Posted on 07/28/2012 6:59:40 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Actor Geoffrey Hughes, famous for his roles in Coronation Street and Keeping Up Appearances, has died aged 68.
Hughes, who was known to millions for playing binman Eddie Yates in the soap during the 1970s and 1980s, died on Friday night after a two year battle with prostate cancer. …
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Well said..I love that show...now two are gone...darn.
Our Rose’’ I”m off men, he’s left me for another woman!’’ Daisy, “He has?’’ Our Rose, “Yeah, he’s gone back with his wife, the swine!’’. :-)
RIP.
Mostly 17th and 18th century pedants trying to get the spelling of the English words to be closer to their French, Latin (mostly) and Greek sources.
Like doing so was really important!
My personal favorite is spelling thru as through. Three utterly redundant letters.
That said, making English spelling phonetic is itself a pathway lined with pitfalls, most notably whose phonetics. Pronunciation varies dramatically across the English-speaking world and also changes with time. There are numerous clues in Shakespeare that words were pronounced quite differently then.
Also when Chaucer wrote there WAS no "correct" spelling, as spelling was not stabilized for another couple of centuries. Many people didn't even spell their own names with any consistency.
Well, my copy of the Canterbury Tales has a pronunciation guide that indicates fixed pronunciation of vowels for the Middle English writing (London dialect) that Chaucer used. “Y” was always pronounced as our present-day “long E”, for example, and there were no silent letters whether vowel or consonant; the now-silent digraphs such as “gh” had a guttural pronunciation.
No doubt.
However, I’ll bet you anything you like that Chaucer didn’t write your pronunciation guide. :)
I’m also willing to place a large wager that in original Chaucer manuscripts spelling of the same word is not uniform throughout. Which was my point. At the time there was no such thing as the “right” spelling because spelling had not yet been standardized.
Lots of the silent letters and silent e’s came along as a result of the Great English Vowel Shift, which took place during the same period when the spelling of words was being stabililzed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
What caption are you seeing that has a "r" in prostate?
They've corrected the caption under the photo since I posted my comment yesterday. I had triple-checked it to make sure I was seeing it right before I posted. They originally had prostrate, but have now changed it to prostate.
How clever of you to notice. :)
I specifically noticed because I have a friend who always says prostrate instead of prostate. I’ve never mentioned it to her though.
Well, maybe they were trying to say
“He died, prostrate, of cancer.”
You're telling me, I still haven't gotten over losing Benny Hill.
<was the voice of Paul McCartney in the Beatles film The Yellow Submarine.”
What! The Beatles didn’t do their own voices? What next, no Santa Claus?
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