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Dundee / Ayr, United Kingdom
Graphic Design, Photography, Design, Freelance. 3rd Year Graphic Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College Of Art and Design

Thursday 28 October 2010

Designer Languages "haitch" or "aitch"?

Urban Dictionary

I've just finished watching the channel 4 news and Jon Snow had a very interesting discussion and report on the evolution of language. It seems that as generations move on we alter pronunciations, with it currently being that the youthful thing to do is add extra syllables. An apt example being the word "mischievous", the current way to say this is "mis-chee-vee-uss", however the classic way to say this is "mis-chi-vus ".

It seems that we are redesigning our own language. From the previous example the second but also original pronunciation now seems to sound posh. However this "redesigning" of language has peen around for centuries. Originally much of the English language came from French and Latin. However when many of these words came in from the French language they were altered when introduced and given a "H" sound at the beginning as this was seen as a sign of class. Take "herb" for example this was initially pronounced "erb".

There are so many variants on pronunciations that there is now very rarely a definite right or wrong way. So much of this has to do with modern communication methods such as text language and even more recently due to twitter for example, words are being created and or their meanings being replaced 1.e. "he/she tweeted".


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