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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#141

Post by DonaldFisk »

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…

There has been a very successful, though limited, reform of English spelling, by Noah Webster. It's him you can thank (or blame) for analyze, color, center, defense, and connection replacing their original spellings (analyse, colour, centre, defence, and connexion).

Re: Ghoti

#142

Post by fermienrico »

Nationalism is rampant and leaking through in this thread. “English” sucks, replace with ______ native tongue is better. Someone posted a thread about cost of their neighborhood road renovation project and immediately an Australian tells the thread that America feels like a third world country from a sample size of exactly 1. I am not even American.

Everyone is getting tribal. Humanity is splitting apart with infighting even on a highly intellectual community as HN.

Folks, please try to be civil and self-introspective, especially if something you say perhaps is hypocritical or fuels your own nationalistic pscyche. Seek truth - the language nature understands, not our evolutionary tribalism and cultures.

Re: Ghoti

#143

Post by anamexis »

tryauuum wrote: post #140
tom_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riiiiight, so obviously you personally have no problems with the spelling rules of English (which do, in general, exist, contrary to popular belief). But, we need to ask ourselves: if it is at all conceivable that "ghoti" could be sounded out as "fish", just what the fuck is going on here? Sure, you don't have a problem dealing with this nonsense - I don't have one neither! But I struggle to believe that you've faile…

(maybe I do not understand the definition of "conceivable") I think it is totally inconceivable that someone would read this word as "fish"! It would require extreme amount of mind-bending! Maybe this is why I am so angry with this article. They could have picked less artificial example to demonstrate irregularities.

It's not supposed to be believable - quite the opposite. The entire point is that it's an artifical example to demonstrate irregularities.

Re: Ghoti

#144

Post by fermienrico »

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…

This is really obvious and not that remarkable. Replace English with your own mother tongue, German, I guess? And then ask the same exact question to non-native German speakers. The reason why you can't see that is because you're unaware of proficienty of your own mother tongue. Everyone is.

Re: Ghoti

#145

Post by [deleted] »

fermienrico wrote: post #142

Nationalism is rampant and leaking through in this thread. “English” sucks, replace with ______ native tongue is better. Someone posted a thread about cost of their neighborhood road renovation project and immediately an Australian tells the thread that America feels like a third world country from a sample size of exactly 1. I am not even American. Everyone is getting tribal. Humanity is splitting apart with infight…

[deleted]

Re: Ghoti

#146

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

tdeck wrote: post #138
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we already did this quite a while ago. In 2020, which capital will you choose? London, Delhi, D.C., Canberra, &c. &c.?

In AmE the dialect would likely be "midwestern speech" since the political history of our "standard dialect" differs from that of many other countries. I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets the short end of the stick. The right way would probably be to bring in many different stakeholders from different sp…

> I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets the short end of the stick.

That seems like a bad idea to me. Standard Written English (which varies only slightly, with minor spelling differences) is fairly intelligible across speakers of different dialects and even quite a few time periods.

If English didn't already have a written standard, all of this might be worth considering. But actual reform would take massive effort for pretty minor benefits, which wouldn't endure long anyway given the ever constant presence of language change.

Re: Ghoti

#147

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

SenHeng wrote: post #89
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…

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.

A friend of mine spent a few months in Japan, and he said the strangest part was learning that speaking simple, slower English with a strong Japanese accent was often better for getting around than using his broken Japanese.

Re: Ghoti

#148

Post by catalogia »

ajmurmann wrote: post #52
codingdave wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that how it's spelled in Greek too though? Well, with the Greek alphabet anyway. I think it's Δελφίν.

Re: Ghoti

#149

Post by dwcnnnghm »

jrockway wrote: post #88
war1025 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do think this is a great point but I do think the idea is fun to consider anyways. My first thought would be some (silent) {super,sub}script symbol/letter to indicate distinction between them. Obviously this feels like we'd be right back where we started but if every non-homophone was neatly standardised (and, as my sibling comment pointed out, every homonym made unambiguous) that seems promising! This is, of course, operating under the assumption that homophones are primarily edge cases (or that the other words in the homophone group are not often used in the same context, or at all).

Minimal research turned up two lists. One only lists groups of n > 2 (88 triples; 24 quadruples; 2 quintuples; 1 sextet; and 1 septet) [0]. The other is for British English (441 groups) [1].

Your example, by the way, is a particularly interesting case! From the Wikipedia page [2]: 17% of Americans (primarily in the Northeast and most clearly in Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island) pronounce each distinctly, with a further 26% merging only 2/3 pronunciations. Accordingly, their distinct IPA pronunciations are /ˈme(ə)ɹi/, /ˈmæɹi/, /ˈmɛɹi/, respective to your ordering (the last, merry, is the one we've converged on). More frustrating still, the list of "multinyms" in [0] excludes this example so it's especially difficult to know how many there may be in practice.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160825095711/http://people.sc....

[1] http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

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