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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#21

Post by koolba »

dylan604 wrote: post #19
imglorp wrote: post #11

If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript. Of course, in an alternate universe, this super…

>Of course, in an alternate universe, this superior writing system was adopted along with the full SI unit system. in that same universe do we eliminate 2^N in favor of 10^N?

No I think we’d just be born with four fingers on each hand.

Re: Ghoti

#22

Post by bjoli »

LatteLazy wrote: post #9

I'm a native English speaker who is currently learning German. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING YOUR SPELLING Work GERMANY! Sorry about our mess of BS you have to learn to use English.

I rarely doubt my German spelling (a language I haven't used much in over 10 years) but with English it happens several times a day.

The fact that "spelling bees" are even a thing is proof that something is wrong, at least if you are using an alphabet.

German is a lot better than my mother tongue (what kind of spelling is that? Tounge? Tung??) Swedish, which, while awful, is still better than English.

I would guess that the best in class would be Italian. I took an Italian spelling test (listen and write) and I got 95% correct without knowing any Italian.

Edit: and even though I read and write englush several hour a day, my spelling is still awful. I wrote a small elisp script to find out my most corrected words in flyspell. The list just grew in every direction until I gave up.

Re: Ghoti

#23

Post by aidos »

imglorp wrote: post #11

If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript. Of course, in an alternate universe, this super…

Nice! Fascinating how many letters you need to represent all the vowels.

Re: Ghoti

#24

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically-based reform would be tricky. E.g., should we spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'?

(It's also worth mentioning that English spelling is position-dependent: there aren't any real words where 'gh' at the beginning is pronounced as 'f'.)

Re: Ghoti

#25

Post by anonu »

Ghoti, sure... But the whole world still wants to learn English. Most people are not deterred by the messed up spelling and other irregularities.

Also, English like any language is a living and breathing thing. New words come in, new spellings, etc... Reform would cause even more confusion than benefits

Re: Ghoti

#27

Post by soared »

wirrbel wrote: post #18
LatteLazy wrote: post #9

I'm a native English speaker who is currently learning German. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING YOUR SPELLING Work GERMANY! Sorry about our mess of BS you have to learn to use English.

As a german, what I prefer about english spelling: * You do not capitalize Nouns in your Sentences which is means I don't have to analyse the lexical Structure of a Sentence while writting stuff. Stuff that is hard in English but rarely talked about because of the prominence of the phonetics-vs-traditional spelling: * hyphenation (fairly complex, basically one needs to look it up or rely on tooling in english, rarely…

The nice thing about English if that with punctuation you can make up your own rules - pretty much. I toss in hyphens and stuff all the time...

Just match how you talk with how you write, and it reads very naturally.

Re: Ghoti

#28

Post by jacobolus »

dylan604 wrote: post #19
imglorp wrote: post #11

If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript. Of course, in an alternate universe, this super…

>Of course, in an alternate universe, this superior writing system was adopted along with the full SI unit system. in that same universe do we eliminate 2^N in favor of 10^N?

Doublings are much more intuitive than powers of 10.

If most logarithms were taken base 2 it would make a big improvement in their comprehensibility to laypeople.

For closest link to western music, use binary logarithms represented using duodecimals. It makes a very nice simple system for approximate arithmetic, since 1 digit after the duodecimal point is enough to represent 3 and 5 reasonably closely. (The same two approximations that make our music sound harmonic also make approximate arithmetic easy and convenient). Of course, that would work even better if we switched to using base twelve for general arithmetic and metrology, overall a big improvement over the often inconvenient decimal system.

Re: Ghoti

#29

Post by skrause »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #24

Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically-based reform would be tricky. E.g., should we spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'? (It's also worth mentioning that English spelling is position-dependent: there aren't any real words where 'gh' at the beginning is pronounced as 'f'.)

> Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically-based reform would be tricky.

Spanish has managed to do that. It has as much variety in its dialects as English (e.g. some dialects have very different "c" and "s" sounds or "b" and "v" sounds while others don't), yet all in all the orthography is quite regular and phonetic.

Re: Ghoti

#30

Post by zwaps »

LatteLazy wrote: post #9

I'm a native English speaker who is currently learning German. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING YOUR SPELLING Work GERMANY! Sorry about our mess of BS you have to learn to use English.

As a German, I recommend you take a look at Turkish. It's fantastic as there are zero exceptions.

Learn the phonetics of each letter, and you can literally speak any word.

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