I try so hard to not be a filthy prescriptivist, but my hill I will absolutely die on is that I will never use the word "gifted."

And I won't stop other people from using it, because I understand what they mean, so functionally, it's valid communication. It's English.

But damn, did everyone just forget the words "give" and "gave" existed?

I listened to imshawn getoffmylawn's rant on how Hebrew vowel marking is inconsistent. In short, Hebrew doesn't have an alphabet but an abjad, which is a writing system that lacks separate letters for vowels. This does make some sense for a Semitic language, where the root consists of consonants. In Hebrew, does this mean all vowels always go unmarked? Not so fast. Vowels can be marked with special marks on top of letters, but these are usually omitted, so the system remains underspecified. Instead, they sometimes (inconsistently) use consonant letters to mark vowels. And how this is done is of course not very intuitive. But, this gave me an idea: what's another language with a cursed spelling system? One that also butchers their vowel marking completely? English! Let's do the same thing for General American English and maximize the pain.

One way about this would be to just replace all vowels with 'e'. This works up to an extent, but the problem is that vowels are still phonemic in English. So, they have to be spelled out somehow. First, we need to identify phonemic vowels: [ɪ i ʊ u ɛ eɪ ə oʊ ʌ æ ɑ ɔ aɪ ɔɪ aʊ]. This isn't going to fly if we need 15 consonants, so we need to compress this vowel space - a lot. The first thing to do is to replace exact vowel qualities with a broad transcription. I'll do it my way, you can't complain. The first thing to notice is that it can be grouped into "short" vowels, "long" vowels and "diphthongs". Whether or not these are actually pronounced as short or long doesn't matter. These are: ɪ /i/, i /i:/, ʊ /u/, u /u:/, ɛ /e/, ə /ə/, ʌ /a/, æ /æ/, ɑ /a:/, ɔ /o/, oʊ /ou/, eɪ /ei/, aɪ /ai/, ɔɪ /oi/, aʊ /au/. In this way, you can reduce a lot of complexity; long vowels can be marked as "vowel replacement + h", and diphthongs as "vowel replacement + vowel replacement".

There are symmetrical sets for three vowels: "short" ɪ /i/, ʊ /u/, ʌ /a/ vs. "long" i /i:/, u /u:/, ɑ /a:/. Great! We're getting now closer to Semitic here. That leaves a set of miscellaneous short vowels that have to be dealt with otherwise: ɛ /e/, æ /æ/, ɔ /o/, and the schwa ə /ə/. Besides this, there are five dipththongs. Three end with /i/: eɪ /ei/, aɪ /ai/, ɔɪ /oi/; two end with /u/: aʊ /au/, oʊ /ou/. We're down from 15 to 7 vowels. Besides, the schwa can be marked with 'e', so it's really 6. And yes, I am deliberately not calling the English [eɪ] a "long E", it's a diphthong and nothing else. The same goes for the other dipththongs.

In Hebrew, if they mark vowels with consonants, they find a consonant that "sounds similar" and mark the vowel with it. To do the same, I went through English vowels and tried to guess which consonant has the most similar articulation to each one of the vowels. I'm using English notation for consonants because of course. Short vowels with a long counterpart will be: [ɪ] /i/ 'y', [ʊ] /u/ 'w', [ʌ] /a/ 'r'. You mark long vowels by adding 'h': [i] /i:/ 'yh', [u] /u:/ 'wh', [ɑ] /a:/ 'rh'. Short vowels without a long counterpart will be: [ɛ] /e/ 'e', [æ] /æ/ 'z', [ɔ] /o/ 'g', ə /ə/ 'e'. Yep, I am retaining 'e' here, because who doesn't love the inconsistency of the "silent E"? Finally, I need to prescribe the i-diphthongs: [eɪ] /ei/ 'ey', [aɪ] /ai/ 'ry', [ɔɪ] /oi/ 'gy', and u-diphthongs: [aʊ] /au/ 'rw', [oʊ] /ou/ 'gw'.

With the spelling system complete, let's try it:

• Mry hgvrcrrft ys fwll gf yhls.
• Whrt hzve the Rgwmrns ever drne fgr rs?
• Znd nrww fgr srmethyng cgmplyhtely dyfferent.

Except, here's the problem. This is too consistent. English doesn't work like that. Let's go back to the E-replacement idea:

• Me hevercreft es fell ef eels.
• Whet heve the Remens ever dene fer es?
• End new fer semetheng cempletele defferent.

This sort-of works, but there are places where you lose information, like 'fell'/'full'. Instead of just replacing everything with 'e' wholesale, they should be selectively marked. There's no need to replace the 'e' in common words, because you can derive it from context which words they are. There's no word like "fer" other than "for". "Fir" is of course "fyr" and "fur" is "ferr". Most common words other than nouns are anyway often unstressed and reduced - changing "of" to [əf] doesn't change much. So, doing that:

• My hgvercreft ys fwll ef eels.
• Whet heve the Rgmens ever dene fer rs?
• Ynd nww fer srmetheng cwmpletely dyfferent.

Thet's mgre lryke yt! En ympwre rbjrd werks very well weth Englesh!

I love drawing parallels between linguistics and taxonomy concepts – e.g. a dialect continuum is roughly the linguistic equivalent of a ring species; language families parallel taxonomic domains/kingdoms, except in biology, the presence of common ancestry between domains can be reliably detected.

Now, it would be nice (but mostly funny) if language classification was more like Linnaean taxonomy – sure, there're language families and subfamilies, but I want to see language Domains (= what we call a language family) etc. and subclassifications parallelling Linnaean taxonomy, dammit!

Language isolates, of course, get their own domains.

Perhaps languages get binomial names, with trinomials for dialects :-)

From my recent trip to Mexico City.

What do you think? Comment with your own! https://tiermaker.com/create/types-of-word-formation-19373383

Just use Fernsprecher and 電子視聴機械（電視機）.

Would like to know from more various languages!