Quote:
Originally Posted by grindy
Can you tell me more? I love those little weird linguistic details.
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Sure, the Dutch vowel system is kind of fun. The main idea is that Dutch spelling unambiguously distinguishes the long vowels (like the long o in phone) from the short ones (like the o in clock). It does this in 3 ways:
1.whether a vowel is pronounced long or short depends on its position in a syllable. Roughly speaking it's only long if it's at the end of a syllable, like both o's in foto.
2. When a vowel which is not at the end of a syllable needs to be long it is doubled: like the long o in boot, which is pronounced 'bote'
3. When words are plural and you just add an s, like fotos, the last vowel would become short bc of rule 1. Instead of doing the logical thing and writing it like fotoos some Dutch person decided that this would be solved by adding an apostrophe to indicate that the second o is long: foto's
Here ends my mini dissertation. Languages are so much fun