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My conclusion from reading this is that Americans can't spell.
by naoqj 5y ago
My conclusion from reading this is that Americans can't spell.
- activitypea 5y agoThen you can imagine how hard the name is for the other 7.5 billion people.
- makeitdouble 5y agoIt's still a situation with no clear solution. Either it's a common word that is just hard to spell, and sticking to actual spelling is the saving grace as people who didn't know the spell will have a fighting chance to remember it. Either they come up with an easier to spell version (e.g. "fuxia", but then those who knew the right spell will have to remember both, and those who "misspelled" the flower will be thinking Google's project name is the "correct" spelling.
- activitypea 5y agoThere's still plenty of uncommon words that are easy to spell. "Anodyne" is a good example, it even sounds cool, but sadly means something not so cool.
- naoqj 5y agoIs it? "Fuchsia" and derivatives are the names of a colour in romance languages - that covers a big chunk of that.
- gadders 5y agoThe colour is named after a plant, which looks down is named after a German chap called Fuchs.
- jbirer 5y agoI am Romanian and I have no trouble spelling and writing "Fuchsia".
- Razengan 5y ago> My conclusion from reading this is that Americans can't spell. My conclusion from reading English all my life is that it’s a terrible unintuitive language and using the Latin alphabet for so many different-sounding languages wasn’t such a great idea. Much like C++; taking the worst of all worlds.
- tokamak-teapot 5y agoFuchsia is named after a German.
- Razengan 5y agoSometimes discussions creep towards a superset of the context.
- jcranmer 5y agoTL;DR: 'fuschia' actually works better with English spelling than 'fuchsia'. English actually has a set of spelling rules that make it generally possible to predict the pronunciation of most words, while fuchsia is one of the words that sits well outside the spelling rules. The most notorious bits of spelling come when, as here, insistence is made on preserving the spelling despite sound changes making it completely untenable. The original pronunciation of fuchsia in the German should be something along the lines of "fook-see-a". In English, the 'sia' would naturally want to affricate in that position (the same process that makes -tion pronounced 'shun'), which would lead to "fook-sha". I guess somewhere along the line, the k phoneme dropped, but the u also changes into an English long u (as in, it becomes the 'u' in 'cute' or 'cuticle'). The end result is that to spell the English pronunciation correctly, you need 'f', long 'u', something to spell 'sh' phoneme, vowel to make 'u' long (usually 'e', but 'i' can do the job in a pinch), and then 'a'. 'Fuschia' would be a spelling that comports with the expected pronunciation--while 'sch' is not the most common way of spelling 'sh', it is a way of doing so. And if you have only a vague of memory of what the word should look like, it has all of the requisite letters, and it yields the expected pronunciation--where the 'correct' spelling doesn't. I'm generally a pretty good speller in English, and I will freely admit that the only way I can remember how to spell fuchsia correctly is that it's the spelling that fucks up--replace k with h.