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Grammar pedants - help please.

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Cerrertonia Oct 2024 10:49am, 18 Oct 2024 22,118 posts	0 Cerrertonia larkim wrote:how the accepted pronunciation of Latin letters is ignored sometimes when the native language is written down. English 'th' is of course a good example of this - used to represent two clearly different sounds (eg in thin and then) neither of which is anything like the Latin t or h.
LindsD Oct 2024 11:24am, 18 Oct 2024 70,433 posts	0 LindsD In terms of transliteration, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between sounds in languages which leads to variation: see different spellings of Muhammad. E.g. the 'o' in Moscow is somewhere between an o and an a.
Cerrertonia Oct 2024 11:30am, 18 Oct 2024 22,121 posts	0 Cerrertonia Yes and that's particularly an issue for Chinese. The Chinese consonants now represented by q and x don't have an equivalent in English and the letters d and t represent two different sounds that would both be considered as a t in English.
Oranj Dec 2024 1:13pm, 19 Dec 2024 4,388 posts	0 Oranj
LindsD Dec 2024 1:37pm, 19 Dec 2024 71,681 posts	0 LindsD
JamieKai chameleon Dec 2024 2:05pm, 19 Dec 2024 19,813 posts	0 JamieKai chameleon (When I was very young and read a cartoon adaptation of ACC, I totally misunderstood the ghost of Christmas Presents...
sallykate Dec 2024 2:05pm, 19 Dec 2024 15,918 posts	0 sallykate
Rosehip Dec 2024 3:54pm, 19 Dec 2024 33,949 posts	0 Rosehip
JamieKai chameleon Dec 2024 9:20am, 23 Dec 2024 19,839 posts	0 JamieKai chameleon The turmoil at PinkNews, which is one of the increasingly few profitable digital media outlets The above is from the Guardian website today - the use of "increasingly few" really jars for me - surely that's incorrect? I know what they're trying to say, but there must be a better or more proper way of expressing it.
Northern Exile Dec 2024 9:28am, 23 Dec 2024 10,708 posts	0 Northern Exile Mmm, yes. I'd say that "the diminishing number of ~" sounds better, "increasingly few" is a gnat's knacker shy of an oxymoron.