3 ms·

Well easy they should use German. More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities. English is no more prone to the problem of "some words sound exactly the same as other words" than any other language.
- pornel 4y ago
  English has suffered the Great Vowel Shift, and has a wide variety of accents. It's a language that has the Spelling Bee, -teen/-ty numbers, -ough suffix, and "ghoti". There are many languages with much more regular, phonetic spelling and smaller variation of accents.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > It's a language that has the Spelling Bee, -teen/-ty numbers, -ough suffix, and "ghoti". For the second point, -teen/-ty numbers sound different, are spelled differently, and mean different things. How are they supposed to support your point? For the fourth, it's just false; "ghoti" in the pronunciation /fɪʃ/ does not come close to being valid written English. There is no such thing as syllable-initial "gh" /f/ or syllable-final "ti" /ʃ/. The -ough suffix is a real case of one sound diverging into two sounds, but that is obviously not relevant to the problem of determining, from the sound of a word, which word you just heard. It comes up in the opposite problem of determining how to pronounce a word from the spelling, which we aren't talking about here. The spelling bee is a cultural artifact; every language whose writing system is not extremely recent exhibits the phenomenon that the spelling of a word cannot be predicted from its sound. (In China, where spelling is much, much tougher, they don't have spelling bees. They do have traditional dictation exercises.) You might find this wikipedia article interesting: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homofon%C3%ADa https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homofon%C3%ADa
mejutoco 4y ago
welcheswort.com would be a good domain for the german version ;)

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities. English is no more prone to the problem of "some words sound exactly the same as other words" than any other language.

pornel 4y ago
English has suffered the Great Vowel Shift, and has a wide variety of accents. It's a language that has the Spelling Bee, -teen/-ty numbers, -ough suffix, and "ghoti". There are many languages with much more regular, phonetic spelling and smaller variation of accents.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > It's a language that has the Spelling Bee, -teen/-ty numbers, -ough suffix, and "ghoti". For the second point, -teen/-ty numbers sound different, are spelled differently, and mean different things. How are they supposed to support your point? For the fourth, it's just false; "ghoti" in the pronunciation /fɪʃ/ does not come close to being valid written English. There is no such thing as syllable-initial "gh" /f/ or syllable-final "ti" /ʃ/. The -ough suffix is a real case of one sound diverging into two sounds, but that is obviously not relevant to the problem of determining, from the sound of a word, which word you just heard. It comes up in the opposite problem of determining how to pronounce a word from the spelling, which we aren't talking about here. The spelling bee is a cultural artifact; every language whose writing system is not extremely recent exhibits the phenomenon that the spelling of a word cannot be predicted from its sound. (In China, where spelling is much, much tougher, they don't have spelling bees. They do have traditional dictation exercises.) You might find this wikipedia article interesting: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homofon%C3%ADa https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homofon%C3%ADa

mejutoco 4y ago

welcheswort.com would be a good domain for the german version ;)