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This is really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who struggles a lot with spelling. His first language is Englis
by serverlessmom 5y ago
This is really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who struggles a lot with spelling. His first language is English and even so sometimes it is hard to decipher what he means when he messages me. Recently he asked me how to spell something and I said, "You spell it exactly how it sounds," and he told me that doesn't help him and he didn't understand what that meant.
So I spelled the word out loud and sounded it out as I went. At the end he told me that his brain doesn't work that way- that it's nearly impossible for him to hold the sounds in his head while he tries to spell. I was really quite awestruck by that distinct differences in our brains.
- qq66 5y agoYou can only "spell it exactly how it sounds" in languages like Italian or Spanish, not in English.
- lelandfe 5y ago"Oaxaca," just like it sounds
- pessimizer 5y agoThat's a really good example. Was it supposed to be a bad one? The only glaring exception I run into in Spanish is "que" being pronounced "ke."
- lelandfe 5y agoIn my learning, I've definitely found that holdover words with "X" are the strangest relative to what is taught. "Oaxaca" has at least two different pronunciations depending on where you are in Mexico, since the pronunciation has evolved over time. See also: xerez.
- pessimizer 5y agoNot the best at Spanish, but it always seems to me that all "x"s drift based on location, not just a few, making it an accent for me rather than an inconsistency. "ll" is the same way.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Not the best at Spanish, but it always seems to me that all "x"s drift based on location, not just a few, making it an accent for me rather than an inconsistency Doesn't seem that way to me; the native speakers I’ve known tend to pronounce the X’s different ways in: México / Oaxaca vs. Xochilmilco vs. Ixtlan / Tepexpan
- pessimizer 5y agoI'm not as familiar with American place names, but there's an obvious reason why those would have pronunciations that couldn't be spelled easily in Spanish. "X" in Mexican might be shorthand for sharp mystery consonant.
- dragonwriter 5y agoIn each of those, the “x” originates from Nahuatl where it had a sound of (or close to) English “sh”, which is also the sound “x” had (maybe still has, though I’m pretty sure there has been shift in Iberian accents/dialects since then) in certain Iberian regional accents of Spanish at the time, which is how “x” got into the Spanish spelling; it wasn't a stand-in for a mystery consonant.
- pezezin 5y agoYour comment is correct. As far as I know, "x" still sounds /ʃ/ in Galician, Basque and Catalan. In Spanish, it became /x/ centuries ago, and the spelling changed to J/G. Nowadays you only see the X in old-fashioned spellings like Quixote, Xerez o Ximenez. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reajuste_de_las_sibilantes_del_idioma_espa%C3%B1ol https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reajuste_de_las_sibilantes_del... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
- darebak 5y agoYeah, but every language has those peculiarities in spelling. AFAIK Serbian Cyrillic is the closest one to "spell how you hear it" because every letter corresponds to a single sound and there's little deviation from this. With the Serbian Latin/Croatian alphabet it gets a little complicated because it uses digraphs such as lj(љ in Cyrillic), nj(њ)and dž(џ).
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> With the Serbian Latin/Croatian alphabet it gets a little complicated because it uses digraphs such as lj(љ in Cyrillic), nj(њ)and dž(џ) People are extolling Italian here, but note that for those three sounds it uses the digraphs gl, gn, and gi.
- qq66 5y ago"Oaxaca" isn't Spanish, it's a Nahuatl loanword.
- munk-a 5y agoEven those have a whole bunch of exceptions. The best language for spelling by sound is probably German, it has an extremely clear pronunciation guide to the point where most first year German students can quite accurately read signs and essays aloud without having the faintest idea of what they're saying.
- narag 5y agoEven those have a whole bunch of exceptions Are you sure? I'm a native Spanish speaker and mastered the "whole bunch" (ce, ci, que, qui, gue, gui) by the age of four.
- munk-a 5y agoSpanish is the one I'm familiar with and there are a bunch of collisions in pronunciations like b/v and h/j (which are sometimes discernable but often aren't) along with a fair number of silent letters.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Spanish is the one I'm familiar with and there are a bunch of collisions in pronunciations like b/v and h/j (which are sometimes discernable but often aren't) That doesn't sound right. What variety of Spanish are you familiar with that sometimes distinguishes B from V?
- narag 5y agoExactly, there are none. Some persons make them a little different because they also speak other languages, like French or English where they're different. There's no problem wiht that, but it's not needed either.
- narag 5y agoIn Spanish B and V sounds exactly the same. H and J are strictly different. H is the only silent letter. Let me remind you that I was answering to your comment where you say: ...read signs and essays aloud without having the faintest idea of what they're saying. This can be done just learning the independent sound of each letter and the six exceptions that I mentioned. Graphic accent rules are a bit more complex, but we also learn them by the time we're seven or eight years, so we can use in our writing. They're not essential for reading.
- Arnavion 5y agoThe statement was about a specific word, not the language as a whole.
- dragonwriter 5y agoSpanish can be problematic due to the influence of Nahautl, Quechua, and other languages of people colonized by Spain. But it's still a million times better than English.
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoI can’t blame him, English has a pretty irregular spelling.
- garrickvanburen 5y agoEnglish mostly isn’t.
- Arrath 5y ago"i BeFoRe E eXcEpt..." Ugh.
- steinjones 5y ago"You spell it exactly how it sounds" such a bullshit advice when the language in the context is English, which one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence is hilariously bad.
- bdamm 5y agoRight? Though the march of enlightenment is eternal, suffrage is not bourne but rather embraced. Through bright corridors stream draughts of fairies, otherworldly. Phonetics lies, asunder.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- demadog 5y agoWhat is that quote from? Google comes up blank.
- harpiaharpyja 5y agoI'm guessing that was not a quote at all, but rather a response to "You spell it exactly how it sounds"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- soperj 5y agoI found the AI that was trained on James Joyce!
- monkeybutton 5y agoThis reminds me of a coworker who recently immigrated from Brazil asking about the pronunciations of some English words and being astonished that we don't just use accents to differentiate it. Like, just use accents. No more ambiguity and problem solved.
- 5y ago
- buu700 5y agoThat's interesting. Sounds like he may have auditory aphantasia (which I only know is a thing because of the few times it's come up on HN lately).
- wincy 5y agoMy wife can’t spell and I just tell her “hey just memorize how to spell everything”. I’m convinced that’s what we all actually do, at least with English.
- duncan-donuts 5y agoI know this is common but I constantly mispronounce words phonetically in my head so I remember how to spell them.
- alfg 5y agoWed-nes-day
- alanh 5y agoYou know, I don’t pronounce this one as it is spelled, but I do pronounce the first R in February, unlike many.
- sudosteph 5y agoBack when I worked in support and had to do a lot of chat/email communication, I did this for a lot of words - "environment" being one of the most frequent ones. Many years later, I realized that my "mispronunciation" for spelling it was actually closer to some people's pronunciation! I never realized it, but I was only familiar with the southern pronunciation, which totally lacks the second "n" sound ("in-vire-mint").
- version_five 5y agoI think there's some sort of "deep learning" analog going on, where we memorize a lot and it subsequently leads to generalization (that can still sometimes overfit and be wrong). For me anyway, I write and read a lot, and having broad exposure to words coming from different root languages etc gives a good feeling for what spellings make sense. At the same time, I'd guess the majority of my adult vocabulary has come out of books, or at less adjacent to them, so it's pretty uncommon to be writing a word I've never seen before
- Karawebnetwork 5y agoThis is interesting. It reminds me of how people usually ask of people with aphantasia to "just visualize". We tend as a group to forget that individuals are very different from each others. Some people have no inner monologue, others have no images, some can never hear the difference in pitch while other have a pitch perfect hearing, etc.
- heavyset_go 5y agoSounds like the distinction between successfully teaching reading strategies, and being taught unsuccessful[1] strategies. He might have learned how to read in a different manner than you. [1] 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...