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Ghoti

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Re: Ghoti

#201

Post by tigershark »

bjoli wrote: post #22
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.

I rarely doubt my German spelling (a language I haven't used much in over 10 years) but with English it happens several times a day. The fact that "spelling bees" are even a thing is proof that something is wrong, at least if you are using an alphabet. German is a lot better than my mother tongue (what kind of spelling is that? Tounge? Tung??) Swedish, which, while awful, is still better than English. I would guess t…

Perfectly agree with Italian. Once you know the few rules you can pronounce every word that you read, unlike English. Spanish would have also been a good example if not for the differences between all the nations that use Spanish, with the most egregious probably being Argentinian Spanish that pronounce ll sh or something like that..

Re: Ghoti

#202

Post by tigershark »

zwaps wrote: post #30
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, 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.

For some reasons that I don’t understand I think that spoken Turkish sometimes reminds me of Russian.. Not that I’m fluent in any of them but I usually can recognise Russian quite well and understand some words.

Re: Ghoti

#203

Post by 082349872349872 »

glenngillen wrote: post #113
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 grew up in Australia, so would have considered myself a native English speaker. We’re even a British colony! I moved to Scotland for a year, and London for a few years later. I’d regularly here phrasing I’d never heard before and would need the speaker to clarify or would look up later. In the vast majority of those cases it was most often an old word that appears to have fallen out of fashionable usage. “Ken” bein…

"Voice recognition lift" (BBC Scotland) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3lYLphzAnw

Re: Ghoti

#204

Post by lmm »

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…

It's not "normal" English, it's specifically American English - a lot of Europeans have learned from (or at least been heavily influenced by) American movies etc., so they speak an American style.

Re: Ghoti

#205

Post by lmm »

simias wrote: post #121
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…

It seems like proposing both a spelling reform and a script reform at the same time is doomed to failure. It's a fun experiment but if one is serious about proposing a pragmatic reform of English spelling, stick to the Latin alphabet and maybe add a few diacritics if you really need to. Can you imagine the insane amount of churn changing to a completely different script would create?

I don't know, it would make for a clean break with no confusion and middle ground. That might actually be easier to adopt than minor spelling shifts that could easily be seen as mistakes.

Re: Ghoti

#206

Post by tigershark »

jdminhbg wrote: post #5

> while ti would only resemble sh when followed by a vowel sound ("mention", "martian", "patient", "spatial"). ti isn't "sh" in "mention," it's "ch," at least in any dialect I'm aware of. Cf. slang for Twitter mentions, "menchies."

It’s something like sh: /ˈmɛnʃ(ə)n/ in Italian it would be pronounced as a soft “z” since it’s the way “ti” was pronounced in Latin.

Re: Ghoti

#207

Post by 082349872349872 »

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…

Your colleagues might be amused by Europanto[1], a creole created for amusement by professional translators.

My modest proposal is this: it used to annoy the brits that european english differs[2] to their dialect. On the other side, we should incite the possibility to embrace[3] our dialect for international use. Finally, this would paradoxically be a gift to EN-GB speakers, because EN-US speakers might then experience being separated by a common language.

[1] http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html

[2] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...

[3] as in s'pore, lah?

Re: Ghoti

#208

Post by lmm »

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.

In the age of sound recording, maybe not? I get the impression that spelling has drifted much less since the invention of the printing press.

Re: Ghoti

#209

Post by msla »

tom_ wrote: post #137
tryauuum wrote: post #123

I think this example is far-fetched and, due to being so far-fetched, is useless. I mean there are no actual english words where "gh" at the beginning of a word would be pronounced as "f", right? And "gh" at the end of a word hints heavily that you should pronounce it as "f", there are no irregularities here.

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…

> if it is at all conceivable that "ghoti" could be sounded out as "fish", just what the fuck is going on here?

"It isn't true, but if it could be, wouldn't that be a scandal?"

There's a name for thoughts like that, I just know it.

> Could it not be improved?

Yes, it can be improved. It can be improved multiple ways along multiple axes, whether you wish to emphasize etymology (to help foreign learners) or phonemic fidelity or phonetic fidelity or don't know the difference between phonemic and phonetic and just want words to be spelled like you say them, and those buffoons from across the ocean can suck eggs if the spelling gets all fouled up for them and their silly accents.

It's impossible to satisfy everyone. Once you propose any kind of improvement, therefore, everyone comes out of the woodwork to improve the improvement, leading to something which satisfies no one, because no one feels perfectly well-served. "Utopia Or Bust!" sounds good until you realize other people apparently want to lead you to perdition.

Re: Ghoti

#210

Post by 082349872349872 »

egypturnash wrote: post #75
pge wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of place names in US that reveal not just non-native speakers but also native speakers that aren’t locals. Some that come to mind: Worcester, MA; Wilkes-Barre, PA; Versailles, KY; New Berlin, PA; and many others.

How you pronounce “New Orleans” can show not only whether or not you are a local, but which part of town you are from, and how old you are. I can think of at least four or five ways.

knowing which part of town you are from means I no longer have to ask where you went to school, but there's still more to know, like:

What was your mama's name?

Can you make a roux?

(more seriously, New Orleans falls under my list of "civilised" places, because Carnaval/Fasnacht is still a thing there)

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