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As an antidote to this, I recommend Mark Rosenfelder’s Hou tu pranownse Inglish [http://www.zompist.com/spell.html http://www.zompist.com/spell.html], which giv
by bradrn 4y ago
As an antidote to this, I recommend Mark Rosenfelder’s Hou tu pranownse Inglish [http://www.zompist.com/spell.html http://www.zompist.com/spell.html], which gives a set of rules to correctly predict the pronunciation of English words from their spelling ‘over 85% of the time’ (using a sample lexicon of 5000 words). English spelling is certainly horrible and irregular, but it isn’t unmanageably irregular.
(To illustrate the point, I supply a quote from said article of a fact which seems to be ignored curiously often: ‘George Bernard Shaw's ghoti … illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee.)
- boxed 4y agoIs that an antidote or a confirmation of the chaos? I scrolled through that list and came away just as horrified as I thought I'd be :P
- JasonFruit 4y agoAnyone who thinks George Bernard Shaw was ignorant is ignorant of George Bernard Shaw. Wiseacre, yes; ignorant, no.
- dahart 4y ago> illustrates only Shaw’s wiseacre ignorance. Joke’s on Rosenfelder, since it appears Shaw didn’t come up with ghoti. The evidence, and some other facetious and funny and intentionally horrible but equally justified misspellings: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 > English spelling is certainly horrible and irregular, but it isn’t unmanageably irregular. True! There are harder languages to learn than English. It’s okay to have a little at English’s expense though, right? It’s irregular enough to frustrate non-native speakers and school children, and irregular enough that English seems funny when you compare it to languages that have very little spelling irregularity, like Spanish. Part of the charm of our language is how weird it is, and how it has mashed and mixed words from other languages. I really like learning bits of other Germanic languages and finding all the cognates we have - words that have similar roots and similar spellings and meanings. There’s a lot of inconsistency in how the spellings have translated, but finding the near equivalents in other languages is often surprising and enlightening.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago> It’s irregular enough to frustrate non-native speakers and school children As my first grade teacher used to reassure us after each spelling test, “English is no language to teach first graders”
- narag 4y ago...very little spelling irregularity, like Spanish. As a native speaker I wouldn't say very little, but none. Anyway, I'll better be catious and ask if you know any. Not saying that Spanish is an easy language to learn, some parts are complicated, but not that one.
- dahart 4y agoI only said very little out of caution, because I don’t know of any, but I don’t know that they don’t exist either. At most very little is compatible with none. ;) Aren’t there commonly used Aztec words that don’t match Spanish pronunciation?
- narag 4y agoSo we are both cautious :) If you mean Aztec imported words, I don't know which they are. Maybe you mean the tl consonant group that is not very natural, but neither is zr (as in three) and we just get used to it, when we learn English. Could "chocolate" be one of these words? It was just adapted, both pronuntiation and spelling. The problem now is imported. It seems English has no letter for j sound... ahem, the real j sound :) being the h (as in hot) the closest, but way weaker, so when transcribing from other alphabets, like Arabian or Cyrilic, it's written as kh, see Ха́рків. But the trick isn't working and everybody reads it as a lone k. Also we receive the kh transcription... what a mess :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]