Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ghoti

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 248 posts

Re: Ghoti

#41

Post by hellofunk »

codingdave wrote: post #40
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…

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.

Quite a lot of languages well outside of India and United States are spelled phonetically.

Re: Ghoti

#42

Post by html5web »

every wrote: post #13

"Homophones, Weakly"[0] enjoys a place in my RSS feed. And I have a supposedly complete version of the referenced poem, "The Chaos"[1]... [0] http://homophonesweakly.blogspot.com/ [1] https://every.sdf.org/various/longish/thechaos.txt

You username is a hack, wow!

Re: Ghoti

#43

Post by littlecranky67 »

imedadel wrote: post #12

Concerning the spelling reform, is there any language that recently underwent a successful spelling reform? And by recent, I mean in the last 10 years. The thing is that with the widespread usage of the internet it seems harder to successfully reform the orthography of a language. Every language is, nowadays, in one way or another decentralized and uncontrolled by language authorities.

Not 10 years, but yeah, German was completely reformed some 24 years ago. It is still pretty major as several countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and others with german-speaking minorities) had to coordinate and consent.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

I as a child started learning the old orthography in school, was taught the "new" one later on and had to use it and even the "new new" one (there was basically a version 2.1 minor update). To this day I am confused about how to correctly spell and write words, and I always end up mixing old/new orthography. The fact that almost all major newspapers refuse to fully adhere to the new orthography and use custom deviations every here and there does not exactly help.

Lessons learned: It is a mess, don't do it.

Re: Ghoti

#44

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

skrause wrote: post #29
_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.

That's regular but not phonetic. (I'm not fully convinced that Spanish has quite as much variation as English, but I'll admit I'm not expert on Spanish.) But what do you do when certain segments are not just pronounced differently, but completely absent in some varieties? (E.g. my example about /kɑ:/ vs /kɑ:r/)

Re: Ghoti

#45

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

core-questions wrote: post #38
_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'.)

> spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'? You've forgotten "kair", the northeast/canadian maritimes version

Yeah, it wasn't meant to be exhaustive. One might add Jamaican 'cyaa' as well.

Re: Ghoti

#47

Post by adventured »

html5web wrote: post #42
every wrote: post #13

"Homophones, Weakly"[0] enjoys a place in my RSS feed. And I have a supposedly complete version of the referenced poem, "The Chaos"[1]... [0] http://homophonesweakly.blogspot.com/ [1] https://every.sdf.org/various/longish/thechaos.txt

You username is a hack, wow!

I'm surprised it was available as recently as 2019.

Re: Ghoti

#48

Post by User23 »

the8472 wrote: post #35
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.

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 "…

This spelling reform was pioneered by Mark Twain[1].

[1] http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html

Re: Ghoti

#49

Post by war1025 »

zwaps wrote: post #30
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.

The trouble with any of these efforts is that pronunciation drifts over time. So eventually you end up in the same place again.

Re: Ghoti

#50

Post by dakiol »

As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British.

I work with Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch and I understand them 99% of the time. We use "normal" words (we are not fancy regarding vocabulary) and pronounce them in a non-native way (the way all Europeans that speak English understand)... But the moment our British colleagues join the conversation, then our understanding decreases to around 70%: either because of the usage of "fancy" words or because of pronunciation.

Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?"

Post reply on HN