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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#191

Post by dhosek »

cronopios wrote: post #103
franciscop wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

My younger Mexican in-laws who still occasionally use text-ese would say "q" instead of "k" (the latter normally being pronounced ka, while q is pronounced que).

Re: Ghoti

#192

Post by dhosek »

titanomachy wrote: post #77
ajmurmann wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And even Greek uses a single letter for the "f" sound. The fact that "φ" is transliterated as "ph" is a historical accident: in ancient Greek the letter was pronounced like p with an extra puff of air, like in "Phuket".

Which is reflected in some contractions where, e.g., ἀπὸ αἵματος becomes ἀφ’ αἵματος

Re: Ghoti

#193

Post by gck1 »

alboy wrote: post #172
cronopios wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Transliterated messages are still quite popular in Georgia (გამარჯობა, როგორ ხარ? > gamarjoba, rogor xar?), even in places where character limits don't apply. Which makes it practically impossible to use any translation services, as there are many ways to substitute a single letter or a sound, making reversing extremely hard. And if you add to the mix the poor quality of those translation services for Georgian language in general, you get texts that mostly make sense to just native speakers.

Re: Ghoti

#194

Post by greggman3 »

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…

It's just what you're used to. Visit Singapore and listen to Singlish. They all understand each other just fine because it's their dialect but if you're not used to it then it takes a while to get used to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAyRoPcuykY

Re: Ghoti

#195

Post by devonkim »

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…

One of the fun exchanges I saw transcripts in a linguistics course was between two ESL speakers - one native Spanish, the other native Japanese. Something as simple as not knowing the word “income” and using the Spanish “ingress” which was interpreted by the Japanese speaker as “English” was like the Naked Gun of language comedy for me.

But as an ESL person myself I’ve never thought of English as a language about rules as much as memorizations. It’s the x86 of human languages, for better or worse, and trying to systemize it fully was how I messed up English most as a kid and how my parents tried to teach it to me.

Re: Ghoti

#196

Post by tigershark »

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 guess that you have never spoken with Scottish, Irish, Indian and Singaporean people...

Re: Ghoti

#197

Post by tigershark »

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 height seems very strange. In British English it’s half past eight normally.

Re: Ghoti

#198

Post by tigershark »

vmception wrote: post #62
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, Nort…

In this case I think that you have never spoken with people from London with cockney accent..

Re: Ghoti

#199

Post by tigershark »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #131
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’ve experienced the same. I’d say people tend to speak way faster in their native tongue. Regardless, it is very frustrating to know the meaning and the spelling of an English word but not knowing how to pronounce it. Or the inverse, hearing a word I know but not recognising it until someone spells it for me or I see it written. I learnt most of my English in written form so this happened to me a lot when I moved to…

The most outrageous for me are still the heteronyms like lead the verb and lead the metal. To add insult to injury the past form of the verb is pronounced the same way as the metal even if they are written differently..

Re: Ghoti

#200

Post by tigershark »

jcranmer wrote: post #165
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…

Do you object to the fact that the spelling "th" invariably means /þ/ or /ð/, and not /th/? Or mapping "sh" to /ʃ/ and not /sh/? I highly doubt you do. Here's the thing: spelling rules are context-sensitive, and if you actually understand the underlying sound rules, spelling in English is often not that bad. For example, there is a fricatization process for /t/ and /s/ sounds convert to a /ʃ/ or a /ʒ/--this is how "-…

This is very interesting, but how do you pronounce lead?
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