Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ghoti

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 248 posts

Re: Ghoti

#101

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Yes, I've heard this before. I've even had to ""translate"" between an Ulsterman and an Afrikaner who both nominally spoke English as a first language but were unable to understand one another's accents a lot of the time. Regional accents and idioms increase confusion, while all International English speakers have a uniform, comprehensible, slightly bland idiom and accent.

Re: Ghoti

#103

Post by cronopios »

franciscop wrote: post #97
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…

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.

Re: Ghoti

#104

Post by fl0wenol »

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…

I don't know if this is unique to English. But I'd say it's culturally acceptable in America, Canada, the UK, etc. to use the passive voice and qualify all statements so that you can mean something entirely different or have a way of weaseling out of any commitments implied by what you say.

If you speak in the active voice and use simple, direct statements, people assume that you're in the military, giving orders, or perhaps a charlatan if you're trying to sell something.

Like a carnival barker.

That has a negative connotation unfortunately.

Re: Ghoti

#105

Post by aledalgrande »

anderspitman wrote: post #32
aledalgrande wrote: post #26

And natives still laugh when I pronounce a word wrong between the million others I say

Do you feel like they're laughing in mockery to make you feel bad, or just because it sounds funny and they actually want to laugh with you and not just at you? I was in Sweden for the first time last year. Besides learning the proper pronunciation of my given name ("Ahndairsh" with a slightly hard "sh"), at one point I noticed the words "Hej hej" written on a bunch of things. I asked them what "hedge hedge" means, a…

It doesn't really matter why, as you always feel you are the "different" one, especially in professional environments.

Re: Ghoti

#106

Post by screye »

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…

Can second this.

My house has folks from France, Burundi, US and India. The non-US people find it a lot easier to understand each other's accents than Americans do understanding us.

Ironically though, I have a bad habit of using big words in spoken English, because I learnt it as written bookish English first.

Re: Ghoti

#107

Post by crispyporkbites »

myth2018 wrote: post #86

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 an…

Forget Esperanto, give Toki Pona a look

Re: Ghoti

#108

Post by every »

adventured wrote: post #47
html5web wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You username is a hack, wow!

I'm surprised it was available as recently as 2019.

Seemingly one of the lesser considered adjectives. I have used it in a number of places with no rejections, so far. It was originally the name of a nethack character that attempted to ascend "every" role. And failed, of course...

Re: Ghoti

#109

Post by canjobear »

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…

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.

Re: Ghoti

#110

Post by godelski »

This reminds me of a stack exchange puzzle that uses this same pattern. [0]

While this isn't the "correct" answer I think everyone agrees that it is the "best" answer (or at least the funniest). As a language lover, this is just a beautiful and hilarious.

[0] https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/32280/22182

Post reply on HN