Ghoti • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghoti

#51

Post by pge » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

maest wrote: post #37

aledalgrande wrote: post #26

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

Lots of place names in US that reveal not just non-native speakers but also native speakers that aren’t locals. Some that come to mind: Worcester, MA; Wilkes-Barre, PA; Versailles, KY; New Berlin, PA; and many others.

Re: Ghoti

#52

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

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.

Germany had a spelling reform in the 90s that changed words to be spelled more phonetically rather than how they would have been spelled in their origin languages. For example "Delphin" (dolphin) became "Delfin" because German isn't Greek.

Re: Ghoti

#53

Post by derefr » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

dakiol wrote: post #50

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…

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

That’s likely because the languages you speak all share recent ancestry (if they’re not all Romance languages, they’re at least all descended from Proto-Indo-European.)

Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make very different mistakes.

Re: Ghoti

#54

Post by lemming » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

dakiol wrote: post #50

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…

FWIW I’m a native English speaker and the same happened to me when I learned Spanish. I suspect that with any language, native speakers have a much wider vocabulary and use more colloquialisms, not to mention speaking much faster and more cultural references etc.

Re: Ghoti

#55

Post by mchaver » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

dakiol wrote: post #50

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…

I suspect this is true for most non-native speakers of a language. They will find speaking with other non-native speakers because they will use less culturally encoded language, probably speak slower and are accustomed to speaking with others that have non-native pronunciation.

Re: Ghoti

#56

Post by rudewater » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

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.

Portuguese has frequent spelling reforms, with over 10 reforms since 1911. The most recent one started in 2009 and had a transition period that ended in 2016.

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

Re: Ghoti

#57

Post by xenator » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

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.

Most of exUSSR countries de facto making transition from russian language to their own. Some parts of these languages wasn't used in many fields (science, street language, popular music) for 50-70 years and only exists in the books. Push is mostly centralized by government or people who pay them. Correct me if I'm wrong, russian speaking population lost about 50 millions speakers in last 10-20 years. Most of these users made switch to languages that before was almost lost. Also some countries changed Cyrillic letters to latin.

I dont want to attack you personally, but idea that languages are uncontrolled is quite opposite. It is centralized more than many things. I think McDonald's is less centralized than this.

Re: Ghoti

#58

Post by mchaver » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #53

dakiol wrote: post #50

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…

> Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?" That’s likely because the languages you speak all share recent ancestry (if they’re not all Romance languages, they’re at least all descended from Proto-Indo-European.) Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make…

> Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make very different mistakes.

That's true. Assume a monolingual learner. You can predict the kinds of mistakes they will make based on their native language (phonetical, phonological, semantic, etc.). As a person learns more languages, they will likely get better at decoding these things. Particularly cultural based assumptions used in languages.

Re: Ghoti

#59

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

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…

> reform English spelling

You forgot about this one: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html.

Re: Ghoti

#60

Post by wcameronmiller » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

I'm glad the Wikipedia article included the link to this page (http://zompist.com/spell.html) that give a good breakdown of the actual general rules of English spelling - granted there's almost 60 of them.