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Tangential, but I recently realized that spelling bees wouldn’t make sense in a lot of other languages, because English reading is exceptionally irregular. I wo
by emsy 7y ago
Tangential, but I recently realized that spelling bees wouldn’t make sense in a lot of other languages, because English reading is exceptionally irregular. I wonder if there have been attempts to reform the language.
- michrassena 7y agoApparently more than a few attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
- jakear 7y agoBenjamin Franklin did! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin%27s_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin%27s_phonetic...
- astura 7y agoNoah Webster had some modest success, but only in the US, which is where many of the unique American English spellings come from - color, center, plow, etc. Some of his proposals never caught on though. I think I remember tung (instead of tongue) being one of the rejected ones.
- Jagat 7y agoWow, I've always assumed that the difference between American and British spelling is because of a natural divergence as a result of being far away for such a long time.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoNo, it was a deliberate effort to create a schism.
- oneplane 7y agoIt was also cheaper on the printing press. Less typesetting required.
- Amezarak 7y agoColor is not uniquely American. It was used in England since before America’s discovery and is, in fact, more etymologically correct - it comes from the Latin word “color”. :) The more French-influenced colour was more common in England, and obviously eventually did totally win out. There are generally very similar stories for most “American” spellings.
- wirrbel 7y agoIirc it's "Couleur" in french.
- Amezarak 7y agoIt is now, maybe, but not when the borrowing took place.
- toyg 7y agoColore in Italian. Adding random "u"s to Latin words is a very French thing.
- Anarch157a 7y agoPortuguese abbreviated it to "cor", but we keep the longer version on the verb "colorir" (to color).
- AstralStorm 7y agoAnd in Polish we have both the Latin import "kolor" (Phonetic k in place of c) and Slavic variant "barwa". (Sounded with v English sound as w per phonetic Latin and forward trill r) Polish is weird like that.
- astura 7y agoNoah Webster was (among other things) a spelling reformer, he didn't "invent" all of his spellings but he researched and deliberately chose them based on his ideas about language and politics and advocated for their use. It was a deliberate effort, not something that just happened.
- k_sze 7y ago
- billfruit 7y agoI wonder as an non-American, if books printed in the US, like Shakespeare or the King James Bible or Dickens novels use British spelling or American spelling.
- freeone3000 7y agoMy copy of the king james bible uses the American spelling with the original words and phrasings, quite amazingly.
- wyclif 7y agoThat's irregular, though, and obviously a "corrected" text for the American market, right? What does the copyright/publisher info say? The KJB is notably copyright-free, so US publishers were free to modify it.
- booleandilemma 7y agoThe Harry Potter books I read as a kid used American spelling.
- jfk13 7y agoYes, there was a separate American edition. (Even the title of the first volume was changed: the original "philosopher's stone" became "sorcerer's stone" for the US market.)
- toyg 7y agoSometimes I wonder if the editing world is arbitrarily building barriers in order to justify its continuous existence.
- dragonwriter 7y agoIn the case of HP1, the title difference was based on the perception that the alchemical reference in the original title would be less evocative in the American youth market and “sorceror’s stone” would convey the intended idea better to that audience due to cultural difference. I don't know if test marketing or focus groups were involved in that judgement, but I wouldn't be surprised.
- baby 7y agoIf you find English reading irregular, wait until you try to learn French.
- Aardwolf 7y agoIn French most vowel and other letter combinations are pronounced in a consistent way, unlike English, so do you have examples?
- yoran 7y agoI'm a native French speaker and French spelling is very irregular. There are tons of unspoken letters and the accents make it even more complex, especially the "accent circonflexe" (^) which is usually silent. Some examples: - temps (time): the "p" and "s" are completely silent - oignon (onion): pronounced as "ognon" (the "i" is silent) - asseoir (sit down): pronounced as "assoir" (the "e" is silent) - poids (weight): the "d" and "s" are silent. "poi" (pea) is also a word. - most words ending on "ou" take an "s" in plural, e.g. "verrou" becomes "verrous", except for certain words like "hibou", which becomes "hiboux" in plural. - the noun "dépôt" takes the "^" accent, yet its derived verb "déposer" does not.
- CydeWeys 7y ago> - oignon (onion): pronounced as "ognon" (the "i" is silent) Heh, as is the "g" as well. The best way to explain the pronunciation to English speakers is "say onion but with a French accent". The "g" is the most confusing part of the spelling to native English speakers as a "g" is never silent in English.
- baby 7y agoWell I guess this is anecdotal evidende. I speak both fluently and find French way more irregular. I've never heard someone saying that French is consistent. You're perhaps thinking of spanish? People usually talk about German when they think of consistency.
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- mr_crankypants 7y agoI think the most interesting attempt was the Shavian alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet They all have their shortcomings, of course. Possibly the most universal one is that none of the ones that I'm aware of seen do a good job of capturing the word stress system in English pronunciation. By contrast, for all its failings, the the current orthography does encode clues that a very experienced speaker of the language can use to infer word stress with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
- stan_rogers 7y agoThe "word stress system" isn't nearly as systematic as you might imagine, at least in English taken as a whole.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoThis made me so confused as a kid growing up in a country where we can tell how a word is written based on its phonemes 99% of the time. So when I was watching dubbed cartoons from the US, they often had episodes revolving around spelling bees (e.g. I remember “Hey Arnold!” had such an episode), it made absolutely no sense when translated.
- wirrbel 7y agoSame feeling here. Except for a few french or english loanwords it doesn't make much sense because such a contest would probably revolve around random mistakes made in a stressful situation, not about being able to spell that word in principle.
- rurban 7y agoexceptionally irregular? Still the most regular and modern of all other indogermanic languages. Compare to German, which has much more exceptions or cases. Or Chinese. Or Japanese. Any of the older languages. There spelling bee competitions would be much harder.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoDutch is way more regular and rational. It is nearly perfectly phoenetic -- my 6 year old daughter finds it significantly easier to read than English, her first language.
- chki 7y agoGerman might be grammatically inconsistent but regarding spelling it's highly regular at least compared to English.
- yladiz 7y agoBesides the fact that Chinese and Japanese are not indo-European, how would you do a spelling bee for Chinese?
- Analemma_ 7y agoThe problem with trying to do serious spelling reform in English is that the language already has two major "branches", British and American, and spelling reform would pretty much have to favor one over the other. It'd probably end up being based on American English, just based on number of users and because AmE spelling tends to be closer to pronunciation (sorry Brits, but it's true. We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French, and what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh"). I can't see Commonwealth countries just lying down to accept that, and if you can't get all English users on board, then what's the point? Languages where a single country has a "majority stake in the cultural control" of a language tend to be able to pull off spelling reform (German, Chinese, etc.). Languages where this isn't the case (English, Portugese, French post-1900) find it a lot harder to gain the necessary consensus.
- stordoff 7y ago> what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh" One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to write what it sounds like: > So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw [...then...] we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech. > But not in writing. > We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French Though interestingly you've kept that with "herb" - in British English, it has a hard H (but I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -er suffix - in my experience, it's the same in both. Did you mean -re?) https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-get-its-completely-unintuitive-pronunciation https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-g... It's not exclusively a British thing though - Connecticut and Poughkeepsie come to mind.
- CydeWeys 7y agoConnecticut, Poughkeepsie, and many, many other place names in the US are not English at all; they're names/words from various indigenous American languages. It's not fair to count these "against" American English, are there are good logical reasons to just use the established place names that the locals are already using, rather than worsening things by making up your own parallel set of place names.
- duckmysick 7y agoSpelling bees as they are maybe wouldn't, but there's a concept of dictation (dictées) where students transcribe the text read by the teacher. It's used not only as a graded exercise in schools, but there are entire competitions built around it. I spoke with my colleagues about it and the dictations are popular in France and Belgium. Wikipedia mentions Canada, Poland, and Switzerland too.
- toyg 7y agoDictation is (or was) used in Italy in primary school, but it becomes trivial very quickly - because pronounciation is very, very regular in that language.
- bonzini 7y agoIndeed, in Italy kids only do dictation for two-three years.
- yoran 7y agoThere used to be a yearly televised national dictation in Holland[1], but they stopped after 2017 because not enough people were watching anymore. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Dictation_of_the_Dutch_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Dictation_of_the_Dutch_L...
- viraptor 7y agoIn Polish that concept exists only because it has letters with same sounds: h/ch, u/ó, ż/rz. It's mostly for kids at school, because after a while you just remember which letter to use in most words and the rest you guess from similarities / changing the form. I've never heard of a competition around it, and the concept is rather silly for adults. (Yes, there is (was?) an annual national dictation, but it's done for fun)
- hyperpallium 7y agoA Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
- rattray 7y agoIs this original content? It's quite good.
- EamonnMR 7y agoIt's Mark Twain
- setr 7y agoProbably a pointless thing to note, but apparently maybe not. http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html >Note 1: The authorship of this piece is in question. Although frequently posted on the internet as authored by Mark Twain, there are some claims that it is authored by M. J. Shields in a letter by him to the Economist. See http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/spelling.html http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/spelling.html. And from there.. >I did, however, come across one error: the "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling" that you attribute to Mark Twain is actually (IIRC) a few paragraphs out of a letter to The Economist, written by one M.J. Shields A couple other sites mention the same thing but I didn't bother digging any further
- erichocean 7y ago> I wonder if there have been attempts to reform the language. I hope not, the complexity and overall size is its strength. Especially the widespread and mandatory use of its embedded "idiomatic usage" subset makes it a hell of a lot more fun than something regular, like Spanish. English is great as is.