when you say them out aloud.

Here are a couple of examples involving vowel transformations.

Mahaa(Great) + Indra(Lord) => Mahendra(Great Lord) (aa(as in car) + e(as in kick) => ae(as in vent))

Mahi(Earth) + Indra(Lord) => Mahindra(Lord of Earth) (e(as in kick) + e(as in kick) => ee(as in screen))

In fact the -ise ending is pronounced with a 'z' sound because of French spelling rules, but since most English speaking people don't learn French spelling rules they don't realise the etymology and hence (not henka) the spelling. The rule in its most basic form is either an 'i' or an 'e' before or after and 's' changes the sound to a 'z'. In a similar way and 'i' or an 'e' before or after a 'c' changes it into an 's' sound; this is why France is spelt France but Francaise is spelt Française, the cédille is there to remind you that the base word has a 'e' after the 'c'. So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

When I was in primary school I was taught basic French, German, Latin and Greek spelling and etymology so that spelling in English would make more sense (not senze!)

> So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

although one shouldn't, since West Germanic didn't have a z sound or a letter to spell it with - it had become r (hence was/were, where “was” originally had an s sound and were originally had a z sound).

Later, when Germanic languages developed z again, it has mostly been spelt with s as in “was”, since it comes from s.

In English no matter the origin of the word, z is spelt s in core vocabulary. Borrowings from Greek have z but they are mostly learned. If there were no zoos, z would feel entirely odd.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing. Here's an interesting tidbit that might be of interest to you. Indic Scripts and some Ethiopean scripts fall under what are referred to as Abugida writing systems [0]. These essentially eliminate the need to memorize(or devise rules for) spellings and the need for a separate phonetic alphabet. Consonants are combined with vowels(using diacritics etc.) to generate units of syllables providing a one to one mapping between sounds and syllabic units.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

Reply on news.ycombinator.com