Well, here’s the thing with language, it is whatever people who use the language use. If you can spell litre as liter and it’s widely accepted, welp, liter is a correct and valid form then.
Litre is an international scientific standard. It’s spelling is not up for debate. Why don’t you just change It’s volume as well, and completely fuck up all scientific communication while your at it.
The spelling of the word, much like any and all words, changes based on how it is used by the people. Standards and definitions follow the usage. It’s not about debate, that’s literally just language. You can already see this reflected in many sources, such as Wikipedia here:
The English spelling and even names for certain SI units, prefixes and non-SI units depend on the variety of English used. US English uses the spelling deka-, meter, and liter, and International English uses deca-, metre, and litre. The name of the unit whose symbol is t and which is defined by 1 t = 103 kg is ‘metric ton’ in US English and ‘tonne’ in International English.[4]: iii
If we’re talking about the order the sounds are made, “liter” is more correct. I never understood why Europeans spell the “er” sound as “re”. It’s just now how the sound works.
My take is that spelling should reflect the sound. In any language. For every word, every time.
American English makes a ton of errors in this regard, you’ll get no argument from me there (for example any word with “ough” or “augh” is automatically spelled wrong).
I’m sure tons of other examples in pretty much every language make the same mistake. But as far as I can tell, there is no good reason the spelling shouldn’t be a representation of the exact order of sounds that make up the word.
All that to say, even when hearing people who speak all manner of different languages use the word “liter”, not one has ever pronounced it “litre”.
Honestly it should be more like “ledur” for most Americans. We don’t have a habit of the actually making the proper “t” sound very often. But I’m getting into a whole different argument, so I’ll leave that kinda rant for a different time.
Oddly enough, for as common as the “er” sound is in English, it’s linguistically rare. According to the Linguistics Channel @human1011, the “er” sound is found in less than 1% of the world’s languages, rarer than the click consonants found in some languages in East and Southern Africa.
What’s particularly interesting about the “er” sound in American English is that it functions as a vowel sound. Most of us learned that the vowels in English are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and that’s true as far as written vowels go, but vowel sounds are different. In the word “bird,” the letter “i” is a vowel, but doesn’t make any of the “i” sounds that we learned in school. Instead, the “ir” combine to make the “er” vowel sound. It’s called an r-controlled vowel, and we see it in tons of words like “work,” “were,” “burn,” “skirt,” etc.
In Finnish it isn’t a “litar”, it’s a “litra”, because the r is clearly before the vowel. In Swedish it’s “liter”, and the vowel clearly comes before the r (the pronunciation being different from the English). But in English, especially American English, you guys use the “er” sound and it’s basically a conflation of those two. It’s a very rare sound when compared to all languages, but seeing as English is the lingua franca and a lot of it is in American English…
tldr my point is you’re being quite ethnocentric, unconsciously most likely, as I assume you don’t speak other languages.
What’s so fascinating to me is that, while the “er” vowel sound is super rare in languages as a whole, it happens to be in the two most widely spoken languages, English and Mandarin.
I probably should have said something about it being true with the languages I’ve heard more often.
Things like Spanish, French, Italian… Basically things near where American English came from.
I was and am fully aware that other languages will possibly sound different. The way I said it did sound ignorant though. And with the previous reply, I was assuming they were coming from a European POV. All of that was wrong.
Anyway, add in the “in languages I’ve heard/am familiar with” to that.
I’m aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically. I’ve got it open in a tab waiting for my next free moment. I’ve spent this one replying.
But you were right to call me out about the order of sounds part. I was assuming a bit. I’m not used to phrasing comments for international audiences 😅. Usually I’m talking to people that would share my perspective and familiarities. In my area I didn’t run into a lot of people that haven’t been from around here. I should get better about this, but changing my own perspective is a challenge. I’m trying.
Uh, I don’t know many people who boast about being biased, but okay.
I’m aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically
What? It’s specifically a concept in linguistics.
It means that while there are rules to language, there’s no one correct ruleset, especially when talking in an international frame. Which would be prescriptive language. Lots of European nations have institutions that prescribe rules for the language, but the rules live constantly as well, and the institutions are all made up of academic linguists who understand linguistic description, meaning it matters more how people use the language and not how it’s “supposed” to be used. Although they’re probably the type of people who are rather pedantic about language.
I’d like to remind you the nationalist movement is rather fresh, historically, and unified nation-states was pretty much a thing for the last century. But go back a few centuries and there’s not a specific single Italian (hell there’s debate whether one exists today) French, English, Spanish, Nordic languages, Slavic languages, etc etc. They’re all just dialects of their neighbouring ones essentially, except for the Finno-Ugric languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian.
You’re very biased because North-America is a whole continent and the difference in the style of speech in English in the entire continent is less varied than the language spoken in the area 150 miles around me.
I’m not used to phrasing comments for international audiences
I just admitted I did that, appreciated you calling me on it, then write a paragraph explaining I’m working on changing it, and I still get accused of boasting about it?
As for the descriptive vs prescriptive part, I’ve heard of it only as it came up in discussions of another concept (philosophy and religion. They were talking about using one type versus the other as it related to their point, but I didn’t know exactly what they meant, because that wasn’t what was being discussed directly). So yes, I’ve heard of it, but no, I wasn’t really aware of the meaning of it because the concept at hand wasn’t linguistics. Sorry, that wasn’t clear. All I was trying to say was that I’ve heard of the concept, but hadn’t learned what it was about yet. That was probably a poor choice of words.
Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn’t (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word. Yes, that falls under prescriptive here. This doesn’t exactly apply to languages that don’t use an alphabet.
You can throw that opinion straight in the trash if you want. But until I find good reasons to think otherwise, that’s just a statement of the ideal way to spell, if we were still forming the language.
Liter us how it’s spelled in American English. Like centre becoming center, fibre to fiber, etc. Language changes, neither is incorrect.
Americans can decide how to spell gallons. They don’t get a say in how to spell litre.
Well, here’s the thing with language, it is whatever people who use the language use. If you can spell litre as liter and it’s widely accepted, welp, liter is a correct and valid form then.
Also, you spell tire as tyre, you lunatics lol
Litre is an international scientific standard. It’s spelling is not up for debate. Why don’t you just change It’s volume as well, and completely fuck up all scientific communication while your at it.
The spelling of the word, much like any and all words, changes based on how it is used by the people. Standards and definitions follow the usage. It’s not about debate, that’s literally just language. You can already see this reflected in many sources, such as Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Unit_names
or here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre
If we’re talking about the order the sounds are made, “liter” is more correct. I never understood why Europeans spell the “er” sound as “re”. It’s just now how the sound works.
My take is that spelling should reflect the sound. In any language. For every word, every time.
American English makes a ton of errors in this regard, you’ll get no argument from me there (for example any word with “ough” or “augh” is automatically spelled wrong).
I’m sure tons of other examples in pretty much every language make the same mistake. But as far as I can tell, there is no good reason the spelling shouldn’t be a representation of the exact order of sounds that make up the word.
All that to say, even when hearing people who speak all manner of different languages use the word “liter”, not one has ever pronounced it “litre”.
Honestly it should be more like “ledur” for most Americans. We don’t have a habit of the actually making the proper “t” sound very often. But I’m getting into a whole different argument, so I’ll leave that kinda rant for a different time.
You’re wrong for a multitude of reasons but I can’t be arsed to explain all of them in detail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description#Descriptive_versus_prescriptive_linguistics
https://www.upworthy.com/english-language-rare-er-sound
In Finnish it isn’t a “litar”, it’s a “litra”, because the r is clearly before the vowel. In Swedish it’s “liter”, and the vowel clearly comes before the r (the pronunciation being different from the English). But in English, especially American English, you guys use the “er” sound and it’s basically a conflation of those two. It’s a very rare sound when compared to all languages, but seeing as English is the lingua franca and a lot of it is in American English…
tldr my point is you’re being quite ethnocentric, unconsciously most likely, as I assume you don’t speak other languages.
What’s so fascinating to me is that, while the “er” vowel sound is super rare in languages as a whole, it happens to be in the two most widely spoken languages, English and Mandarin.
No it’s conscious.
I probably should have said something about it being true with the languages I’ve heard more often.
Things like Spanish, French, Italian… Basically things near where American English came from.
I was and am fully aware that other languages will possibly sound different. The way I said it did sound ignorant though. And with the previous reply, I was assuming they were coming from a European POV. All of that was wrong.
Anyway, add in the “in languages I’ve heard/am familiar with” to that.
I’m aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically. I’ve got it open in a tab waiting for my next free moment. I’ve spent this one replying.
But you were right to call me out about the order of sounds part. I was assuming a bit. I’m not used to phrasing comments for international audiences 😅. Usually I’m talking to people that would share my perspective and familiarities. In my area I didn’t run into a lot of people that haven’t been from around here. I should get better about this, but changing my own perspective is a challenge. I’m trying.
You’re proudly being ethnocentric?
Uh, I don’t know many people who boast about being biased, but okay.
What? It’s specifically a concept in linguistics.
It means that while there are rules to language, there’s no one correct ruleset, especially when talking in an international frame. Which would be prescriptive language. Lots of European nations have institutions that prescribe rules for the language, but the rules live constantly as well, and the institutions are all made up of academic linguists who understand linguistic description, meaning it matters more how people use the language and not how it’s “supposed” to be used. Although they’re probably the type of people who are rather pedantic about language.
I’d like to remind you the nationalist movement is rather fresh, historically, and unified nation-states was pretty much a thing for the last century. But go back a few centuries and there’s not a specific single Italian (hell there’s debate whether one exists today) French, English, Spanish, Nordic languages, Slavic languages, etc etc. They’re all just dialects of their neighbouring ones essentially, except for the Finno-Ugric languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian.
You’re very biased because North-America is a whole continent and the difference in the style of speech in English in the entire continent is less varied than the language spoken in the area 150 miles around me.
New to the internet, are we? Welcome, welcome.
I just admitted I did that, appreciated you calling me on it, then write a paragraph explaining I’m working on changing it, and I still get accused of boasting about it?
As for the descriptive vs prescriptive part, I’ve heard of it only as it came up in discussions of another concept (philosophy and religion. They were talking about using one type versus the other as it related to their point, but I didn’t know exactly what they meant, because that wasn’t what was being discussed directly). So yes, I’ve heard of it, but no, I wasn’t really aware of the meaning of it because the concept at hand wasn’t linguistics. Sorry, that wasn’t clear. All I was trying to say was that I’ve heard of the concept, but hadn’t learned what it was about yet. That was probably a poor choice of words.
Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn’t (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word. Yes, that falls under prescriptive here. This doesn’t exactly apply to languages that don’t use an alphabet.
You can throw that opinion straight in the trash if you want. But until I find good reasons to think otherwise, that’s just a statement of the ideal way to spell, if we were still forming the language.