About English Names

[yetgdhfgh]

I still cant understand to the this day how the name Richard means Dick!!

Oh why did that have to come to be!!

[caervek]

So my question is why? why we don't pronounce it as "Seen" instead of Shawn? is that some kind of modern English or it's always been called this way or?

It's Irish.

[Mormolyce]

Our language is a mishmash of Germanic grammar, Latin vocabulary and names who’s origins span the globe. All languages do this somewhat, the silent vowels in Arabic are a blast, but English is a particularly bad offender.

Yeah bascially, England got gangbanged by half of Europe and the language is still covered in 14 kinds of cumstain.

I still cant understand to the this day how the name Richard means Dick!!

Oh why did that have to come to be!!

That one is the fault of rhyming slang. People in medieval England liked to substitute words with the same sound, so Rick gave birth to Dick, Meg to Peg, Rob to Bob etc.

Why did the English like doing this? That one's a fucking mystery. I guess it was fun. No Youtube back then.

[Lynarii]

One of the big things to understand is that unlike most other languages, modern English is NOT the same language as historical forms of English. What we consider to be English nowadays is a mishmash of words, rules, terminology, etc.. drawn from not only older forms of English, but just about every other language the world has ever come out with. Many of the stranger terms or spellings are from words that started somewhere else, and English tends to use a 'close enough' rule where as long as what they end with can be figured out, that's what they'll go with.

[yetgdhfgh]

That one is the fault of rhyming slang. People in medieval England liked to substitute words with the same sound, so Rick gave birth to Dick, Meg to Peg, Rob to Bob etc.

Why did the English like doing this? That one's a fucking mystery. I guess it was fun. No Youtube back then.

I think its modern times to blame where dick meant penis iam sure it didnt mean that ages ago!

Though we English is notorious for rhyming slang i mean look at cockney rhyming slang for the words we use!

[3DTyrant]

Language can be a fickle bitch. It's like minute and minute, two different words spelt the exact same, with different pronunciations and different meanings, why we have this shit in English I don't quite know.

[Deleted]

SEEN BEEN is my favorite actor.

[Tasttey]

Language can be a fickle bitch. It's like minute and minute, two different words spelt the exact same, with different pronunciations and different meanings, why we have this shit in English I don't quite know.

It could be worse, at least our inanimate objects don't have genders.

[Allatar]

our language has many confusing rules and each has many confusing exceptions
I'm convinced that the secret weapon of the British Empire was to confuse everyone with our language and quietly conquer them while they were too busy trying to understand it

'When do we attack, General?'
'How long since we sent them the dictionary and thesaurus?'
'Two weeks, sir'
'Excellent, we attack at dawn!'

[Zelk]

It's an irish name, not English at all. In Irish when an s is followed by an e or an i the s is pronounced like sh instead. So it's pronounced like Shaun instead of Saun.

[Allatar]

Language can be a fickle bitch. It's like minute and minute, two different words spelt the exact same, with different pronunciations and different meanings, why we have this shit in English I don't quite know.

Well both meanings actually derive from a common Latin ancestry pars minuta prima, roughly translated as 'the first small part' so it kind of makes some sense. The difference in pronunciation is a different matter though.

[Najnaj]

Not sure about Sean but much of the oddities in English stem from the fact that English did not have a language revision in the 1800s like many other European languages. I think all the other Germanic languages had their spelling simplified and centuries of added inconsistencies removed.

[Deleted]

I don't particularly care why it's pronounced the way it is, but why would we change it to suit you?

[Deleted]

I was in my early twenties before I realized "Sean" was pronounced "Shawn", I would read the name in books and come up with my own phonetic sound.

I also spelled "forty" as "fourty" for the longest time.

Fourty is a fine. It was the most common way to spell it for most of the history of modern English.

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Not sure about Sean but much of the oddities in English stem from the fact that English did not have a language revision in the 1800s like many other European languages. I think all the other Germanic languages had their spelling simplified and centuries of added inconsistencies removed.

We had the Oxford English dictionary which went about mandating how words a spelt with no regard to how different areas and dialects pronounced it.

Dyslexia is fun for revealing how off written English is from spoken English as dyslexics tend to spell phonetically.

I have recently been reading the original king james Bible. And I find that easier to read than modern English because it's all phonetic spelling.

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Well both meanings actually derive from a common Latin ancestry pars minuta prima, roughly translated as 'the first small part' so it kind of makes some sense. The difference in pronunciation is a different matter though.

We dropped alot of the inflection markers in the transition from middle to modern English. Stuff like umlaut's and such other languages have.

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It could be worse, at least our inanimate objects don't have genders.

Don't assume my tables gender!!!!

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Yeah bascially, England got gangbanged by half of Europe and the language is still covered in 14 kinds of cumstain.



That one is the fault of rhyming slang. People in medieval England liked to substitute words with the same sound, so Rick gave birth to Dick, Meg to Peg, Rob to Bob etc.

Why did the English like doing this? That one's a fucking mystery. I guess it was fun. No Youtube back then.

Britons - > celts - >Romans - >celts - >vikings - >saxons - >more vikings - >more Germans - > the French

Old lady britannia likes to get her leg over.

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I think its modern times to blame where dick meant penis iam sure it didnt mean that ages ago!

Though we English is notorious for rhyming slang i mean look at cockney rhyming slang for the words we use!

It has been for along time
1665 dick ment a thug or rouge - source a book called "an English rouge" by richard head ( legit the name he used haha)
Extract from the book:
The next Dick I pickt up for her was a man of a colour as contrary to the former, as light is to darkness, being swarthy; whose hair was as black as a sloe; middle statur'd, well set, both strong and active, a man so universally tryed, and so fruitfully successful, that there was hardly any female within ten miles gotten with child in hugger-mugger, but he was more than suspected to be Father of all the legitimate

An 1869 slang dictionary offered definitions of dick including "a riding whip" and an abbreviation of dictionary, also noting that in the North Country, it was used as a verb to indicate that a policeman was eyeing the subject.[3] The term came to be associated with the penis through usage by men in the military around the 1880s

[babyback]

I still cant understand to the this day how the name Richard means Dick!!

Oh why did that have to come to be!!

Because the nickname of Richard being called Dick is most likely a lot older than dick being another name for penis.

Afaik calling a penis, dick is a fairly new term when it comes to synonyms. Probably not more than 100 years old. While the name Richard dates several hundred years back.

[Deleted]

Because the nickname of Richard being called Dick is most likely a lot older than dick being another name for penis.

Afaik calling a penis, dick is a fairly new term when it comes to synonyms. Probably not more than 100 years old. While the name Richard dates several hundred years back.

1880 it was first used to mean a penis.

It been a word for and criminal type person since at least 1665

[Vanyali]

I'm not sure Irish ever had a native alphabet. Ogham was probably a cipher alphabet or constructed by missionaries.

Their pre-press alphabet (not their native one) had a great many symbols that the presses didn't use, which means we got... interesting compromises that make zero sense to an english speaker.

[AeneasBK]

Sean isn't an English name, blame the Irish for their contrary spelling of stupid shit like Siobhan.

[Theodarzna]

However, there is one English name that I have a hard time to find any logical explanation of why it's pronounced like that. The name "Sean".

In the past I usually pronounce it as "Seen" you know just following the typical English letters, but after many years I discovered that I was wrong and it should be pronounced as "Shawn" just like the famous English actor Sean Bean his name pronounced as Shawn Bean. So my question is why? why we don't pronounce it as "Seen" instead of Shawn? is that some kind of modern English or it's always been called this way or?

The issue is one of the loan words. Sean isn't an English name but has become a common name in the British Isles in general despite its Gaelic (Irish) origins. In Gaelic phonetics, it makes a great deal of sense to rean "Sean" and pronounces it "Shawn" basically. But the name Sean is used in English despite the original Gaelic context that makes it seem like a weird of funky way of spelling Shon or Shawn. Another is a name like Lloyd. Why use two Ll's to make a one L sound. That is because Lloyd is actually a Welsh name and once transplanted into English, the LL sound loses its phonetic pronunciation since English has no sound like that and it becomes pronounced like "Loy-d".

English is awash in loan words and underwent a cataclysmic set of phonetic shifts after the Norman Invasion of 1066 which saw a lot of its Anglo-Saxon flavour vanish and the influx of LEGIONS of French/latinate words into the language. Once more English was also influenced by its Celtic speaking neighbours and peoples encountered in the Empire and various later/Modern English changes that happened throughout the Anglo-Phonic world. Such as the disappearance of Rhotericisms in South-East England. America preserves some of the older English, much as Mexican Spanish preserves a lot of old Andulesian Spanish, partly because Colonies are often more linguistically conservative.

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Their pre-press alphabet (not their native one) had a great many symbols that the presses didn't use, which means we got... interesting compromises that make zero sense to an english speaker.

Irish had a native Alphabet and Ogham was it, also Ogham is older than Christianity and once more it was the writing system of the priestly caste within Old Irish society.

[I Push Buttons]

Sean isn't an English name, blame the Irish for their contrary spelling of stupid shit like Siobhan.

Leicester, Worcester, Gloucester, etc., would like a word.