More of such intriguing facts can be found in the book by Martin Jurafsky, Computational linguistics.
Ghoti
171–180 of 248 posts
Re: Ghoti
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Spanish on my teen years, which saw the rise of SMS and MSN Messenger, it was very common to see a simplified version of Spanish, where "hola" became "ola" since the h is mute, and similar changes. It was a brief period though, since now everyone (my age) uses proper grammar, and younger generations use English mixed in instead.
ola k ase? But that was because of the hard character limit in SMS messages, and that they used to cost money.
It was also very common to write long messages in "translit" (substituting Latin letters for equivalent Cyrillic ones, e.g. ф -> f) back then here in Russia since you could fit in 160 characters using GSM 03.38 (7-bit encoding) instead of 70 characters with UCS-2 (UTF-16 encoded) and SMS messages were quite expensive.
Re: Ghoti
#173As 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.
[deleted]
Re: Ghoti
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) -…
I guess identifying nouns is relatively easy for me since I'm a linguist :)
Re: Ghoti
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping
TL;DR, it's not actually "innernational", but rather an alveolar flap on the t that you have a hard time distinguishing between depending on where you grew up.
Re: Ghoti
#176If 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).
But we didn't learn. We kept at most of it - phoenix, cough, dough etc. He even suggested sensible transformations such as ache → ake, soup → soop, tongue → tung, machine → masheen etc. All of these make phonetical sense unlike the existing spellings (for whatever reason they exist).
I had read about Cut Spelling which, to me, sounds more like SMS lingo - something like "how du u du" - and even though I find SMS lingo really irritating (I have to see that a lot on dating apps) it actually does make sense phonetically :)
Re: Ghoti
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> reform English spelling You forgot about this one: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html .
I think that came from Mark Twain.
First published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1946 (Astounding later become Analog). Often recirculated with accumulated changes. As far as I know, this is the original.
MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM
by Dalton Edwards
Re: Ghoti
#178If 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…
I have a feeling SMS/texting lingo will succeed at what others, including Benjamin Franklin, Shaw, Webster, failed at :-)
Re: Ghoti
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
First published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1946 (Astounding later become Analog). Often recirculated with accumulated changes. As far as I know, this is the original.
MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM
by Dalton Edwards
Re: Ghoti
#180Nationalism 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…
I am yet to finish through the thread (I may not) but whatever I've seen are all comments on unintuitive and phonetically absurd spellings of many words in English language.