4 ms·

Except in German this is not a problem. The idea that you could say/hear a word and not know how to spell it doesn't even make sense in that context.

zelphirkalt 2y ago
I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.
- Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues. What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
  - Maken 2y ago
    There are a couple of rules that cause confusion: - b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages. - h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/). - g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses). - x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry). Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words. For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-de-los-grafemas-y-d%C3%ADgrafos-del-espa%C3%B1ol https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      Also, in Latin America (but not most of Spain) z and s are pronounced the same.
  - lomase 2y ago
    H, V/B, LL/Y are problematic in Spanish and you have to memorize how each word is wrote down.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
  - Maken 2y ago
    The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Spanish is indeed somewhat more phonemic in spelling, even though it's not as good as Finnish, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian. That said, Spanish and German are both so much better than English that the difference between them can be disregarded in this context. The irony is that almost any major European language (with the notable exception of French) has better spelling than English; and even French, although it's horribly overcomplicated, is more consistent when it comes to reading.
throw_pm23 2y ago
Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
- jbeninger 2y ago
  But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues. This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know. (Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
  - e63f67dd-065b 2y ago
    > I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half). I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".
    - naniwaduni 2y ago
      > In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half). That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153 (It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)
joshdavham 2y ago
> Except in German this is not a problem. I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
Ekaros 2y ago
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
- Tor3 2y ago
  And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.
cetu86 2y ago
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. That explains why it looks like a 'silly' version of english to english speakers.

zelphirkalt 2y ago

I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.

Xenoamorphous 2y ago
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues. What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
- Maken 2y ago
  There are a couple of rules that cause confusion: - b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages. - h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/). - g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses). - x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry). Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words. For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-de-los-grafemas-y-d%C3%ADgrafos-del-espa%C3%B1ol https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    Also, in Latin America (but not most of Spain) z and s are pronounced the same.
- lomase 2y ago
  H, V/B, LL/Y are problematic in Spanish and you have to memorize how each word is wrote down.
adastra22 2y ago
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
- Maken 2y ago
  The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Spanish is indeed somewhat more phonemic in spelling, even though it's not as good as Finnish, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian. That said, Spanish and German are both so much better than English that the difference between them can be disregarded in this context. The irony is that almost any major European language (with the notable exception of French) has better spelling than English; and even French, although it's horribly overcomplicated, is more consistent when it comes to reading.

throw_pm23 2y ago

Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.

jbeninger 2y ago
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues. This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know. (Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
- e63f67dd-065b 2y ago
  > I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half). I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".
  - naniwaduni 2y ago
    > In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half). That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153 (It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)

joshdavham 2y ago

> Except in German this is not a problem. I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.

Ekaros 2y ago

Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.

Tor3 2y ago
And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.

cetu86 2y ago

If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)

Suppafly 2y ago
>In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. That explains why it looks like a 'silly' version of english to english speakers.