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Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety

Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example. Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time. Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform). [1] https://spellingbee.com https://spellingbee.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... [4] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

raverbashing 5y ago
> since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours? I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß
- bmn__ 5y ago
  Liechtenstein, too, in that agreement. More German speaking countries (language with official status) who were not involved: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Namibia.
samus 5y ago
The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.
marcandre 5y ago
It is pretty much a thing in French too, sadly.
dpifke 5y ago
I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I'm a German native speaker, and I still sometimes get tripped up by things like it being spelled "Flannel" in English, but "Flanell" in German.
  - lokedhs 5y ago
    Same spelling in Swedish, and until you mentioned it just now, I never even realised that the word is spelled differently in English. It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    For "Flannel" and "Flanell", it makes a surprising amount of sense when you then look at the pronounciation. The English word is stressed on the first syllable, like "FLANnel", which makes the N sound longer, whereas Germans say "flaNELL", which makes the final L sound longer.
- csunbird 5y ago
  Try Turkish, everything is spelled as they are written, although the grammar will make you insane.
gumby 5y ago
Are you kidding? It’s prime time TV in France. Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL. Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I ran into this phenomenon when I was idly learning the Shavian alphabet. It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. So, while it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to read it, (accurately) writing it would have required about as much rote memorization as it does in any other alphabetical language I'm familiar with. (https://www.shavian.info/ https://www.shavian.info/)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - olah_1 5y ago
    > It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim. > While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1] I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way. [1]: https://shavian.info/alphabet/ https://shavian.info/alphabet/
biztos 5y ago
I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin. Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  I find Hungarian itself pretty easy to learn, it's just that all words are unfamiliar, except those of Germanic or Slavic or Latin origin :)
sandworm101 5y ago
It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions, And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
- toast0 5y ago
  > And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.
  - krageon 5y ago
    The point was that learning a smaller subset of the language makes the challenge doable at all, which is what is happening here.
- aasasd 5y ago
  > American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    Well, I think one should be free to dream of the Americans finally learning how to spell correctly.
- 5y ago
lordnacho 5y ago
My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.
DocTomoe 5y ago
> Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996 That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school. [Citation Needed] It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."
  - wizardofdos 5y ago
    You just don't frequent the same 'socioculutal strata' ;)
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    I find "Photographie" all the time, most prominently in photography-related organisations and publications, so that might be carried over from old times before 1996... when "Fotografie" was already a valid variant spelling. I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.
    - LeonidasXIV 5y ago
      I think "Photographie" is common when you want to sound stuck-up-your-ass artsy-fartsy. In regular use the word "Foto" is way more common than "Photo", unless you're the publisher of a black and white analog photography publication dating back to 1888.
amyjess 5y ago
On the other hand, you also have languages like Danish where the pronunciation is just as messy as English.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  And just when you think numbers can't be any sillier than in French, Danish comes along and proves you wrong.
  - 3np 5y ago
    The rest of Scandinavia love to point it out. From Norway: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
WalterBright 5y ago
Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C3%BCtterlinschrift.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C... Detecting cat pictures is nothing compared to deciphering sütterlin. Even Unicode has rejected it, despite accepting useless text like Linear A.
- wirrbel 5y ago
  On suetterlin (or the overall topic of current) its not just a change about handwriting. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German books were published in blackletter (Fraktur) until it was abolished by the Nazi regime (internal reasoning "you cannot rule the world if the world cannot read what you type", what was communicated "Fraktur is jewish"). I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier. For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries. Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore. Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Linear A is not useless! It is widely used by Greek teenagers as a shorthand for quick text messaging. :|
me_me_me 5y ago
Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down. However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases. 'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch' Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past. In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters. (gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...) There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like 'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it. There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O
alsetmusic 5y ago
There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-and-worse/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...

raverbashing 5y ago

> since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours? I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß

bmn__ 5y ago
Liechtenstein, too, in that agreement. More German speaking countries (language with official status) who were not involved: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Namibia.

samus 5y ago

The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.

marcandre 5y ago

It is pretty much a thing in French too, sadly.

dpifke 5y ago

I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.

vlunkr 5y ago
Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.
ThePadawan 5y ago
I'm a German native speaker, and I still sometimes get tripped up by things like it being spelled "Flannel" in English, but "Flanell" in German.
- lokedhs 5y ago
  Same spelling in Swedish, and until you mentioned it just now, I never even realised that the word is spelled differently in English. It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.
- majewsky 5y ago
  For "Flannel" and "Flanell", it makes a surprising amount of sense when you then look at the pronounciation. The English word is stressed on the first syllable, like "FLANnel", which makes the N sound longer, whereas Germans say "flaNELL", which makes the final L sound longer.
csunbird 5y ago
Try Turkish, everything is spelled as they are written, although the grammar will make you insane.

gumby 5y ago

Are you kidding? It’s prime time TV in France. Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL. Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.

mumblemumble 5y ago
I ran into this phenomenon when I was idly learning the Shavian alphabet. It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. So, while it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to read it, (accurately) writing it would have required about as much rote memorization as it does in any other alphabetical language I'm familiar with. (https://www.shavian.info/ https://www.shavian.info/)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- olah_1 5y ago
  > It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim. > While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1] I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way. [1]: https://shavian.info/alphabet/ https://shavian.info/alphabet/

biztos 5y ago

I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin. Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.

andrewshadura 5y ago
I find Hungarian itself pretty easy to learn, it's just that all words are unfamiliar, except those of Germanic or Slavic or Latin origin :)

sandworm101 5y ago

It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions, And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.

toast0 5y ago
> And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.
- krageon 5y ago
  The point was that learning a smaller subset of the language makes the challenge doable at all, which is what is happening here.
aasasd 5y ago
> American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  Well, I think one should be free to dream of the Americans finally learning how to spell correctly.
5y ago

lordnacho 5y ago

My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.

DocTomoe 5y ago

> Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996 That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.

Semaphor 5y ago
> switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school. [Citation Needed] It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."
- wizardofdos 5y ago
  You just don't frequent the same 'socioculutal strata' ;)
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I find "Photographie" all the time, most prominently in photography-related organisations and publications, so that might be carried over from old times before 1996... when "Fotografie" was already a valid variant spelling. I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.
  - LeonidasXIV 5y ago
    I think "Photographie" is common when you want to sound stuck-up-your-ass artsy-fartsy. In regular use the word "Foto" is way more common than "Photo", unless you're the publisher of a black and white analog photography publication dating back to 1888.

amyjess 5y ago

On the other hand, you also have languages like Danish where the pronunciation is just as messy as English.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
And just when you think numbers can't be any sillier than in French, Danish comes along and proves you wrong.
- 3np 5y ago
  The rest of Scandinavia love to point it out. From Norway: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

WalterBright 5y ago

Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C3%BCtterlinschrift.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C... Detecting cat pictures is nothing compared to deciphering sütterlin. Even Unicode has rejected it, despite accepting useless text like Linear A.

wirrbel 5y ago
On suetterlin (or the overall topic of current) its not just a change about handwriting. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German books were published in blackletter (Fraktur) until it was abolished by the Nazi regime (internal reasoning "you cannot rule the world if the world cannot read what you type", what was communicated "Fraktur is jewish"). I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier. For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries. Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore. Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Linear A is not useless! It is widely used by Greek teenagers as a shorthand for quick text messaging. :|

me_me_me 5y ago

Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down. However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases. 'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch' Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past. In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters. (gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...) There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like 'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it. There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O

alsetmusic 5y ago

There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-and-worse/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...