“Chile” should denote the long, thin country in South America and NOTHING ELSE.
“Chili” should refer to all peppers so designated (which also tend to be long and thin, come to think of it) as well as the thick, hot, bean-containing soup. Also, the red and green sauces they love so much in New Mexico. In fact, nothing you can put in your mouth should be spelled “chile”. I insist on this.
Unless, maybe, it comes from Chile. And then only under certain circumstances. Like, if you came up with a recipe for Chilean chili (maybe it’s made with sea bass and flavored with Malbec) you could call it “Chili alla Chile” or something. Otherwise, no.
“Hyperbole” is an intentional trap and that is not an excessive exaggeration. I didn’t match up the spoken and written forms mentally until I was in my 30’s. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a good way to spell it so that it makes sense intuitively in English.
One little thing: “rhyme” is so spelled because of a false analogy with “rhythm”: it really ought to be spelled “rime” (as it is in the title of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”).
Delores Reborn, that poem is fabulous. I tried to say it aloud, but got about halfway through before I couldn’t do any more. I’d love to hear Stephen Colbert or Stephen Fry try it, though.
I’d like to be able to use segway instead of segue, sotter instead of solder, and my personal favorite, prolly instead of probably.
Aside from F and V being interchangeable, German is one of the most perfectly phonetic languages in the world. I don’t think there is a single homophone in the German language, but maybe somebody here knows one.
Even if a language were perfectly phonetic, it would soon drift out of synch, because language constantly evolved through subtle shifts by the speakers in how they say things. Chaucer spelled his English words very close to the way they were pronounced then. It’s the later speakers who dropped the terminal E and stopped pronouncing the GH, making the language less phonetic.
They should be labl and tabl. This would highlight the fact that they use a vocalic l and have no e sound at all. Lots of others with l and r (theatr, centr, etc.). The real problem is that different dialects do different things. Fr exampl, I pronounce the middl n in envirnment. The classic science fiction story: Meihem In Ce Klasrum illustrates some of the problems and pitfalls. (To explain the cird word of the titl, ce letter c was first dropd entirly, replaced by s or k as rekuird, and cen broot bak to represent th.)
