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…]

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 hours 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!