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The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you

The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say. I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com http://www.cutspel.com

Scarblac 11y ago
"There exists today a universal language that is spoken and understood almost everywhere: it is Broken English." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html
- pessimizer 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29
thinkpad20 11y ago
I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). English also lacks a gender system which might make it easier than some European languages. That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".
- danieltillett 11y ago
  The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.
  - bonoboTP 11y ago
    This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple. I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English. So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.
    - douche 11y ago
      If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.
  - xxpor 11y ago
    To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation. The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > I wonder if that's unique to English though. At least in the German language I'm not aware of a similar phenomenon (at least in this manifestation). The German grammar is rather complicated (which restrains, in my opinion unjustifiably, many people from learning German). This has in my opinion the "advantage" that it is "rather complicated" to speak or write something in German completely incorrect without at least being very unsure whether it is really correct. In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    >In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker. This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the language - while we expect everyone to speak English, we don’t expect you will speak it without mistakes.
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      I have a different opinion on this topic, but this is the same discussion as strongly vs. weakly typed programming languages (I'm obviously on the side of strongly typed ones).
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        I will guess you are native German speaker :P English is far from perfect and is not well suited to things where precision is required - laws, for example, probably should not be written in English - that is unless your aim is to provide lifetime employment to lawyers.
maemilius 11y ago
After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself. For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me. I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey... All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel. The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)
  - vacri 11y ago
    The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e' is lost? On a first reading, this new regime sounds like it's just as full of "you-just-have-to-knows" as the thing it's trying to solve - and it makes the context of the word even more important to figuring out what it means. For example, "eye" by itself is totally unambiguous. "y", suggested on the site, is the name of a letter (and the pronunciation of that is "why", not "aye"), and "ey" is yet another word with yet another pronunciation (contraction of "hey"). Nothing is gained from shortening "eye", and something is lost. I just don't see Cutspel actually solving more problems than it creates. Finally, why is it "cutspel" instead of "cutspl"? The stress is on 'cut', so 'spell' doesn't need that unstressed E before the L, according to rule 2...
jan_g 11y ago
With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say. Exactly this and in addition it's also relatively easy to understand other people speaking English. This is really a key strength of English language, i.e. low barrier to entry. On the other hand, consider Danish language: similar grammar to English, also many almost same words, but one needs lots and lots of learning/practice to be able to speak to and understand other Danish speakers.
- titanomachy 11y ago
  I wonder though, is this a feature of the language itself or the fact that we are so used to hearing broken English? Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to communicate in English with non-native speakers, and I've gotten pretty good at it. Even if your accent is terrible you can probably still communicate with me. Contrast with Greek, for example: the vast majority of its speakers are native, and the Greeks have a hard time understanding non-native speakers despite the language's clear and consistent phonology. Danish has rather complex and tortured phonology (to my ears), so I'm sure that's part of the problem; but English is pretty weird too.
Spooky23 11y ago
I was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan. It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.
  - stordoff 11y ago
    I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker. Couple of examples: - The informal form of 'you' persists to some extent in parts of Yorkshire - "Where are you going?" often becomes "Where's tha goin'?" - There is slang that I rarely hear outside of my immediate family (though I suspect it's more common than I realise) - "seef" for example (from "see if"), "I was seeing if it was in the car" is almost always "I was seefing it was in the car"
    - prewett 11y ago
      I think it is because non-native speakers all learn the same basic 1000 words (initially) and same most-frequently-used grammatical patterns. Native speakers know thousands more words and all the colloquial phrases. I can understand foreigners (Americans, anyway) speaking Chinese pretty easily, because we all know the same (limited) vocabulary and grammar. I have real trouble with native speakers because they use all the short forms of the words and the grammar patterns that you don't learn initially.
  - _delirium 11y ago
yongjik 11y ago
English about very basic knowledge exist then I say want word convey way exist word is? Nah, I don't really believe it. * The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?" I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.
tim333 11y ago
Just trying cutspel - that's quite a cool idea.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Thanks :)

Scarblac 11y ago

"There exists today a universal language that is spoken and understood almost everywhere: it is Broken English." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html

pessimizer 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29

thinkpad20 11y ago

I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). English also lacks a gender system which might make it easier than some European languages. That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".

danieltillett 11y ago
The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.
- bonoboTP 11y ago
  This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple. I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English. So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.
  - douche 11y ago
    If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.
- xxpor 11y ago
  To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation. The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.
wolfgke 11y ago
> I wonder if that's unique to English though. At least in the German language I'm not aware of a similar phenomenon (at least in this manifestation). The German grammar is rather complicated (which restrains, in my opinion unjustifiably, many people from learning German). This has in my opinion the "advantage" that it is "rather complicated" to speak or write something in German completely incorrect without at least being very unsure whether it is really correct. In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  >In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker. This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the language - while we expect everyone to speak English, we don’t expect you will speak it without mistakes.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    I have a different opinion on this topic, but this is the same discussion as strongly vs. weakly typed programming languages (I'm obviously on the side of strongly typed ones).
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      I will guess you are native German speaker :P English is far from perfect and is not well suited to things where precision is required - laws, for example, probably should not be written in English - that is unless your aim is to provide lifetime employment to lawyers.

maemilius 11y ago

After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself. For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me. I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey... All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.

danieltillett 11y ago
You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel. The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)
- vacri 11y ago
  The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e' is lost? On a first reading, this new regime sounds like it's just as full of "you-just-have-to-knows" as the thing it's trying to solve - and it makes the context of the word even more important to figuring out what it means. For example, "eye" by itself is totally unambiguous. "y", suggested on the site, is the name of a letter (and the pronunciation of that is "why", not "aye"), and "ey" is yet another word with yet another pronunciation (contraction of "hey"). Nothing is gained from shortening "eye", and something is lost. I just don't see Cutspel actually solving more problems than it creates. Finally, why is it "cutspel" instead of "cutspl"? The stress is on 'cut', so 'spell' doesn't need that unstressed E before the L, according to rule 2...

jan_g 11y ago

With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say. Exactly this and in addition it's also relatively easy to understand other people speaking English. This is really a key strength of English language, i.e. low barrier to entry. On the other hand, consider Danish language: similar grammar to English, also many almost same words, but one needs lots and lots of learning/practice to be able to speak to and understand other Danish speakers.

titanomachy 11y ago
I wonder though, is this a feature of the language itself or the fact that we are so used to hearing broken English? Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to communicate in English with non-native speakers, and I've gotten pretty good at it. Even if your accent is terrible you can probably still communicate with me. Contrast with Greek, for example: the vast majority of its speakers are native, and the Greeks have a hard time understanding non-native speakers despite the language's clear and consistent phonology. Danish has rather complex and tortured phonology (to my ears), so I'm sure that's part of the problem; but English is pretty weird too.

Spooky23 11y ago

I was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan. It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.

danieltillett 11y ago
Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.
- stordoff 11y ago
  I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker. Couple of examples: - The informal form of 'you' persists to some extent in parts of Yorkshire - "Where are you going?" often becomes "Where's tha goin'?" - There is slang that I rarely hear outside of my immediate family (though I suspect it's more common than I realise) - "seef" for example (from "see if"), "I was seeing if it was in the car" is almost always "I was seefing it was in the car"
  - prewett 11y ago
    I think it is because non-native speakers all learn the same basic 1000 words (initially) and same most-frequently-used grammatical patterns. Native speakers know thousands more words and all the colloquial phrases. I can understand foreigners (Americans, anyway) speaking Chinese pretty easily, because we all know the same (limited) vocabulary and grammar. I have real trouble with native speakers because they use all the short forms of the words and the grammar patterns that you don't learn initially.
- _delirium 11y ago

yongjik 11y ago

English about very basic knowledge exist then I say want word convey way exist word is? Nah, I don't really believe it. * The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?" I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.

tim333 11y ago

Just trying cutspel - that's quite a cool idea.

danieltillett 11y ago
Thanks :)