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ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as pa
by knome 1y ago
ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as part of '-tion' where the pronunciation slurred over time. Pretending it says anything about the nature of the English language outside of English being a complex merging of various other languages that has evolved with time is silly.
- salomonk_mur 1y agoRead and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples. English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization. Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
- efilife 1y ago[flagged]
- selectodude 1y agoEnglish lacking a language regulator makes it hard to be a bootlicker for that particular language. Whose boot are they licking?
- eviks 1y agoThe blob's
- JKCalhoun 1y agoWhat was the poem (song?) that captured many more of these? (Anyone?)
- defrost 1y agoThe Chaos (1922) by Gerard Nolst Trenité ? https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw (and others similar)
- JKCalhoun 1y agoBingo!
- toast0 1y ago> wind, rewind Wind and rewind are fine. It's just wind and wind are a problem, like read and read. For example, wind and rewind sound the same in: Rewind that, so I can see him wind up.
- yread 1y agoalso wound and wound
- jcranmer 1y agoThe best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is https://www.zompist.com/spell.html https://www.zompist.com/spell.html, which at the end admits: > I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. There's too many oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people think. Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of sanity that some people try to portray it as.
- ragazzina 1y agoThis article feels to me as it was written in bad faith, trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing the point was proved. The author happily start the article by submitting: >The purpose of this page is to describe [...] the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time. but then they quietly show that with their whole page of rules, the reader will not actually pronounce 85% of the words correctly as they just claimed, but actually less than 60%. By arbitrarily deciding that a number of errors can be considered small, the author bumps the number of "correctly pronounced words" to 85%. Are we talking about 85% of the whole language? No, just 5000 words. Even if they are the most frequent in the written language, they would still only account for around 95% of all the words. The author position is: - people complain about the English spelling all the time, saying it's horrible - the English spelling is actually pretty systematic and this page will explain the rules to understand it - when you will have mastered these rules, you will pronounce half of the words perfectly - for extremely common words such as "give", "get", "real", "very", "put", "half" you are still SOL - the english spelling is not so horrible after all: as a perfect student you will only butcher more than 1 word every 10 spoken To me, the author has proved the point he was trying to disprove. (and in which rule do /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)
- Pooge 1y agoCould you please share your list? I have this discussion a few times per year and I'd love to hand that list to people that think written English makes sense. I was thinking of writing a blog article on it but I don't think I'd need to anymore!
- efilife 1y agoI'll organize it a bit and I can (if I don't forget) share it tomorrow
- Pooge 1y agoPing!
- efilife 1y agoBelieve me or not, I kept the list in a chat with my girlfriend on a certain social platform and got my account banned (just yesterday). I'll bother her to find it, check this thread in a week if I don't get it in the next hour. Although the list is not as extensive as you may think
- Pooge 1y agoAppreciated nevertheless! Cheers
- efilife 1y agocompiling the list together tomorrow. sorry for the wait
- efilife 1y agoHere's the list. You probably expected something larger due to me saying I maintain it since 2022, but I wanted to keep the best examples here https://pastebin.com/JhFdEY5Y https://pastebin.com/JhFdEY5Y Pasting it here as HN doesn't like my formatting
- marci 1y ago> In my native language these kinds of errors are impossible as how you pronounce letters doesn't change depending on the word they are in Don't forget when the pronunciation depends solely on the meaning. Live or Live?
- brainwad 1y agoYour examples are more or less regular though. English is a stress-based language, so it's expected that pronunciation might change when you add an extra syllable, if the stress moves (syllable -> syllabic is another example, btw). > wind, rewind This one is trivial, no? the "wind" in "rewind" is pronounced the same, with /aj/. The "wind" with /ɪ/ is unrelated.
- huimang 1y agoAll languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue these days to single out english and use it as a punching bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are logical. They all have irregularities and illogical aspects. It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn by speaking. It's not unique to english.
- int_19h 1y agoEnglish is singled out because its orthography really is atrociously bad even when compared with other languages. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321
- huimang 1y agoAmongst niche circles of linguists, maybe. It's easy to single out for the average person because it's popular- english is a language learned around the entire world. Besides, I'd rather have some more word pronunications than memorizing a table of der/das/die,dem/dem/der and a word's gender on top of learning the word itself. Or changing the position of a verb depending on if I used a modal verb or not.
- int_19h 1y agoWe were talking about the orthography specifically. There are certainly areas in which English is much simpler than other languages, including those that you mention. But its orthography is objectively very bad.
- coffeeling 1y agoA Dutch man wrote an amazing poem highlighting the absurdity of English orthography: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
- pookha 1y agoAs someone that enjoys reading I can't think of a more descriptive language than the English language...It's easily one of the most powerful languages on earth and has twice (!) the number of words in its vocabulary compared to something like French, which is heavily centralized by some managerial class. You just have to appreciate the language for what its strengths are (unbounded capability to communicate using just words) vs what you as a novice need to do to master it. Which, to be frank, is easier than mastering something like the Korean language that has all this drama and ceremony around politeness and speech levels.