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Arglebargle III posted:Wade-Giles is exactly the same, you have to learn it. The reason it's so hated is because it looks pronounceable and has lead to decades of mangled pronunciations from English speakers. Wade-Giles looks dumb though. And since Pinyin is the standard now nobody should bother learning it. Berke Negri posted:The weird thing is most native Mandarin speakers ive met just tell me to stop trying to pronounce things right. The only one who tried to teach me something close to proper pronunciation was a girlfriend of mine a few years back. This is a big contrast with spanish speakers on the border here in Arizona. There is a pervasive belief in Asia that "foreigners" (anyone not my ethnic group, who are all the same) are incapable of learning our special language and shouldn't even try. This bleeds into other things. But this is not the thread for bitchin' so if you would like to explore such joys there are threads in T&T. 
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Oct 12, 2013 03:32
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Baron Porkface posted:What do you think was the cause of the fall of Troy? 
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Oct 12, 2013 03:40
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Haha yeah. If you're interested check out the Chinese Language Thread "revering everything foreign and pandering to overseas" in TAS. It's a pretty slow thread but chances are your question will be answered or you'll be at least directed to an explanation. My high school teacher's given name was Xiaoyu, and I don't blame him for giving up on getting Americans to pronounce it right. I think the recent u/v split in pinyin might render his name Xiaoyv, which would be even more confusing for Americans. (The new "v" vowel is just the French u, it's not actually complicated.) Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 03:42
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Grand Fromage posted:Wade-Giles looks dumb though. And since Pinyin is the standard now nobody should bother learning it. I'll stop, dont worry. I love more chinese antiquity talk. Id be fine with americas antiquity talk, but afaik we only have vague ideas what things were like then compared to the Mediterranean or China.
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Oct 12, 2013 03:50
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I hate using English names but I have one Cantonese friend that I do it with because her name is completely impossible. Both syllables are all phonemes that don't exist at all in English and it's just not happening. I tried for months. Chinese is hard to pronounce correctly as an English speaker. I kinda get it with Chinese, but Koreans have the same attitude even though Korean is relatively easy to pronounce--except for one vowel all the sounds exist in English. Anyway, if you're going to effortpost about Chinese history I am interested in the historical basis of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms vs the novel, since I'm trying to read it now.
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Oct 12, 2013 03:52
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There's also those weird tonal phonemes that make the Chinese have perfect pitch much more often than westerners. The thing I find weirdest about Chinese is the way in which it's written down in the western alphabet. Who the hell ever decided to write down the "ch" sound in Qin as a Q of all things?
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Oct 12, 2013 04:19
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veekie posted:That makes sense then. Lots of small wars with cooling off periods rather than armed camps facing off? Yes. Lots of small local wars. The kingdoms were petty and so were their conflicts, especially at the beginning of the period. Two states would often have wars while their neighbors were at peace, then end that war but then the loser would get jumped by a third aggressor, and sort of daisy-chain on through. The point is, there could be constant warfare even as most of the states were at peace for any one time. Just like if Pisa and Milan are at war, we wouldn't assume that Florence or Genoa were also at war, but might say that in general it was a period of warfare for Italy. As we go towards the Warring States period and their final conflicts the wars get bigger as states get bigger and consolidate territory. I really with the Let's Play: Kung Fu thread wasn't archived because I based a lot of what I wrote there on real anecdotes from primary sources in this time period and I would like to be able to remember what I was thinking at the time -- although everything I actually posted was invention and parody. I really would like to hear more discussions of the other lesser-known Chinese philosophies from the Spring and Autumn period like the Mohists or the Vertical and Horizontal Alliances because they're not going to get included in an overview but they're still really interesting. This period also wasn't my professor's focus so I know less about it than other times.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:26
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Berke Negri posted:Someone more qualified than me can correct me if im wrong but it'd be likd "Xian" = Chan or Zhan, Tzu like Shu or Chu, Qin like Keen or Cheen. Transliteration from Mandarin to English is pretty imperfect no matter what. This sounds like Cantonese to me, if only because those words in mandarin sound completely different from what you described. SlothfulCobra posted:The thing I find weirdest about Chinese is the way in which it's written down in the western alphabet. Who the hell ever decided to write down the "ch" sound in Qin as a Q of all things? Having things look pronouncable doesn't actually help with speaking languages, since people will default to their usual phonemes and end up sounding weird. The "Chin" dynasty looks and sounds silly.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:28
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Grand Fromage posted:Chinese is hard to pronounce correctly as an English speaker. I kinda get it with Chinese, but Koreans have the same attitude even though Korean is relatively easy to pronounce--except for one vowel all the sounds exist in English. Anyway, if you're going to effortpost about Chinese history I am interested in the historical basis of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms vs the novel, since I'm trying to read it now. I have no effortpost, but the basic outline of the book's events are pretty true. Anything that sounds super-dramatic was probably made up. I'm trying to find this online resource that described the battles of the period in ways pretty similar to a Dynasty Warriors game. That was a good read. Also, it outed Shu Han as a bit-player state that got the underdog treatment several dynasties afterwards.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:The thing I find weirdest about Chinese is the way in which it's written down in the western alphabet. Who the hell ever decided to write down the "ch" sound in Qin as a Q of all things? Convenience for English speakers was not high on the list of priorities when pinyin was being developed. That's really the only answer you need. More specifically, Chinese has a ch sound, they needed a different grapheme for q because it's a different sound. They had to pick some way to write it and they didn't need the letter q for anything else. Be grateful the Communists won the war, if the Nationalists had won instead of discussing the tiny learning curve of pinyin we'd be discussing how to read ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:40
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Arglebargle III posted:
Had a friend growing up named Wang Yang, and he definitely did not pronounce it properly, I guess.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:42
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There is no hard "a" in Chinese.
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Arglebargle III posted:Convenience for English speakers was not high on the list of priorities when pinyin was being developed. That's really the only answer you need. More specifically, Chinese has a ch sound, they needed a different grapheme for q because it's a different sound. They had to pick some way to write it and they didn't need the letter q for anything else. Be grateful the Communists won the war, if the Nationalists had won instead of discussing the tiny learning curve of pinyin we'd be discussing how to read ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ. As a foreigner in Taiwan, this leads to all sorts of problems when I'm trying to understand what the hell someone is saying. I usually have an electronic dictionary (Android tablet) on me, but naturally all my settings are in Pinyin since that's what I learned. The Taiwanese have no idea how to input sounds in it and I usually have to switch to a touch based method so they can just write the character.
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Oct 12, 2013 05:09
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Grand Fromage posted:
I'm taking most of these arguments from the Biblical Interpretation and History thread (which if you like ancient history is definitely worth checking out, the OP's main focus is a socio-historical interpretation of the bible) but the 'Jesus was totally made up!' thing is pretty unlikely. It's not far off someone claiming that Socrates never existed, it was just an attempt by a later Athenian government to impose the ideals of the Republic or some crap. The primary argument against it is simply that Jesus' story has quite a few problems for traditional Jewish Messianic figures, some of which later writers try to solve (so the going to Bethlehem to be born story, which makes no sense at all) but why include them at all if you're just making someone up? That isn't to say interpretations of his life changed radically or that he may have had aspects conflated with other speakers at the time or later but there does seem to be a core figure that inspired followers to write accounts of his life and teachings. The earliest gospels are dated to something like 100-150 years after his life and it seems kind of weird to think that you could entirely invent a figure that recently out of whole cloth. The idea that the Roman's tried it in order to pacify the Jews? Especially that they would create another monotheistic religion for the purpose? On the balance of burden of proof I think it's lying somewhat more against 'massive and unique cover up by the Roman government' than with 'inspirational preacher/cult leader whose life and works got recorded/embellished/reinterpreted over a few hundred years'.
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Oct 12, 2013 05:22
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Suben posted:Inheritance of Rome by Christopher Wickham. The development of political and social systems, court practices, and the like in the (very late) Western Empire, the various post-Roman barbarians (Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, England/Wales/Ireland, etc.), and all of that up through 1000 AD (with a little bit of Byzantine and Abassid stuff thrown in) is basically that book's entire shtick so I would assume that's probably the most comprehensive write-up you're going to find on the subject. I'm still reading through it now though because I get distracted easily; no fault of the book's as I do find it all really interesting to learn about. Thanks for the recommendation. I think if I use the Heather book as a precursor to Wickham that'd be a pretty good foundation.
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Oct 12, 2013 05:31
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MrNemo posted:I'm taking most of these arguments from the Biblical Interpretation and History thread (which if you like ancient history is definitely worth checking out, the OP's main focus is a socio-historical interpretation of the bible) but the 'Jesus was totally made up!' thing is pretty unlikely. It's all reasonable. Ultimately it's a thing I don't care at all about, because there's no way to prove it in either direction and it doesn't matter at all whether he was an actual preacher of the era or not. The New Testament story is standard mythology of the era/region. The mythology being built out of nothing or being placed on an actual person doesn't change anything about the interesting part, which is how it affected the region.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:18
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Okay, too much talking about language. Old Chinese sounds almost nothing like Mandarin anyway so we can talk about how to give these things their modern names but be aware that the people we are talking about wouldn't recognize any of them. Let's get back into the historical overview. Things are getting closer together in time so now I have to check my dates or I'll get something wrong.  221 BC-206 BC The Qin Dynasty From 230 to 221 BC the state of Qin, lead by the young and forceful King Zheng and his Machiavellian counselor/regent/SECRET DAD??? Lv Buwei, went on an epic rampage and conquered the other 6 Warring States, which had already been severely weakened by Qin's ascent over the last 50 years. Zheng was ruthless in conquest and in consolidating his power, and made few friends as the Qin armies stormed through state after state. Zheng wasted no time in pronouncing himself First Emperor of Qin, which is how history mostly remembers him as Qin Shi Huangdi. Qin Shi Huangdi followed up his literal epic rampage with a metaphorical epic rampage of state-building, taking the Qin apparatus of state and imposing it on China. He standardized roads, vehicles, weights and measures, currency, writing, etc. He collected and destroyed weapons from the defeated states' armories, burned their history books  , conscripted many of their people into the army or forced labor, and everywhere imposed the Qin Legalist philosophy of zero tolerance. You often hear that the Qin "unified" China but that's the wrong word. Qin conquered China, eradicated much of what came before, and the centralized, bureaucratic Qin state left its mark forever.Qin Shi Huang wasn't satisfied with metaphorical rampaging though, and after a few years lead the now even bigger Qin armies on campaigns into the sub-tropical forest and rugged hills of south China all the way down to the Mekong Valley. The Yue peoples, who had been a formidable barbarian culture on the Chinese southern border for centuries, were broken and south China firmly brought into the Chinese political sphere. He also attacked the Xiongnu to the north, but as you'd expect his attempts to dominate and settle the steppe don't take. Our rampaging First Emperor accumulated a lot of enemies and no new friends over the decades. In fact he even had his lifelong mentor Lv Buwei put to death for boning the Imperial Mom, which is where the SECRET DAD??? rumor comes from. His building projects were heedless of human life and many forced laborers died in monumental construction projects like the Great Wall. In one famous exchange he ordered a whole forest chopped down just to prove a point. He burned books of philosophy that disagreed with Legalism, and when scholars hid their libraries he ordered them buried alive. He escaped numerous assassination attempts and put down almost a dozen rebellions, almost one for every year of his reign. Summation: he was not a popular guy. Qin Shi Huangdi eventually died in 210 BC, and while his tomb is a noteworthy point I'll have to come back to it, because the Qin super-state immediately went to poo poo without King Zheng's formidable foot on China's throat. The Prime Minister, the Imperial princes, and the court advisers turned on each other literally before the death was officially announced, and before you know it heads were rolling in the palace. The new government was too incompetent to rule and far too incompetent to contain the hatred of the Chinese people for the Qin oppressors. By 209 the entire country was in revolt and the Qin state had virtually collapsed. King Zheng managed to conquer China for a total of 12 years. A young army lieutenant from a humble peasant family will reunite and transform the state in just a few years, but that's where I'll stop for now. That's a lot to talk about in a very short time, and I doubt I will ever spend so much  on one person's accomplishments again but Ying Zheng (or Zhang Zheng) was such a transformative figure in Chinese history it's hard to gloss him more than this. Chinese history is literally divided into pre-Zheng and post-Zheng since he's the first Emperor of the Imperial Period.I should talk about Qin Shi Huangdi's tomb complex since it's now recognized as one of the wonders of the ancient world. It was so well-hidden and so deeply buried that it was only rediscovered in the 1970s, and therefore is a wealth of material that can be secured and excavated properly. Ironically it owes its preservation to contemporary looters, who so hated the Emperor of Qin that they burned his tomb complex after looting it. The huge wood and earth structure collapsed into the ground and became an unremarkable-looking hill, where it sat unnoticed for 2000 years. The tomb complex is enormous, covering a diameter of about 3 kilometers. It includes an 600-meter-wide miniature copy of the Imperial City for the Emperor and his household in the center, three burial pits for the Terracotta Army in the east, and a mass grave for the construction workers in the west. Yes, they actually did kill all the people who built it so that it wouldn't be found. Rebels burned it down the year after it was finished. Great plan, guys!  The army complex is the only part that has been excavated. It includes three separate chambers. The largest chamber containing the infantry force has been mostly excavated. The discoveries there will probably take decades more for archeologists and historians to analyze and interpret fully. We have true-to-life models of an entire army regiment, horses, vehicles, and equipment which appears to be the real thing. The Qin state was kind enough to date-stamp a lot of its weaponry, and the dates indicate that these are actual weapons that the Qin army had lying around and then buried. Some of them are so well-preserved that with a new grip and a bit of polishing you could take them out to war again. The other chambers have not yet been opened but have been examined with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers, which is how we know the general layout of the site. The Imperial burial complex itself is currently off-limits, since one of the centerpieces of the tomb was supposed to be a carved relief map of China with mercury for rivers and lakes. The soil above the complex does indeed have high levels of mercury and so excavation is on hold indefinitely. Whew! That was a lot. Next time I'll try to get through more than 50 years! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 06:45
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So are the works of Adrian Goldsworthy worth reading? If not who does this thread recommend for good books on ancient Rome?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:51
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Isn't Qin Shi Huangdi basically responsible for his own death by drinking gallons of mercury, going insane, and then dying?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:53
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That's certainly a theory and given the Chinese alchemical obsession with mercury it's a plausible one. We won't know until someone digs up the imperial corpse. Alternate answer: Ying Zheng was already so  how would you tell if he went insane?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:59
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I have no effortpost, but the basic outline of the book's events are pretty true. Anything that sounds super-dramatic was probably made up. Even beyond the super dramatic stuff (i.e. Zhuge Liang summoning the wind at Chibi) there's a lot of stuff that's invented wholesale such as Guan Yu killing Hua Xiong (in fact Hua Xiong's forces were defeated by Sun Jian) or his killing Yan Liang and Wen Chou at Guandu (he only killed Yan Liang, Wen Chou was killed kind of randomly during the course of a battle). The novel is very much about talking up Shu and Liu Bei/Zhuge Liang/Guan Yu. And obviously it's not historically accurate but the 2010 Three Kingdoms TV series should be easy to find on youtube and is pro-watch as gently caress.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:04
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Arglebargle III posted:The other chambers have not yet been opened but have been examined with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers, which is how we know the general layout of the site. The Imperial burial complex itself is currently off-limits, since one of the centerpieces of the tomb was supposed to be a carved relief map of China with mercury for rivers and lakes. The soil above the complex does indeed have high levels of mercury and so excavation is on hold indefinitely. Can't remember if I asked this before or not, but what are they waiting for to excavate? Fair enough that they don't want to just dynamite the hill open (Schliemann ), but is there some technological skill/criteria that they're waiting to develop? Ditto the sites in the west such as Pompeii etc.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:39
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Right now excavating a site irrevocably damages it, no matter how careful you are. We consider the information worth the damage in general, but some sites are thought to be too important to touch yet. The rest of Pompeii is left buried until there's better technology to preserve it and the Italian government can afford to actually do it properly, and Qin's tomb is also being left alone until the Chinese are confident it can be properly preserved. There's no specific technology because we don't know what it will be, it hasn't been invented. You could theoretically seal the entire site inside a climate controlled dome or something I guess.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:42
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The Terracotta Army excavation is under a steel aircraft hanger sort of deal, but they have visitors so it can't be totally climate controlled. The visitors walk on an elevated deck around the excavation so the archeologists can work and tourists can visit without interrupting them. Maybe they keep the building under constant positive pressure or something but I kind of doubt it. Better than leaving it out in the rain at least! They absolutely made the right call going slow on the tomb, though. In 1976 China's academic community was in no shape to conduct world-class study of a world-class site. When they excavated the Terracotta Army they broke a lot more than they needed to and destroyed the paint by exposing it to air. To be fair they didn't even know about the paint and the figures are already crushed in the earth, so it's hard to excavate them without breaking them more or even realize whether you broke something or whether it has been broken for 2000 years. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 08:02
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Grand Fromage posted:Basically. There are different camps, and there was for a long time (and still is, though it's not as common as it once was) a popular idea that the empire fell apart because of decadence and the systems collapsing and poo poo. Gibbon is the prime example here. Heather's argument is that this provably not true, and had the Germans never showed up there's no reason to believe the western empire wouldn't have survived another thousand years like the east did. Where exactly did you get it? I'm trying to order it, if only to understand what exactly Guy Halsall finds so objectionable, but the only place that Amazon has that will ship to Canada (in hardcover of course, I'm not some softcover prole) has it listed for >$500. 
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Oct 12, 2013 09:02
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Arglebargle III posted:His building projects were heedless of human life and many forced laborers died in monumental construction projects like the Great Wall. In one famous exchange he ordered a whole forest chopped down just to prove a point. Man, the guy thinks big for sure. He kind of reminds me of a Civ player rushing Wonders at horrendous costs.
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Oct 12, 2013 09:30
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Does anyone have a recommendation for an accessible biography of Virgil?
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Oct 12, 2013 09:48
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veekie posted:Man, the guy thinks big for sure. He kind of reminds me of a Civ player rushing Wonders at horrendous costs. Actually killing all the construction workers was his fuckstick son's idea, according to Sima Qian. He also had a bunch of young women sacrificed to be his dead dad's concubines in the afterlife. The tomb wasn't sealed up until 9 months after Qin Shi Huang died, and parts were still under construction when they gave up and buried him.
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Oct 12, 2013 10:12
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:So are the works of Adrian Goldsworthy worth reading? If not who does this thread recommend for good books on ancient Rome? Goldsworthy does good writing and is a cool dude IRL. His books are a fine place to start.
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Oct 12, 2013 13:24
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PittTheElder posted:Where exactly did you get it? I'm trying to order it, if only to understand what exactly Guy Halsall finds so objectionable, but the only place that Amazon has that will ship to Canada (in hardcover of course, I'm not some softcover prole) has it listed for >$500. I got the $12 softcover on Amazon. You might have to just be a prole like the rest of us.
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Oct 12, 2013 14:57
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Edit: Whoops, hardcover snob. $8 for paperback on ebay. Your call.
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Oct 12, 2013 15:40
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Arglebargle III posted:
See, this is what happens when you try to explain foreign pronunciations, particularly to English speakers. If you hadn't offered the examples, these sentences would be totally incoherent. Like "hard a"? What? I'm not complaining about your usage, since you clearly you know your stuff, but there's so much terrible terminology used in English that it just makes me wish everyone knew IPA. You could just say, "there's no /æ/ in Chinese, now let's move on", and everyone would understand. Or like trying to make English people pronounce straight /e/ without turning it into a diphthong, bloody hell. Very off-topic, sorry.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:02
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Transliteration within indo-aryan languages is a crapshoot to begin with, once you start heading east goooooooooooooooooooooooood the gently caress luck.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:04
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Arglebargle III posted:Convenience for English speakers was not high on the list of priorities when pinyin was being developed. That's really the only answer you need. More specifically, Chinese has a ch sound, they needed a different grapheme for q because it's a different sound. They had to pick some way to write it and they didn't need the letter q for anything else. Be grateful the Communists won the war, if the Nationalists had won instead of discussing the tiny learning curve of pinyin we'd be discussing how to read ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ. Bopomfo is cool you guys, and you should learn it because there are a million different ways to spell everything using Roman characters. I still see different spellings on the same street walking around.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:10
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Ras Het posted:just makes me wish everyone knew IPA. You could just say, "there's no /æ/ in Chinese, now let's move on", and everyone would understand. "Why doesn't everyone just memorize these 159 graphemes so that this occasional difficulty never happens?!"  IPA is good to know but if I'd used it I would be giving one obscure writing system to explain another obscure writing system. I don't even know how to type æ and I most people don't know how to pronounce it. And this is the Roman thread! I think Latin uses æ for a different vowel than IPA. So... ever read that comic about how trying to rationalize 2 competing standards invariably results in 3 competing standards?
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Oct 12, 2013 16:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Actually killing all the construction workers was his fuckstick son's idea, according to Sima Qian. He also had a bunch of young women sacrificed to be his dead dad's concubines in the afterlife. The tomb wasn't sealed up until 9 months after Qin Shi Huang died, and parts were still under construction when they gave up and buried him. I had the chance to visit both the Terracotta army and the Han Yang Ling Mausoleum (a Han dynasty tomb built about 60 years after the end of the Qin dynasty; check out the Wikimedia Commons link for photos) and it was interesting to see the differences between the two. The Han tomb also has terracotta statues but they're small scale mass-produced models (which doesn't mean they were badly made: every single soldier has a penis and testicles) with wooden arms and real clothing, both of which decayed long ago. There were also statues of servants and officials as well as herds of livestock, which I don't think Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum has. It's pretty clear that the Han were more fiscally responsible when it came to building tombs.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:38
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Arglebargle III posted:"Why doesn't everyone just memorize these 159 graphemes so that this occasional difficulty never happens?!" Yea no obviously, but Wikipedia has sound clips for most IPA characters you might ever need, so when talking online, you can just show what vowel it is, instead of going for incredibly vague comparisons. I'm not sure what xkcd you're referring to, but I think the point is sort of lost here, cos you've got: 1) English spelling - perfectly fine for English 2) Pinyin - perfectly fine for Chinese 3) Latin - perfectly fine for Classical Latin (fwiw, "ae" was pronounced like eye, until it turned to /ɛː/ in Vulgar Latin...) and so on, but you can't really make these meet in any way without a standard that represents all of them. And IPA is the only option for that, and it's pretty much the only way to point to an objective reference. [disclaimer: I do recognise that Chinese romanisation isn't made much easier by IPA reference, cos us idiot Westerners can't really hear the differences between a lot of the phonemes, but I'm just being provocative really...]
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Oct 12, 2013 16:47
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Okay dude next time I'll just find the IPA for the sound I need, then link the wikipedia IPA page, then link the page for that sound and people can click and listen to the sound wherever they may be reading. What was I thinking? A comparison is so much harder. In fact, how about I just run everything by you before I post? 
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Oct 12, 2013 16:53
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Okay, I'm gonna put on the mod hat for this post and say let's end this derail. If you wanna talk more about Chinese pronunciation or language issues there are appropriate threads in SAL.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:02
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Content! how close are the romance languages we have now to vulgar latin and when can we see divergence? I was under the impression that the romance languages were already pretty under way (also: italian) long before what we consider the middle ages.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:03
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Arglebargle III posted:Okay dude next time I'll just find the IPA for the sound I need, then link the wikipedia IPA page, then link the page for that sound and people can click and listen to the sound wherever they may be reading. What was I thinking? A comparison is so much harder. In fact, how about I just run everything by you before I post? I wasn't upset with you  I'm just moderately irritated with the problem of representing the sounds of Mandarin Chinese with ad hoc English comparisons, because I found your post super interesting and at one point thought "this is an annoying point of confusion caused by English phonology and spelling conventions". Right?e: yes, mod hat acknowledged.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:03
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