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Ghoti
- parentheses 4y agoThis is what makes spelling bees possible!
- toiletfuneral 4y ago[dead]
- croisillon 4y ago[flagged]
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoReminds me always of Mark Twain’s hilarious Plan for improvement of English spelling. https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
- rmk 4y agoI could barely understand the last sentence! Thank you for this hilarious passage.
- capableweb 4y agoMe neither. Thankfully, technology to the rescue: > What does this mean? > Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. >> This text seems to be an example of a proposed spelling reform for the English language. The author has purposefully misspelled words to demonstrate how this reform would change the current spelling system. Here is a translation of the text into standard English: >> "Finally, then, after some 20 years of orthographic reform, we would have a logical, coherent spelling in use throughout the English-speaking world." >> The text suggests that after 20 years of implementing changes to the spelling system, the English-speaking world would have a more logical and coherent spelling system.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoWhy, that looks suspiciously like Dutch.
- hoseja 4y agoMissing þ and ð honestly. Stop 'x' abuse, it has like five different meanings at least. Edit: wow, over twenty actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X#Other_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X#Other_languages
- csa 4y agoI’m not sure whether I’m proud or embarrassed that I didn’t need to slow down for that part. linguistics nerd flex
- drowsspa 4y agoFunnily enough it was pretty easy for me as a native Portuguese speaker
- riffraff 4y agoSame as an Italian, perhaps because it normalized vowels to a sane system, which is pretty far from the English one.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoI wonder if he wrote that before or after studying German. His famous essay on it actually noted its phonetic spelling as a pro. [0] [0] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
- dang 4y agoUh oh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507 (it actually originates in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Sometimes the truth is stranger than astounding science fiction)
- svat 4y agoTo be clear: the essay “The Awful German Language” is indeed by Mark Twain, while the short note “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling” is not.
- kibwen 4y agoAnd this more recent version of the joke, "English to become official language of the EU": https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o4rkq/english_to_become_official_language_of_the_eu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o4rkq/english_to_be...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dheera 4y agoReminds me of the English word "gaol".
- phillc73 4y agoWhich is perfectly fine, when considered in the context of other words like “giant” and “geranium.”
- _emacsomancer_ 4y agoAnd "gif".
- euroderf 4y agoThe peanut butter
- panzi 4y agoDid they back then pronounce i and y the same way? Or do I mispronounce year and it should sound like eear?
- Falkon1313 4y agoAs the saying goes, "Y is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.", although that has totally different meaning. Similarly, the y in 'finally' makes an i sound (as in the i in 'machine'), while the y in 'tyrant' makes a different i sound (as in the i in 'finally'), and of course the y in 'year' makes yet another totally different sound. And then of course you have 'lye' and 'lie', which sound the same but with very different meanings. That is what these jokes were about, simplifying so that each letter has only one sound and a spoken word can only be spelled one way while a written word can only be pronounced one way. It doesn't work and is silly because letters take their sounds from context, combination, and position, as does the y in 'year'. And there aren't enough letters for all the sounds in English.
- panzi 4y agoWell, one could use IPA. :P
- smoyer 4y agoMy grandmother introduced me to this when I was in elementary school - https://www.exploratorium.edu/files/exhibits/ladle/ https://www.exploratorium.edu/files/exhibits/ladle/
- Chinjut 4y agoAs with so many things attributed to Mark Twain, this was not written by Mark Twain. According to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain: Actual source: A letter to The Economist (16 January 1971), written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's Words at Play books. This was a modified version of a piece "Meihem in ce Klasrum", published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
- sph 4y agoFixing English consonants is the easy part. The hard part is consolidating the 25 or so different vowel sounds that exists in English. Given that we only have 5 vowel characters, this improved English would need a lot of vowel digraphs and/or accents.
- DiscourseFan 4y agoTo the contrary of most people, I think that English spelling is actually excellent because the spelling tells you less about actual phonology than etymology, and from there you can derive the pronunciation, thus the script is able to accomodate the accurate representations (phonologically) of every word from every language. There is no other language where people care about the correct pronunciation of words, because in most other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited (take, for example, Hindi, with its supposedly phonetic script). Whereas Roman script can represent the accurate pronunciation of every word in Hindi, the Devanagari cannot even come close to representing all English words, not even all words written in Roman--which is probably why Roman script is becoming a dominant writing system in South Asia.
- croes 4y agoHow would you pronounce "read"? As read or read?
- GoatOfAplomb 4y agoRead, obviously.
- illiarian 4y agoI always read `ea` in `read` as in `lead`, it's easy to memorise :-)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymousiam 4y agoHow do you pronounce the name of the town Reading, PA? https://www.howtopronounce.com/reading-pennsylvania-2 https://www.howtopronounce.com/reading-pennsylvania-2
- 4y ago
- dang 4y agoRelated: Ghoti - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 - June 2020 (239 comments) Ghoti - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296927 - March 2011 (3 comments)
- anonymousiam 4y agoNot sure where it came from, but it's very old. My dad (who was a school teacher) presented it to me 50 years ago.
- kuhewa 4y agoGhoti papers is a type of article in the journal Fish and Fisheries which say it was a George Bernard Shaw joke
- lucb1e 4y agoSo how do we fix it? I remember Dutch having had a spelling reform at some point, and I'm pretty sure I've heard of similar things in both German and French. Does English (in any country or group of collaborating countries) have a standardization body or some volunteer group of people that might publish optional guidelines that people could follow? Making it all consistent overnight would result in nobody being able to read (let alone write) the language anymore, but incremental tweaks that are gradual, obvious, and consistent could be doable.
- Kamq 4y ago> So how do we fix it? I don't think we can, at least not while preserving its value. For one, english started as basically a pidgin or creole from the british isles being invaded by so many groups over centuries, so we're not starting off at the best place. Two, the other examples of spelling reform I'm aware of are either from highly centralized places (the French empire), or small groups of countries that border each other (German spelling reform). There's not really a way to get the US, UK, India, and parts of Africa to agree on how something is pronounced (and therefore agree on what the proper spelling should be). The only way to "fix" it would be to have each country (or region within a country potentially), reform the language in a different way, which would destroy most of the value of having so many people in disparate places speak that language and be able to communicate.
- vlunkr 4y agoI don’t see why any of that means it can’t be reformed. No commonly-used language is formed in a vacuum.
- Kamq 4y agoIt can be reformed. I specifically say that it can be. My point is that, because you have so many disparate groups with completely different pronunciations (and therefore different target idealized spellings), reformation will destroy the majority of the value. And nobody who actually speaks english has an interesting in destroying the value of understanding that language.
- rfmoz 4y agoThe languages that hadnt had an early written grammar, have nowadays a close relationship between the spelling and the written form.
- shadowofneptune 4y agoThə prablem with a sistəmatic, fōnetic chānj in Inglish speling is that it rāsəs thə questyən of wat acsent tū fāvər. Fər an Əmerican en Ōhīō, this transcriptshən prabablē māks səm sens, wuns yū get past thə shwa. I dout an Inglishman or ēvən ā Nū Yorkər wud fīnd it yusful.
- Majestic121 4y agoThat is surprisingly easy to read, even though I'm not a native English speaker
- Claude_Shannon 4y agoSame
- posterboy 4y agoBut this is not phonetic. The Is in "Inglish" are hardly the same in any dialect. And it doesn't solve the problem on the graphematic level. It ought to allow anyone to read the chosen dialect phonetically. But it suffers from an arbitrary choice of glyphs, so I have no idea how to pronounce eg. an (an actual problem I have pondered today is a-typical). Conversely, if the spelling ought to be predictable for language learners, you are probably better of learning Mandarin (^_^)
- getoj 4y agoThr is anthr wy, whch ws dscvred ntrlly by early intrnt usrs: txt spk essntlly rduces englsh spllng to an abjad lk Arbc. Lk Arbc, Englsh is vry cnsnant hvy, and dialctl dffrnces are almst entrly vriashns n vwl qualty, so an abjad is the prfct wrtng systm fr us. The perfect English abjad would use diacritics to mark vowels and some clever way to identify syllable boundaries (so you can distinguish ideal from idyll). But alas, we’re probably stuck with an alphabetic script forever.
- duskwuff 4y ago> ntrlly This one took a moment. (It's "naturally", not "neutrally" or "entirely".) The rest is surprisingly readable.
- croisillon 4y agoobligatory mention of "the chaos" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
- Xenoamorphous 4y agoOh man, even if English is a pretty simple language having to learn the pronunciation of every word is tough… I remember when I was mispronouncing recipe and no one had a clue what I meant (it wasn’t even in a cooking context). I was dumfounded when I found out how words like tomb or womb are pronounced. Or how about colonel? Or how nation is pronounced differently as a whole word vs when it’s part of national. In contrast Spanish must be a bitch to learn as an adult due to all the verb tenses, but once you know the pronunciation rules you can read anything correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying.
- 13of40 4y agoMy wife has been in the US for about 25 years at this point, and we just had our talk about how to pronounce February, Wednesday, and turmeric yesterday.
- wincy 4y agoI don’t like the correct people when they say Wed-ness-day though. I wish I lived in a world where the pronunciation made sense like that.
- memling 4y agoThink "weddinsday," and it might make more sense. I hear that mostly from British-English speakers though.
- dmichulke 4y agoEven more so because Wodan / Woden and Odin are different names for the same god who is also the namesake for that day.. Weddin just lies on the spectrum between Wodan and Odin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday
- BrotherBisquick 4y agoI'm a native English speaker in the US and I've been spelling turmeric incorrectly for decades. When I noticed that first 'r' I questioned everything I thought I knew about the universe...
- Simplicitas 4y agoEvery time this comes up someone shares the joke about the European Union’s changes to the English language ..
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoI figured out the gh at one point. Gh used to be its own phoneme. It slowly phased out of spoken english and got replaced by semi-random similar sounding phonemes. This g(h)/ch phoneme still exists in dutch and german though, and once you know about it you start finding a lot of cognates between the languages!
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoEnglish is really four languages (Germanic, French, Latin, Old Norse) that have been corrupted and morphed into an insanity of unnecessarily complex structures. The linguistic equivalent of four different cars taken apart and turned into an economy tractor race car used for pizza deliveries. Yes, it can go fast and deliver pizza to a farmer. But I wouldn't wanna learn to drive the bastard.
- euroderf 4y agoIt ends up being similar to Chinese, in that pronunciations (and written forms) are acquired only thru sheer repetition.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoReminds me now of "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough", collected works by Dr. Seuss.
- IshKebab 4y agoIn fairness how many languages have letters that are always pronounced the same regardless of context? Even languages with highly regular pronunciation like Italian have letters that are pronounced differently depending on the other letters around them. The o in women is really the only one that is completely irregular. The others follow.. not rules, but at least heuristics. I'm not defending English pronunciation. It's clearly a mess. But this feels like a disingenuous way to demonstrate that. (Yeah I know it's clearly a joke.)
- frosted-flakes 4y ago> In fairness how many languages have letters that are always pronounced the same regardless of context? Finnish does. But the Finnish language only gained a writing system in common usage relatively recently, in the 1800s.
- euroderf 4y agoWhereas (in comparison) German was saddled with movable type early on, and shows it.
- dav_Oz 4y agoConcerning "pronunciation-vs-spelling" the Tibetan script has one of the most (egregious) mismatches.[0][1] So, relatively speaking, written English is just slightly worse than Hangul.[2] [0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script [2]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K53oCDZPPiw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K53oCDZPPiw
- thriftwy 4y agoHangeul very nicely reflects how Korean language's syllables change depending on what goes before and after them (phonetic context). In comparison, most of irregularities with English spelling are either caused by extensive word loaning or by language changes that happened too long ago to make sense today. So no, they're not the same.
- bradrn 4y agoThis always irritates me somewhat. Let me link [0], as I do every time this comes up: > Whenever the subject [of English spelling] comes up, someone is sure to bring up … George Bernard Shaw's ghoti -- a word which 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. He goes on to substantiate the claim that it has rules, too, by explicitly stating and testing them! [0] http://zompist.com/spell.html http://zompist.com/spell.html
- Karellen 4y ago> The purpose of this page is to describe those rules -- to explain the system behind English spelling, the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time. The way that's written gives the impression that the author thinks "over 85% of the time" is something to be particularly proud of - but I'm not so convinced it is. There's still an error rate in there of more than 1 in 7 words, and even this short paragraph I've written has 64 words. Following the rules should still result in 9 pronunciation mistakes, which seems like a lot.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- oh_my_goodness 4y ago"the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time." Arguably the author concedes Shaw's point before moving on to more interesting stuff.
- lifthrasiir 4y agojan Misali (or possibly others, but this is the first known occurrence to my knowledge) has argued that a much better example would be pfysche [1], which is within the observed English spelling rules and still hard to predict its pronunciation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEsqY4MH40s&t=25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEsqY4MH40s&t=25s
- riffraff 4y ago
- usr1106 4y agoThat ghoti is pronounced fish seems rather widely known. Fewer people seem to be aware that ghoti is silent: gh as in right o as in people t as in mortgage i as in business
- coreyp_1 4y agoI know that the pronunciation for this is all nonstandard and "wrong", and I still love it! So much so that I bought the ghoti.io domain name, and I'm currently writing a collection of C++ libraries under the collective project name "Ghoti.io". (.io actually means Indian Ocean) First was a programming language called "Tang" ("Template lANGuage", also a type of fish). Project available on GitHub. Second was a thread pool worker queue call "Pool". Also available on GitHub. Now I'm working on an HTTP server named "Wave". For surfing the web, of course. Still working on it, not ready for public consumption. Yes, they are bad puns and double meanings. No, I don't care. Yes, I'm enjoying it. And I still love the word "ghoti"!
- debarshri 4y agoIt also present a group of people in Bengal [1] whose main diet is fish centric. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti_people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti_people