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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#61

Post by JadeNB »

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…

> punctuation, especially placement of commas

If it's any consolation, in my experience, no two native English speakers can agree on where and how often commas are needed either.

Re: Ghoti

#62

Post by vmception »

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 never thought of it this way. I'm American and I can understand fluent English speaking Europeans way better than I can understand British, unless that British person is from London. 70%? That's optimistic. I don't even think I am understanding words, only the most likely context in the flow of a conversation and the most likely way to react.

Fluent Northern European English (Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia, North Germany) almost blends into "normal" English to me. It is kind of shocking.

Re: Ghoti

#63

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Funny story, had this happen to me in a hostel in Germany. I had to “translate“ from English with a heavy Italian accent to/from English with a heavy Vietnamese accent between roommates. Basically I just repeated what each said into my California English accent with a few touch ups. Everyone finally understood. :D

Re: Ghoti

#64

Post by ajmurmann »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #43
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…

I was in school during this time as well and before the reform had an entire grade point deducted from most exams because of my bad spelling. The new spelling immediately made sense to me and the issue went away. So much less learning of exceptions that made only historical sense.

But then I'm also the kind of person who thinks we should embrace the positivist calendar and agree on a single language.

Re: Ghoti

#65

Post by toddsiegel »

In teaching my young son to read I have become starkly aware at just how inconsistent English is.

I never consciously realized how many ways there are to pronounce "ough". And not a single one makes sense.

That said, I am amazed at how quickly he's figuring it all out.

Re: Ghoti

#66

Post by hpkuarg »

mchaver wrote: post #55
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.

I'm not a native speaker of English, either, though with perfect American fluency. I find myself switching to "international English" in those contexts.

Actually, the word "international" is a good example -- in my regular American accent it would be pronounced like "innernational", whereas I would distinguish the T when conversing with non-native speakers.

Re: Ghoti

#67

Post by egypturnash »

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…

American English speakers can have trouble understanding British English speakers too, fwiw. Mostly due to some dramatically different slang and pronunciation rather than use of more obscure words though.

Re: Ghoti

#68

Post by jwilliams »

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…

Plus, native speakers tend to use a lot more idiom. Which generally makes things much harder to understand (but arguably more fun) -- this is even quite noticeable when encountering English from different regions.

Re: Ghoti

#69

Post by mikelward »

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

Did you mean Gloucester and lieutenant?

Re: Ghoti

#70

Post by thenewwazoo »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #44
skrause wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/)

Apropos not much, I’m a native English speaker who is learning Spanish quite intensively, and I can say without a doubt that there is more variation across Spanish dialects than English. Different regions have hugely different lexicons, with many many different words for the same things. Just try to predict the word for “green pea” based on region! Learning Spanish is like learning 15 languages at once. It’s hilarious fun but specialization becomes a concern very very early.
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