513
TIL about 1 million liters of urine is spilled onto the bathroom floor every day in the U.S.
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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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.
I mean you acknowledged consciously doing that. If you're working on it, then you take into account perspectives other than your own.
Hearing that from an English speaker while my native is Finnish is quite amusing.
https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/
A few opening verses to demonstrate:
Etc.
If you look at the international phonetic alphabet, take an English word, like "geography". And it looks like this: dʒiˈɒɡɹəfi.
Contrast that to Finnish ones. Horse , hevonen: ˈheʋonen, peasoup, hernekeitto: ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo.
You can't even tell me an objectively correct way to pronounce "read", because depending on the context I'm thinking of, you might say the wrong one. There's none of that in Finnish, we have like one "phone" (as in specific sound that's "pronunciated", äng-äänne, velar nasal iirc might be mistaken too lazy to check).
See if you took 10 English people, or American English people, whatever, English speakers. Gave them a list of fantasy names no-ones ever heard of, they'd try applying rules to familiar feeling bits, like if the name sounds Latin or French or Spanish, but it'd be subjective and very much guesswork. So you'd get 10 English speakers saying all the males differently, but prolly some would go as the writer intended, seeing how writers often use real life inspiration so we rely on how we know people might pronounce them.
Put 10 Finns there, you'll get exactly the same from everyone. Theyre probably all horribly wrong per the writers intention, but each will say the same thing.
But, that's just the book language, the official version of Finnish. We only got written Finnish 500 years back. Dialects are much older. Growing up I had troubles understanding a lot of the vocabulary my grannies used. And then I grew up a bit more realised lots of it is etymologically from a few hundreds years back from the Swedish influences. Though she's doesn't speak a lick of Swedish. Or didn't, rather. (RIP).
But genuinely within 150 miles of me there's more variance in language than in the English in the whole of North America. It's hard for Americans to understand how stubbornly communities can isolate themselves with language that "those people" don't know. Which is why the UK has so many more accents than the US. It's just time. Finnish tribes are still clearly visible mostly as counties, largely like in Italian. Although Finnish dialects I presume are closer together to each other than Italian ones, there's quite a bit of difference going from the extreme south to the extreme north. Or just driving a few hours east.
Tldr the longer point I'm making is that I get the center centre confusion, because English utilises the er-sound. But most languages don't, so... It's subjective. Finnish people probably say litra "liter-uh" sort of, because French and Swedes would've been saying sit so it ends in R, but ours don't, so we added an a. And the French wrote it litre, so we went with "litra", especially since "littera" was already taken.
Grammar ruled for French though, those I'm not gonna start explaining. Gonna run out of char limit.
I may be a bit straightforward, I mean to jestingly poke, not actually offend. My apologies if offense was caused.
Oh I'm sure me saying that is interesting from your POV. But I'm agreeing with your point, English does it totally wrong for sure.
And if the -er sound is as rare as you say, then I guess the pronunciation is just implied.
I don't know exactly why (nor do I care enough to dig into the history of this detail) American English went with "lee-tur" or more casually, "lee-dur"(almost exactly like the word "leader", but if they had home with spelling it correctly, than it would've been pronounced differently.
So it was one thing or the other was gonna be different, simply because we actually do have that sound that makes the spelling look wrong to us.
I think I did get a little offended by the jest, but not consciously or intentionally.
I have learned about the relative rarity of the -er sound in most places. It's very common in this language, so that's surprising to me.