Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Bizarro, on geese around the world:

A little play on spelling conventions: the default spelling for the phoneme /v/ of English and French is V, but the spelling for the phoneme /v/ of German is W. So Canadian geese — note that this is a type name; Canada geese (sometimes called Canadian geese) are by no means limited to Canada, and other goose species, for example the snow goose, are found in Canada — will fly in a V formation, while German geese (this is not a type name) will fly in a double V formation, making a W. But only if the German geese know how to spell in German.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2012 at 6:33 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Spelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.