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Ghoti

en.wikipedia.org

31–40 of 248 posts

Re: Ghoti

#31
post #18

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…

> and get rid of the `ß/ss` mess.

Swiss Standard German got rid of ß :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German

Re: Ghoti

#32

And natives still laugh when I pronounce a word wrong between the million others I say

Do you feel like they're laughing in mockery to make you feel bad, or just because it sounds funny and they actually want to laugh with you and not just at you? I was in Sweden for the first time last year. Besides learning the proper pronunciation of my given name ("Ahndairsh" with a slightly hard "sh"), at one point I noticed the words "Hej hej" written on a bunch of things. I asked them what "hedge hedge" means, and they had a good laugh teasing me about it (it's pronounced "hey hey", and seems to mean about the same thing as the English). I laughed with them and it was actually a bonding experience with my new friends.

Re: Ghoti

#33
post #23
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.

Western American English has 14 vowels and some parts of Eastern have 15 (the caught/cot distinction).

Re: Ghoti

#34
post #5

> while ti would only resemble sh when followed by a vowel sound ("mention", "martian", "patient", "spatial"). ti isn't "sh" in "mention," it's "ch," at least in any dialect I'm aware of. Cf. slang for Twitter mentions, "menchies."

What dialects are you aware of? I don't know anyone around me that says menchun, everyone I know says menshun

Re: Ghoti

#35

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.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Re: Ghoti

#37

And natives still laugh when I pronounce a word wrong between the million others I say

There's a small category of words, at least in British English, that act as a fairly effective shibboleth when it comes to identify non-native speakers. Usually names for places, but not only:

Glouchester, Worcester, Worcestershire, leftenant etc

Re: Ghoti

#38

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'.)

> spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'?

You've forgotten "kair", the northeast/canadian maritimes version

Re: Ghoti

#39
As a polyglot and linguist, I have analyzed the spelling as follows:

Gh - Arabic hard G, O - Persian Ou, Ti - Russian Tee.

Re: Ghoti

#40
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…

You don't need to go to an alternate Universe to find a place that uses a phonetic script and the metric system. Just go to India.
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