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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#81

Post by dang »

User23 wrote: post #48
the8472 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That attribution to Twain is bogus. I believe it started as a letter to the editor in some mid-20th century magazine. Let me see if I can dig up the citation.

(Edit 2: the Economist came later! see downthread)

Edit: the joke originated as a letter to the Economist in 1971: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof.... The classic internet version (referencing the European Commission) was a later rewrite—no idea by whom. It's interesting that the original was a UK in-joke ("Haweve, sins xe Wely, xe Airiy, and xe Skots du not spik Ingliy") but the rewrite became more outward-facing, a sort of Euroskeptic joke when light humor about that was still possible (I got it in an email in the 90s), as well as quite a bit funnier.

Misassigning it to Mark Twain is not surprising, because all great quotes by obscure people get reattributed to famous writers over time. Also, Twain wrote a famous and funny essay complaining about German (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html), and he was interested in alphabet reform too (http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1322/).

Re: Ghoti

#82

Post by egypturnash »

xenator wrote: post #73
livealife wrote: post #4

One of the core problems of English language.

Most interesting problem of English language is that it is not direct. Good example is small talks. In many cultures direct question assume direct answer. If somebody asks you "how are you" you kinda obligated to give response with your real feelings and events happened to you last time. In USA mostly every stranger can start this conversation and expect only unsalted response. This tradition is much deeper than you…

May I ask what language you are a native speaker of? I have a couple ideas based on the patterns of your errors but I’m not sure.

(My strongest guess is Russian due to your omission of articles.)

Re: Ghoti

#84

Post by olalonde »

pge wrote: post #51
maest wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a native French speaker and I never know how I'm supposed to pronounce French words and expressions used in English (e.g. Versailles, bon appétit, déjà vu, etc.).

Re: Ghoti

#85

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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…

> As a german, what I prefer about english spelling... You do not capitalize Nouns in your Sentences

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries when German was still a lingua franca of various scientific fields (linguistics, archaeology), it actually was the practice of some writers outside Germany to not capitalize nouns. One sees this in many German-language scholarly publications from Sweden and Finland, for example.

Re: Ghoti

#86

Post by myth2018 »

That is one of the reasons why I think Esperanto has too much more to offer to the World as an international language than English.

I'm not an activist. Besides, I enjoy so many features of English.

But the resources one must invest to learn it as a second language make it unreachable to a huge amount of people around the globe, providing breeding ground to the formation of "linguistic elites" and deepening social and economic inequalities.

Having contact with poor people in my country and others and being a non-native speaker myself make me very aware of that.

Re: Ghoti

#87

Post by duck2 »

war1025 wrote: post #49
zwaps wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another effect is that the sound variety in the language was reduced. The new alphabet has "n" for both "ŋ" and "n" sounds. Now, in year 2020, no one spells out ŋ. See "taŋrı", "seniŋ", etc.

Re: Ghoti

#88

Post by jrockway »

war1025 wrote: post #49
zwaps wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. A good example in English is Mary/marry/merry. Many speakers pronounce all three words identically, but many speakers distinguish them. Should the spelling be unified? Probably not, because they are three separate words that might sometimes sound the same in speech. Simplifying spelling removes any way of distinguishing them.

English is filled with homophones, and while you can almost always figure out which variant is meant through context, in writing the opportunity is reduced. (You can't ask a book a follow-up question.)

Re: Ghoti

#89

Post by SenHeng »

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…

Immigrants in Japan have the same experience too. We often make the same mistakes and thus have a shared understanding of misunderstandings. I would expect immigrants in other places appphave similar experiences too.

Re: Ghoti

#90

Post by inlined »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #63
derefr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Same thing happened to me once with a Welsh couple in Krakow. The husband and I could understand the wife but not each other.
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