That is a joke.
Right?
The first syllable may elide (is that the right word?) into the second, but I have never heard it pronounced like that. Who are you talking to?
Oh.
People of great charm and wit, I am sure.
Okay, I’ll play, what’s wrong with “cherry”?
To me, that looks like a good approximation of how most people I know seem to say it. I would say “skwerl” and “squirrel” exactly the same way. Not sure what the “charm and wit” comment means, though. For me, “squirrel” and “curl” have the same amount of syllables. Whether that’s one, one and a half, or two (the “rl” combination can be counted as a swallowed or full syllable if you want).
Anyhow, bob++ can help us out. Here are 22 pronunciations of “squirrel” and it looks like 11 of them are from America. How many of those sound like what you mean by “skwerl”?
I’m Scottish and I think the closest spelling to my pronunciation of squirrel would be skwiril.
It’s an erroneous backformation. The original word was cherise, and ignorant people assumed it was a plural because it ended in an s sound, so they started calling one of them a “cherry.” (It didn’t help that fruitmongers of the time probably spelled cherise with an apostrophe before the s. The few who could write, anyway.) It’s as clear a case of linguistic solecism as you’ll find, and the fact that this mistake is now found in respectable dictionaries is a clear sign that English is in decline. It may have taken seven hundred years for anyone to notice, but surely just because everybody makes the same mistake for seven hundred years doesn’t make it correct! If you’re a prescriptivist, anyway. Next thing you know, people will be wearing jackets without tails to dinner!
Also, this is a similar process to words like “newt” and “nickname” through misanalysis of the indefinite article (originally “an ewt” and “an eke-name.”) Also, in the other direction “a napron” became “an apron,” “a nadder” became “an adder.” This is known as metanalysis, rebracketing, or juncture loss (among some other names.)
By the way, I’m shocked that anyone with the slightest education would use such a corrupt and vulgar word (if it can even be called such) as “okay.” Juveniles who took perverse pleasure in their own inability to spell took to writing such allegedly humorous phrases as “oll korrect” where they would otherwise have used the barely gramatical sentence fragment “all correct,” to indicate satisfaction with something. Lazy, incompetent journalists spread the fad, and eventually took to bastardizing it even further by abbreviating it as the initials “o.k.” Unbelievably, some people were so illiterate and unimaginative, that they started pronouncing these letters in speech, and before long others (whom one might hopefully suppose were ignorant of the vulgar history of this utterance) began transcribing this pseudo-linguistic refuse as if it were an actual word spelled, as it sounded, “okay.” Sheer corruption and ignorance from start to finish. The day this obscene erructation becomes an accepted part of the language is the day English ceases to be the language of business and government around the globe. Mark my words! What will follow but men walking about bareheaded and women in trousers! You’ll see!
But isn’t this the whole point of language evolving?
We don’t say or spell ye olde for the old any more… The old is the accepted saying and spelling. Therefore b4 should replace before and u should replace you etc.
And since most ppl on this message board are american how would u feel if I started criticising ppl for typing color or civilization?
Well, that one’s a little more complicated. It wasn’t pronounced with a “y” sound. It was always a “th” sound. Specifically, it was a letter called thorn (“Þ”). This was a letter used in Old English through about early middle English. The “y” was the result of printing press workers making do with the Continental lettersets, which did not contain a thorn. It never was meant to be pronounced “ye.” Similarly, “that” was typeset as “yt” and “ys” for “this.” They were all meant as abbreviations.
Also, see here.
To step away from my bluenose prescriptivist persona for a moment (or longer), if language is like clothing and grammar like fashion, the SDMB is the opera house of the internet: we don’t expect top hat and tails anymore, but we expect you to dress up a little, and typing “b4” and “ppl” here is like walking around with your fly undone. It may be the style where you come from, and quite practical to boot, but it won’t win you any friends. At least, not the kind you want.
No, there’s a big difference. “B4”, “u”, etc are only used in the most informal contexts and the most ephemeral texts, and are not used consistently even in those contexts. They don’t appear in journalism, in (most) business writing, in )(most) literary fiction, in documents of record, etc. They are a very long way from being the dominant spelling, or anything like it.
Nor, I predict, will they ever become so. Telegraphic abbreviations flourished at the end of the nineteenth century in a particular context (telegraphs, obviously) but they never gained much acceptance outside that context and, when the technology progressed, they disappeared.
The same is likely to happen here. Even now, abbreviations like “b4” are never used outside text messages and post-it notes except as a very conscious mannerism. And, within that context, they’re already in decline as mobile phones increasingly recognise them and substitute “before”; they’ll disappear entirely when text messages are routinely created through speech recognition technology.
I didn’t say it’s the way I prefer to spell the words. But I’d gladly bet that more ppl will type b4 than before in the next 24 hours which means b4 is the preferred spelling and dictionaries should be updated to reflect this. It doesn’t mean the spelling has to change overnight but it should become acceptable for either to be used. As technology advances we’ll find ourselves using shorter versions of spelling words more frequently. Since languages are intended to evolve it only seems reasonable we should allow our spelling of words to evolve. After all it wasn’t so long ago that 3 was III.
Yes, it was, and replacing that system allowed banking and commerce and mathematics, with all associated sciences, to flourish.
However, I will accept your argument and agree to use “b4” for “before” after a millennium.
This improper usage of the word “hung” is a thing up with which I shall not put.
I question whether more English-speakers type “b4” than “before” in a typical day, but even if it’s true it doesn’t establish your point. As far as the compilation of dictionaries goes, what matters is not what people type into their phones and how many of them type it, but what gets published - what people read and how many of them read it. Dictionaries establish usage by looking at published, publicly-available texts - newspapers, books, journals, blogs, websites - but not so much by trawling through the NSA’s log of all your phone messages to your friends. And in the sources that dictionaries look at (and which represent the great bulk of texts that most people read), “before” eclipses “b4” by a very large margin.
Not all of them. And let’s think this through a little. As dictionaries cease to be published primarily on paper, there will be little cause to cull words from the dictionary. The only question will be whether someone using the dictionary will benefit from the entry or will find it spurious, confusing, or misleading. As long as there is a possibility that someone might encounter “b4” in a text (whether traditional or SMS) and seek to look it up in a dictionary, I think there is a good case for it being there, and little or no case against it (except concern about space in a paper dictionary). Being in a dictionary doesn’t make it the preferred spelling or the official spelling or a “real word” (whatever that means). It means that someone seeking it can find information about it, including its meaning, but also its part of speech and possibly pronunciation, etymology, date of first use, example sentences, even usage notes explaining that it’s inappropriate in all but very casual communication, especially SMS text messages.
I would but I can’t be arsed to sign up
Signing up? I’ve never done such a thing with that web site, and I’ve used it dozens of times.
ETA: You are hitting the little “play” arrow and not trying to download an mp3 right?
We never did ‘say’ ye old. The digraph <th> evolved from the Old English letter thorn, þ. Printers did not have that character available, so used the nearest possible <y>
Ye olde is a modern advertisers idea to give an image of Merrie England.
Printers have a lot to answer for, since back in the 17c they were largely making up the spelling as they went along.
OK - I didn’t see the arrow.
The answer is that all the ones from the US sound like skwerl to me.