7 ms·
"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 hilar
by 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.
- pessimizer 5y agoWe'd have to cover every word with accents. We'd have to have accents for "letter has no effect on sound," "these three letters actually represent this other letter," and "pretend you're French when you say this, but French with a severe head injury."
- darebak 5y agoThere was some English guy that tried to create an English alphabet where each letter would correspond to exactly one sound, so around 44 letters in total. Kinda like Serbian Cyrillic. I can't remember his name or the name of his project though.
- pessimizer 5y agoThat's doomed from the start. There's no way English speakers could deal with a written language with 19 different vowels.
- thechao 5y agoAnd which dialect!?
- blaxis 5y agoShavian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
- darebak 5y agoYeah, that's the one.
- ralferoo 5y agoNot heard of this particular script before (although I see the answer was already posted), but it seems a bit redundant to have created an incompatible system when shorthand was in widespread use in the UK at the time, albeit mostly only used in a secretarial context.
- tshaddox 5y agoWell, that's the point. You tell someone to spell it exactly how it sounds if it is one of the words that is spelled phonetically.
- quickthrower2 5y agoWhich might still depend on your accent!
- Johnny555 5y agoIt's still not horrible advice if the goal is to just communicate some idea that he would otherwise not know how to type at all. "i pushed da bisikel off da ruf" Is difficult to read, but not impossible to understand.
- iqanq 5y agohttps://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60318986 https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60318986
- AussieWog93 5y agoMy all-time favourite BBC Pidgin article is this one: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-41171196 https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-41171196
- jamiek88 5y agoHoly crap that was brilliant.
- HPsquared 5y agoEnglish is really good at "graceful degradation".
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y agoI love the euphemism! But, compared to what? Spanish degradation is arguably much more graceful.
- Retric 5y agoI would assume Japanese or other pictogram based languages would score very low here, but I am not sure how you would measure it objectively.
- 5y ago
- albert_e 5y agotrying to teach phonics to a kiddo ... letter E, called "eee", makes the sound "ae" letter I, called "aai", makes the sound "ee" letter A, called "aae", makes the sound "uh" super confusing for some kids and in my non-english-native schooling we were never ever taught "vowel sounds" in our English classes - we only learnt vowels as letters. beyond A for Apple and introducing common words like Car and House and Tree ... the curriculum never bothered about teaching how to speak English
- function_seven 5y agoI vividly remember learning the short and long vowel sounds in elementary school. With the marks over the vowels explained and used in lessons. Things like băss and bāss. Obviously those marks can be confusing if they're substituted in for words where the spelled vowels are different than the pronounced vowels (like yo̅o̅ for "ewe"). I guess those were the advanced words we'd learn after the basics were taught. But first, the "Evil E" :)
- skydhash 5y agoThis is why I'm grateful for my native language, Haitian Creole. Our alphabet has signs - formed with Latin characters - and each is mapped 1 to 1 to sounds. You write words like they sound, and you pronounce them like it is written. Most of the usual mistakes made are because they tried to use the French orthography - many schools teach French before Creole. Foreign words can be either written with the original orthography or the best approximation in creole.
- albert_e 5y agoI am also similarly thankful for the indian languages I know and grew up learning. There is no difference at all between what you call a letter and how it sounds when it is used in a word. Reading is simply sounding out each letter as you go from left-to-right.
- alanh 5y agoPoint taken, but it’s not bullshit advice when the particular word in question actually follows typical English spelling rules (which, despite countless exceptions, do exist)
- mellavora 5y agoHippo birdie two ewes to quote an old greeting card, for example
- serverlessmom 5y agoYou know you would think so, but for me it's actually been helpful many times for spelling a variety of words. I don't think I realized until checking out this thread that a lot of what I thought was spelling words how they sound was actually me memorizing the way they were spelled and somewhat skewing the pronunciation in my head in order to get the correct spelling.