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Comment by lucian1900 | Hacker News Reader

lucian1900

This is terribly nit-picky, but reading "loose" so many times is making me crazy! It's "lose".

Crap. Agreed. Too late to edit. I don't know why I did that. Typing too fast. Also, I speak several languages.

English can be really inconsistent at times: "lose" and "loose" are pronounced exactly the same yet have different meanings. Yet "lost" is not pronounced "loost". Another one I hate: "read" can be pronounced "red" or "reed".

In sharp contrast to this Spanish is regular and consistent. I'll venture to say that even French can be more consistent than English.

That said, I am launching into learning Mandarin, which I understand can be tricky due to subtle pronoun inaction [see edit] and tone details.

EDIT: Damn, every time I type on my iPad there's something to regret. Here "pronoun inaction" was supposed to be "pronunciation". Time to turn off auto-no-help. Just try texting in multiple languages on your iPhone for some ROFL fun. Cute until you email or text a business contact and auto-no-help corrections make you sound like a total idiot.

English is a terribly inconsistent language, yes. I suppose having both Germanic and Latin heritage, plus some other random bits does that to a language.

French is quite consistent as well, pleasantly so in comparison to English.

I had assumed only native English speakers misspel "lose", but you prove me wrong :) I don't think I ever got that particular word wrong, for some reason.

Not sure if it's just my dialect of English (which is the "non-accent" accent) but I pronounce "lose" with a "z" sound (rhymes with booze) while I pronounce "loose" with an "s" sound (rhymes with noose or moose).

English can be really inconsistent at times: "lose" and "loose" are pronounced exactly the same yet have different meanings.

Not to be pedantic, but they are not pronounced the same in American English.

http://www.englishpage.net/showthread.php?10393-Pronunciatio...

True. Having learned a couple of other languages I can, however, place myself in the shoes of a non-native or less fluent speaker, and, to them, these words sound pretty much the same. It's like me with Chinese, it all sounds the same right now.

So, "lose" should really be spelled "looze", "looz" or some variant of that. Writing "lose" and pronouncing it \ˈlüz\ makes as much sense as writing "lost" and pronouncing it \ˈlüzt\.

> So, "lose" should really be spelled "looze", "looz" or some variant of that.

How should "have" be spelled?

Haav?

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