6 ms·

Typos, tricks and misprints

84 points by erehweb 5y ago

pxc 5y ago
I really like languages whose phoneticism is reinforced through series of orthogtaphic reforms, because it gives them an aspect of regularity and predictability that is rare in non-written aspects of natural languages, since natural languages are fundamentally social and evolve over time. But I also love the etymological richness of languages like English where little or no attempt is made to truncate the visible histories of loan words by normalizing their spellings (or pronunciation or grammar, for that matter— in English, spellings and pronunciations of words that are identical or similar to their original, foreign ones usually remain acceptable even as more Anglicized forms naturally develop alongside them). There's something magical about how rich the English language is with historical traces, even to foreign lands and tongues. If you're attentive to spelling, English's orthographic conservatism also exposes the relationships between words to you in a way that spelling reforms can obscure. It lets us recycle words, too, so that words of ultimately identical roots (and sometimes grammatical role, too) come to bear different shades of meaning and connotation that reflect their histories. For better and for worse, words get to have a kind of 'path dependence' in English in this way.
bradrn 5y ago
EDIT: Looks like the title’s been changed — it was previously ‘Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?’. Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500 years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation. Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me elaborate: • English spelling was ‘standardised’ (for lack of a better word) roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ used to be the same sounds as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩, just pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩. The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving silent ⟨gh⟩s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like ‘bottle’ should really be spelt like ⟨bottoo⟩. Even worse, some sound changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic change from /ɒ/ to /ʌ/ in some words, which is why ⟨won⟩ and ⟨dot⟩ have different vowels. • At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to make them more similar to ‘related’ words — even when, on closer examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus ⟨iland⟩ → ⟨island⟩ (by analogy with ⟨isle⟩); ⟨dout⟩ → ⟨doubt⟩ (by analogy with Latin ⟨dubitare⟩). • Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it’s passed through another language on its way: e.g. ⟨rhino⟩ and ⟨archaeology⟩. (Ancient Greek distinguished ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨rh⟩ from ⟨c⟩ and ⟨r⟩; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed the former as digraphs.) • For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so far has been Websters’; American English adopted it partially, while British English did not, which of course just added to the confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is standardised and updated by the Real Academia Española. Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name ‘Tashi’ is spelled བཀྲ་ཤིས་, in Roman letters ⟨bkra-shisl⟩, which is indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic systems, English is probably the worst. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
LatteLazy 5y ago
English has never been standardised because England didn't suffered an invasion (post 1066) or had a strong central authority the way other countries have had. English isn't a "real" language. English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. And the grammar got massively simplified. Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows so they use the French word. Over time we have added some Latin and Greek and basically any other language we could "borrow without asking" from. The result is that every rule is at best a guideline. That the same sound is spelt differently in different words. And that different sounds and spelt the same in other words. I'm a native English speaker and it must be a nightmare for anyone learning it. I speak ok German but I can spell most words in German effortlessly because German spelling makes sense. Because it was nice ver such a mess and it's regularly standardised.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. … Over time we have added some Latin and Greek Aren’t you leaving out the much earlier Roman conquest? And didn't Latin already have a big influence on the Germanic languages even before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Great Britain?
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    The Romans left before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so when they replaced the existing peoples the latin influence mostly disappeared. I don't think they ever made it far enough into North Germany to influence them before they left but I don't know. It would be interesting to see how many romans lived for how long in England, Northern Germany and (say) France (as a reference). I wonder if you can see a correlation between that number and the amount of Latin retained? Latin had a pretty big influence all over the place so I don't want to talk it down. We can add it to the mix, but then you have even more volcab and grammar mixed up in an even bigger mess that still never got standardised. And that's sort of my point here. Other nations have 1 language. England has 2 (plus latin if you like?) mashed together badly and never cleaned up.
whall6 5y ago
I’ve always been curious about how delineating “queens English” affected other dialects of English
paozac 5y ago
With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem. I think names are always going to be a source of orthographic irregularity. Even if English were an orthographically perfect language—which of course it isn't—it would still have to be able to deal with people whose names derive from any other language.
- goodells 5y ago
  I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking with one of the Chinese international students in college. He pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion came from, even with the -ing suffix.
- lionsdan 5y ago
  I've known multiple people with the last name spelled Koch. One pronounced it "Coke", one "Cook", one "Cock", and one "Cahch".
  - stevekemp 5y ago
    Dialects and accents really make this kind of difference very pronounced. In Edinburgh, Scotland, there is "Cockburn Street". Which is pronounced co-burn. Other good examples trip up tourists, such as Buccleuch Street which is pronounced "Buck-Loo".
    - 5y ago
fortyseven 5y ago
The "blogger from 1990" huh?
4t3gar 5y ago
This article is interesting and all but I think it is missing some COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID
gumby 5y ago
A lot of the complaint about English spelling comes from a theory that the written form must be phonetic. This is reflected by the mistake of teaching American kids "phonics": giving them a bunch of post facto rules and then immediately telling them that there are innumerable exceptions to said rules. As the article points out, a lot of the spelling reflects meaning (etymology) which is more useful when reading than the sound (unless, I suppose, you're reading out loud). The loose phonetic linkage is handy, but you end up simply learning a bunch of words, which is no different from learning Hanzi.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  I would refine your statement about phonics as the mistake is HOW we teach phonics, not that we use phonics in itself. Phonics at it root is about decomposing a written word into its sub-units, and then applying rules to build back up to the whole word sound. The alternative to phonics (as unreliable as it is) is basically rote memorization (granted that English requires significant rote memorization anyways). Here's an article (it was previously on HN I think) that talks about the whole word vs phonics "debate" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... I found it really interesting.
- canjobear 5y ago
  It's true that the phonetic linkage in English is loose, but it still requires massively less memorization than Hanzi.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Definitely! But also, apart from tiny nouns (cat, dog) when I was learning words as a kid (not just reading, but speaking) I was often told what its pieces were (not just obvious ones like "skyscraper", but "entrance? We enter through it."). Any other way just seems hard.
icegreentea2 5y ago
The article argues that English spelling inconsistencies were heavily driven by the printing press appearing in a period of overall spelling turmoil in English, due to the displacement of written English from ~1066 to 1300s. As (basically) a native english speaker, does anyone know of how this works analogously in other European languages? How consistent was French or German spelling around 1450?
- canjobear 5y ago
  The article's argument doesn't seem right. French and German had comparable spelling consistency within dialects before printing, although they had much more divergent dialects than English. The difference between them and English is that English went through a massive series of sound changes after the orthography was set, whereas German didn't. French did, but the sound changes were mostly deletions, leaving a relatively regular spelling.

84 points by erehweb 5y ago

pxc 5y ago

I really like languages whose phoneticism is reinforced through series of orthogtaphic reforms, because it gives them an aspect of regularity and predictability that is rare in non-written aspects of natural languages, since natural languages are fundamentally social and evolve over time. But I also love the etymological richness of languages like English where little or no attempt is made to truncate the visible histories of loan words by normalizing their spellings (or pronunciation or grammar, for that matter— in English, spellings and pronunciations of words that are identical or similar to their original, foreign ones usually remain acceptable even as more Anglicized forms naturally develop alongside them). There's something magical about how rich the English language is with historical traces, even to foreign lands and tongues. If you're attentive to spelling, English's orthographic conservatism also exposes the relationships between words to you in a way that spelling reforms can obscure. It lets us recycle words, too, so that words of ultimately identical roots (and sometimes grammatical role, too) come to bear different shades of meaning and connotation that reflect their histories. For better and for worse, words get to have a kind of 'path dependence' in English in this way.

bradrn 5y ago

EDIT: Looks like the title’s been changed — it was previously ‘Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?’. Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500 years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation. Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me elaborate: • English spelling was ‘standardised’ (for lack of a better word) roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ used to be the same sounds as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩, just pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩. The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving silent ⟨gh⟩s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like ‘bottle’ should really be spelt like ⟨bottoo⟩. Even worse, some sound changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic change from /ɒ/ to /ʌ/ in some words, which is why ⟨won⟩ and ⟨dot⟩ have different vowels. • At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to make them more similar to ‘related’ words — even when, on closer examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus ⟨iland⟩ → ⟨island⟩ (by analogy with ⟨isle⟩); ⟨dout⟩ → ⟨doubt⟩ (by analogy with Latin ⟨dubitare⟩). • Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it’s passed through another language on its way: e.g. ⟨rhino⟩ and ⟨archaeology⟩. (Ancient Greek distinguished ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨rh⟩ from ⟨c⟩ and ⟨r⟩; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed the former as digraphs.) • For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so far has been Websters’; American English adopted it partially, while British English did not, which of course just added to the confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is standardised and updated by the Real Academia Española. Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name ‘Tashi’ is spelled བཀྲ་ཤིས་, in Roman letters ⟨bkra-shisl⟩, which is indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic systems, English is probably the worst. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

LatteLazy 5y ago

English has never been standardised because England didn't suffered an invasion (post 1066) or had a strong central authority the way other countries have had. English isn't a "real" language. English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. And the grammar got massively simplified. Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows so they use the French word. Over time we have added some Latin and Greek and basically any other language we could "borrow without asking" from. The result is that every rule is at best a guideline. That the same sound is spelt differently in different words. And that different sounds and spelt the same in other words. I'm a native English speaker and it must be a nightmare for anyone learning it. I speak ok German but I can spell most words in German effortlessly because German spelling makes sense. Because it was nice ver such a mess and it's regularly standardised.

tshaddox 5y ago
> English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. … Over time we have added some Latin and Greek Aren’t you leaving out the much earlier Roman conquest? And didn't Latin already have a big influence on the Germanic languages even before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Great Britain?
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  The Romans left before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so when they replaced the existing peoples the latin influence mostly disappeared. I don't think they ever made it far enough into North Germany to influence them before they left but I don't know. It would be interesting to see how many romans lived for how long in England, Northern Germany and (say) France (as a reference). I wonder if you can see a correlation between that number and the amount of Latin retained? Latin had a pretty big influence all over the place so I don't want to talk it down. We can add it to the mix, but then you have even more volcab and grammar mixed up in an even bigger mess that still never got standardised. And that's sort of my point here. Other nations have 1 language. England has 2 (plus latin if you like?) mashed together badly and never cleaned up.

whall6 5y ago

I’ve always been curious about how delineating “queens English” affected other dialects of English

paozac 5y ago

With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

JadeNB 5y ago
> With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem. I think names are always going to be a source of orthographic irregularity. Even if English were an orthographically perfect language—which of course it isn't—it would still have to be able to deal with people whose names derive from any other language.
goodells 5y ago
I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking with one of the Chinese international students in college. He pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion came from, even with the -ing suffix.
lionsdan 5y ago
I've known multiple people with the last name spelled Koch. One pronounced it "Coke", one "Cook", one "Cock", and one "Cahch".
- stevekemp 5y ago
  Dialects and accents really make this kind of difference very pronounced. In Edinburgh, Scotland, there is "Cockburn Street". Which is pronounced co-burn. Other good examples trip up tourists, such as Buccleuch Street which is pronounced "Buck-Loo".
  - 5y ago

fortyseven 5y ago

The "blogger from 1990" huh?

4t3gar 5y ago

This article is interesting and all but I think it is missing some COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID

gumby 5y ago

A lot of the complaint about English spelling comes from a theory that the written form must be phonetic. This is reflected by the mistake of teaching American kids "phonics": giving them a bunch of post facto rules and then immediately telling them that there are innumerable exceptions to said rules. As the article points out, a lot of the spelling reflects meaning (etymology) which is more useful when reading than the sound (unless, I suppose, you're reading out loud). The loose phonetic linkage is handy, but you end up simply learning a bunch of words, which is no different from learning Hanzi.

icegreentea2 5y ago
I would refine your statement about phonics as the mistake is HOW we teach phonics, not that we use phonics in itself. Phonics at it root is about decomposing a written word into its sub-units, and then applying rules to build back up to the whole word sound. The alternative to phonics (as unreliable as it is) is basically rote memorization (granted that English requires significant rote memorization anyways). Here's an article (it was previously on HN I think) that talks about the whole word vs phonics "debate" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... I found it really interesting.
canjobear 5y ago
It's true that the phonetic linkage in English is loose, but it still requires massively less memorization than Hanzi.
- gumby 5y ago
  Definitely! But also, apart from tiny nouns (cat, dog) when I was learning words as a kid (not just reading, but speaking) I was often told what its pieces were (not just obvious ones like "skyscraper", but "entrance? We enter through it."). Any other way just seems hard.

icegreentea2 5y ago

The article argues that English spelling inconsistencies were heavily driven by the printing press appearing in a period of overall spelling turmoil in English, due to the displacement of written English from ~1066 to 1300s. As (basically) a native english speaker, does anyone know of how this works analogously in other European languages? How consistent was French or German spelling around 1450?

canjobear 5y ago
The article's argument doesn't seem right. French and German had comparable spelling consistency within dialects before printing, although they had much more divergent dialects than English. The difference between them and English is that English went through a massive series of sound changes after the orthography was set, whereas German didn't. French did, but the sound changes were mostly deletions, leaving a relatively regular spelling.