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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#151

Post by flobosg »

tmountain wrote: post #132
lemming wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same for me. I speak "North American" Spanish fluently. I struggle with Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean Spanish. My sweet spot is non-native speakers, as the vocab is usually simplified.

> I struggle with Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean Spanish.

As a Chilean I understand very well what you mean ;)

Re: Ghoti

#152

Post by dwcnnnghm »

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.

This is definitely true, but I think it's also valuable to ask "how much and how fast?"

Re: Ghoti

#153

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

desert_boi wrote: post #33
aidos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Fascinating how many letters you need to represent all the vowels.

Western American English has 14 vowels and some parts of Eastern have 15 (the caught/cot distinction).

Interesting. The pin-pen merger and caught-cot merger have very little (if any) overlap.

It looks like Florida and Texas might soon merge caught and cot, while retaining the pin-pen merger, in which case they'd only have 13 vowels, but I suspect they would probably end up splitting pin and pen eventually as their regional accent gets watered down to be closer to the General American accent.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Pin-pen....

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Co...

Re: Ghoti

#154

Post by tryauuum »

anamexis wrote: post #143
tryauuum wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Was there such a point? The person who invented this spelling was 21 years old, if I'm reading the article correctly. Who knows, maybe the entire point of inventing it was to impress opposite sex.

Re: Ghoti

#155

Post by tryauuum »

tryauuum wrote: post #154
anamexis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Was there such a point? The person who invented this spelling was 21 years old, if I'm reading the article correctly. Who knows, maybe the entire point of inventing it was to impress opposite sex.

...and then other people tried to use this word to advocate language reforms, of course. All I want to say is that this word doesn't make me feel there's need to change spelling rules. Other examples, like dough-through-enough are more moving.

Re: Ghoti

#156

Post by petercooper »

egypturnash wrote: post #67
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.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation.

Another funny one I ran into a few times was how for a time like 8:30, we'd say "half eight" in the UK, but when I would casually say this in the US people would be like "half eight? you mean four?" It had never occurred to me this common British parlance would be unintelligible elsewhere. Of course, there are just as many things the other way around, although watching a lot of US TV will take care of that.

Re: Ghoti

#157

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Benjamin Franklin too was an advocate of reforming spelling, and phonetic spelling.

Seems to be a recurring theme for English because it's such a difficult language owing largely to its awful spelling.

But it has never, and probably will never, take off, unless, perhaps, we first have a Jacobin Revolution in the U.S. and UK, complete with a Terror of our own. God forbid. (Though even that didn't fix the French language.)

Re: Ghoti

#158

Post by jan_Inkepa »

canjobear wrote: post #109
wirrbel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find the noun capitalization in German nice because there's no ambiguity about whether you should capitalize. Whereas in English we capitalize "proper names" but it's not always clear what is a proper name, and I always have to look up if you're supposed to capitalize things like prepositions in movie titles.

German-as-a-Second-language speaker here -

There's a lot of ambiguity and corner cases about what's a noun in German when you drill down to it (It maybe doesn't seem a problem coming English because you don't have to decide every time you write a word whether it's a noun or not). And Germans in highschool are drilled in this apparently, so many grow to hate it a bit. For example, take 'ein Paar'\'ein paar' (a pair) - in english you say oh pair is a noun so great. But in german whether you write it big or small depends on whether you're using it as an indefinite pronoun or a noun. You can apparently use it to distinguish a pair of trousers (in Paar Hosen) from a pair of trousers (ein paar Hosen), though don't ask me which is which...

And there are some fossilised expressions where even though things are nouns they're written small (e.g. 'durch dick und dünn' (through thick and thin.) ), and there are cases of capitalising things that sure look like adjectives though...I don't know how linguistics classify the parts of speech formally...

Or another example - if say "I take part" ("ich nehme teil") in something, is 'part' a noun? The german sentence is a word-for-word translation of the english, and 'Teil' is a noun in german (meaning 'part'), but you don't capitalise it because teil is part of the verb 'teilnehmen' and not independently a noun in this context.

(here's my personal menagerie of capitalisation rules for German: https://gist.github.com/increpare/b5d652b535656b794c47a77c1d... , and here's a relevant page (in German) by Duden, one of the two main authorities on German orthography - https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/Groß-%2... . It's not a short page, and not something that comes intuitively to people. They learn this stuff).

All that said, I like German orthography! I enjoy compound words and (plus or minus edge cases) its approach to capitalisation.

Re: Ghoti

#159

Post by already »

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!

Registered as already

Re: Ghoti

#160

Post by jacobush »

petercooper wrote: post #156
egypturnash wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…

Half eight in Swedish is 7:30 :-)
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