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My two biggest disappointments about English: - I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic languag

• civilized 5y ago
  > - I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic language. I can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano (unless of course we get Mandarin instead). We will get Mandarin, if anything other than English, and you will beg, on your knees, weeping, to go back to English...
• p2t2p 5y ago
  In Russia people call Moscow “default city” because if people are talking on the internet about something that is related to a location they usually mean Moscow. Also people from Moscow in conversations also always assume that everyone lives in Moscow.
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    IIRC that originated on the largest Russian car-related internet bulletin board. They had a rule about posting classifieds that said "if you're selling your car, you're selling in Moscow by default, if you are not, explicitly state your locality at the very beginning and at the very end of your ad or don't complain about people from Moscow calling you".
    • klaudius 5y ago
      What is the name of that board?
  • KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Same in Poland. Warsaw is the default city.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    This is like how on certain internet forums, people talk about American conditions as if everybody is in America. Start a conversation about labor conditions and people throw around W-2 as if it's some standard thing. Or someone will give you a summary of your rights as if you are in America ("at-will states"). I remember in the early days of the internet, when you came across a postcode field, it had to be a US postcode. 90210 was the only one I knew at the time, so that got put in a lot.
• wheybags 5y ago
  Actually chuckled out loud at "stone-weights and horse-lengths" :D
  • deleted 5y ago
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• 2143 5y ago
  > can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin. If people from, say, Germany, France, Italy, China, Egypt, India, Brazil, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina get together in a room, the odds are English would be the language most of them would be familiar with, even though it's not any of their native language. Over here in India people in different states natively speak totally different languages, with totally different scripts and everything. For example: (State — Language) Karnataka — Kannada Kerala — Malayalam Tamil Nadu — Tamil Andhra Pradesh — Telugu Uttar Pradesh — Hindi West Bengal — Bengali Maharashtra — Marathi These are just a few examples. There's atleast 28 states in India and even more languages. In most of northern India I think you can get by with Hindi. However, not everyone knows Hindi. And when people from, say, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have a conversation, then unless everyone in that group knows Hindi it'll likely be in English even though it's not the native language of anybody in that group. > Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths. Lmao. But these days I notice that most American youtubers (atleast the ones I'm subscribed to) would also mention the metric equivalent of whatever they're talking about. So kudos to them for being mindful of their international viewership :)
  • azangru 5y ago
    > In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin. I hope you are right; but it's one of the observations of sociolinguistics that a more "prestigious" language eventually wins out, and until recently, prestige was synonymous with power. I hope that with the arrival of the internet we may be past that, and that English has reached sufficient critical mass to stay dominant even after the fall of the US; but if history is any guide, a new superpower may eventually replace it with its language. This happened to Greek, Latin, French and German; it could happen to English too.
    • roywiggins 5y ago
• throwaway90090 5y ago
  English is the javascript of languages: full of warts and enforcing a status quo that sucks but everyone has to learn it because this is the world we live in. Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots. Romance languages would be like scripting languages (Python, Ruby, lua, etc.): once you know one the others get really easy. Greek would be like Lisp: had a lot of influence on current languages, dwindled a bit, but is still around.
  • rahen 5y ago
    Have a look at Interlingua too. It's essentially a modernized, simplified Latin. You can readily understand it in spoken and written forms if you're used to the major western languages (English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian), and use it fluently in a few weeks. I wish it was the official EU working language.
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular It might be, mostly, regular. But it is hardly beautifully pure, it is almost as mongrel as any other European language. And of course now that there are quite a few speakers it is importing words even though native Esperanto style words could easily be created.
  • dsnr 5y ago
    To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)
    • zdragnar 5y ago
      I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters. Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.
• retrac 5y ago
  > I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers (and simple rule-based algorithms) can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words with most of the errors being minor issues about vowel reduction to schwa and stress placement. For the incredulous, here's 56 table-based search-and-replace rules that get you to about 85%: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html https://www.zompist.com/spell.html Various other authors have their own slight variations on this, but typically it comes to 40 - 70 algorithmically-applicable rules. I wish more students got taught some variation on spelling rules like that, because they're much closer to the real rules of English spelling. It's only slightly worse than French, who we ripped off most of the modern orthography from. (Such table-based rules for French get above 95% pretty easily.) The thing is that, in both languages, this is a decidedly one-way process. Guessing how something is spelled from the sound is hopeless.
  • FabHK 5y ago
    Right, 85% for English sounds plausible. For Spanish, I'd venture much closer to 100%. For Chinese, around two thirds of characters contain a phonetic component. In other words, English is around half way between Spanish and Chinese :-) Oh, and in Spanish it is bijective: if you know the pronunciation, you pretty much know the spelling also.
    • ralferoo 5y ago
      The counter example for Spanish is b/v which is pretty much the same sound in most dialects nowadays, and it seems increasingly common to see misspellings online, e.g. baca for cow.
  • morsch 5y ago
    Would be 99% for Standard German with its quasi deterministic pronunciation. Going from sound to spelling isn't hopeless, either.
  • miki123211 5y ago
    Getting to 80% may be easy, but getting to 100% is close to an AGI problem. Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc. Determining which way to use is impossible without understanding the text. You can get pretty far by using some simple heuristics. For example, when the word read is preceded by "have", you almost always want to use the past tense pronunciation, but if it's preceded by "to", you want the present tense. At some point, though, you will hit the "time flies like an arrow" vs. "fruit flies like a banana" problem, and simple sentence analysis will not be enough. Another issue with English is that it likes to mash words together, and most pronunciation rules are not ready for that. While "Black Lives Matter" might be easy to pronounce, #blacklivesmatter is not. Getting this wrong sometimes leads to hilarious results[1]. I'm blind and I use a speech synthesizer daily, so I'm familiar with most of these issues. I haven't found a single piece of software that actually solved them well. This is still much better than languages like Hebrew, though, as they require you to manually insert vowels in the appropriate places, a task modern computers are not ready for. [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/?utm_source=go...
• cpursley 5y ago
  I'm a native English speaker who's studying Russian (my first real attempt at another language). I didn't actually realize how terrible English spelling is until studying a language with a mostly sane writing system (Russian Cyrillic). My biggest observation is English basics are not that difficult (grammer rules are very easy) but the English writing system needs a total reform. Especially now that it is becoming the default international language (for better or worse).
  • pavlov 5y ago
    English spelling could be greatly improved by adding accent marks to indicate long vowels. This would fix some of the most ambiguous cases (words like "read" and "live" and "epitome"), and wouldn't alter the spelling for those who want to stick with ASCII. The funny thing is, most English text today is written on operating systems controlled by just three entities: Google, Apple and Microsoft. A spelling reform would really need to convince just these companies to adopt it in their soft keyboards and spell checkers.
    • james_in_the_uk 5y ago
      Standardisation is sort of happening by default. In my work I don't both correcting stuff like "color", "optimized", "software license" unless it actually matters. Sometimes this comes in from international colleagues but half the time it's that my own country-folk haven't bothered to change their spellchecker defaults. [Ironically my own spellcheck has highlighted 'standardisation' for me... and asked do I mean 'standardization' or 'bastardization'. Good question :) ]
  • Joker_vD 5y ago
    "How is this word pronounced?" ― "Ugh, exactly how it's written? visible confusion" Compare e.g. to "Worcester" actually being pronounced as "Wooster". Well, why don't you just spell it like this, then? Na-a-ah, it'll be fine. P.S. Compare "In Russian, letter a is generally pronounced as English a in father" with "In English, letter a can be pronounced as а, эй, or (very wide) э, depending on what else surrounds it: ...". That's the main problem with English spelling: the language itself has way too many vowels to comfortably use only the basic Latin alphabet. Russian actually can, but instead it has much more variety in its consonants: look what Czech and Polish, which have similar problem, have to do to cope with it!
• js2 5y ago
  Gallagher tells it how it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk Spelling begins at 1:45. Starts by making fun of "Good Food" and ends with making fun of "go" and "do".
• monster_group 5y ago
  >> Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths. And also (American) football fields, libraries of Congress and Olympic size swimming pools.
• deleted 5y ago
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• FabHK 5y ago
  > It's a logographic language. You're tongue-in-cheek, presumably, but others were not: 'It is because of the widespread discrepancies noted above that Kono (1969:85) places English in the category of logographic scripts along with Chinese while Zachrisson (1931:5) goes so far as to contend that "English shares with Chinese the doubtful honor of being made up chiefly of ideographs, pictures of words which must be seen and remembered." Both views are wrong, Zachrisson's ridiculously so, since even sight words like "the" and "one" that are often taught to children without regard to "phonics'' are by no stretch of the imagination pictures totally devoid of phonetic clues, as witness th in "the" and n in "one."' This is from the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John D. Francis.
  • aasasd 5y ago
    Afaik Chinese hieroglyphs also have hints for pronunciation. I seem to have read in this very thread that something around 2/3rds have them. Doesn't change the classification of the writing system, though.
• nine_k 5y ago
  Can't wait for the Roman empire to fall, to have Latin replaced as a dominant cultural exchange language! In mere 1500 years or so.
• bandyaboot 5y ago
  I wouldn’t expect English as the dominant language of tech, business, etc to change soon after US hegemony comes to an end. There’s a lot of inertia there.
  • imbnwa 5y ago
    No different than the fall of Rome, sans the extra 500 - 600 years of hegemony but that's totally offset by rate and reach of communication
• prewett 5y ago
  I've decided English spelling is about like Chinese characters. If you see a new word you can make some guesses about how it is pronounced (many characters have pronunciation hints), but you won't really know until you hear someone pronounce it. I was told English is phonetic, and I believed it, but the fact that we had spelling tests through fifth or sixth grade suggests it is most definitely not. I'm guessing Chinese kids have about six years of learning characters before they have the standard set down. (3000 characters gets to 95% usage, in 6 years that's 20 a week for 25 weeks/year.)