• fakeman_pretendname@feddit.ukEnglish
    120·
    2 个月前

    It just says “This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary”.

    It doesn’t say “This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary correctly”.

  • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.netEnglish
    901·
    2 个月前

    My favorite version of this is that spelling bees don’t exist in most (any?) other language, because their systems are more intuitive and consistent, but with English, if you can consistently spell words they give you a fucking trophy and you get money for college

    • cazssiew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      2 个月前

      In french we have “concours d’orthographe”. Pronunciation is pretty consistent, but we add a dozen letters for every sound we utter, so spelling’s still a mess.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        13·
        2 个月前

        I’ve seen enough French spelling to get it, though, and I don’t really speak French. English spelling is still often hard as a native speaker.

        You guys can have second place, our system is the most ass “bar none”.

    • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      2 个月前

      There are some other languages that have inconsistent spelling, but most do have some level of consistency yeah, also would character tests in Chinese/Japanese be considered similar to spelling bees?

      • PlexSheep@infosec.pubEnglish
        5·
        2 个月前

        Not really. They just have multiple pronunciation depending on which vocabulary they are part of/how they are used grammatically.

        But let me tell you, learning 2000 kanji and vocab they are used in is a pain. Still love 日本語 thought.

        • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          6·
          2 个月前

          What the heck is a sun truth language, anyways? :)

          I’m in the process now, and you’re definitely not wrong!

          • PlexSheep@infosec.pubEnglish
            3·
            2 个月前

            The meanings of the kanji are: sun - origin - language for 日本語

            I’m sure you know this, but kanji have different meanings, and this one refers to Japan being the land of the rising sun.

            • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              2 个月前

              Haha, yeah, I was just being silly and having a little fun. :)

              Although, learning all the meanings certainly does get overwhelming at times, especially when combinations of individual kanji characters can have substantially different meanings and readings than they do on their own!

              • PlexSheep@infosec.pubEnglish
                2·
                2 个月前

                I tried to change my PC and phone language to Japanese yesterday. I did not last long. It’s seriously hard.

  • Eunie@feddit.orgEnglish
    37·
    2 个月前

    Stupid question: Doesn’t a dictionary also contain the phonetic spelling?

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4413·
    2 个月前

    Two things about English.

    First, English is not one language, it’s a mix of several different languages with loanwords stolen from eveey culture encoutered. Grammar and conjugation is entirely inconsistent because it is based on Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Greek.

    Second, English is descriptive, not proscriptive. In other words, there are no rules to pronunciation or spelling. English words are spelled and pronounced the way English speakers spell and pronounce them. That’s how England and America can end up with such disparate spellings and pronunciations. If you are understood, you have spoken English. When new pronunciations and spellings become commonly used, they are added to the dictionary. When speaking and writing styles change, so do the rules of grammar.

    • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      351·
      2 个月前

      Aren’t most languages a mix of several languages?
      Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
      Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words…

      • Dagnet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        2 个月前

        Yeah, pretty much every single language. I think it’s funny when someone (usually americans) says their language has words from a bunch of languages because it shows they never really learned a second language. Word ‘clima’ in Portuguese or ‘Klima’ in German is from Greek for example, many languages have english words too, portuguese takes ‘playground’ and ‘check in’ to cite two but it has many more.

        • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          3·
          2 个月前

          Yeah, Polish has a decent amount of loan words for example, but they tend to be used for different things and polish also uses calques and native phrases for things, for example a car is a samochód, literally “self-walker”, and species names are written in Polish, not Latin

      • zaphod@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        31·
        2 个月前

        Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words…

        English butchers words too.

        • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          4·
          2 个月前

          Yeah, I only was speaking about the German language as example

          But yeah, you’re right of course

    • Zwiebel@feddit.orgEnglish
      16·
      2 个月前

      The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.

      For example German imported the word ‘cakes’, but it is now spelled ‘Keks’ inline with it’s pronunciation.

      I think it’s funny how the slang word ‘biz’ fixes the spelling of ‘business’

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      2 个月前

      Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don’t seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written “chrome” as “krohm” or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with “ch”. It’s actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        6·
        2 个月前

        and english is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from the worst, thai is afaik basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, to the point that people can read old texts quite easily.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          2 个月前

          Also Icelandic is so archaic compared to the other Nordic nations that they can more or less just read thousand year documents like how we may read writings from the 1700s.

    • Hawke@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 个月前

      English is descriptive, not proscriptive.

      Surely there are no languages that base their rules on forbidding certain pronunciations?

      (Proscriptive means forbidding; I assume you meant prescriptive)

    • Miaou@jlai.luEnglish
      6·
      2 个月前

      Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        Many languages have very specific pronunciation rules. If you can read a word, you can almost always pronounce it correctly, especially when accents are uses. You can often determine the pronunciation from the etymology by the language of origin. It’s why spelling bee contestants always ask for country of origin.

    • apolo399@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 个月前

      English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it’s quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it’s contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        2 个月前

        Sure, sometimes it is. But frequently it isn’t. But let’s conjugate two very similar words and then pronounce them. How about “go” and “do”?

        I do
        You go He does He goes She did She went

        How about the words “rove,” “move,” and “shove”? They are all conjugated basically the same, spelled almost the same, but each is pronounced differently.

        Knowing how one word is conjugated and pronounced does not necessarily inform on any other. The phrase “sometimes it’s consistent” is self-contradictory.

        • apolo399@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 个月前

          I never mentioned pronunciation. I only talked about the untrue claim that english grammar was inconsistent because it was mixed with other languages. The mismatch between pronunciation and spelling is the fault of the printing press.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
            12·
            2 个月前

            Ok, but that’s the topic of conversation. And even if we set aside pronunciation, English grammar is inconsistent. There are far more irregular verba than there are rules.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 个月前

      So, if you collectively forget a word, does it disappear from the dictionary? And if you collectively do so, are there any known words that you don’t know anymore their spelling or pronunciation?

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 个月前

        Yeah. There are a lot of words that people have stopped using and don’t remember how to pronounce. Sometimes we have clues from old writings and especially poetry, but archaic words and pronunciations are studied and recorded for posterity.

        Consider the word “ye” as in “Ye Olde Shoppe.” We still see the word on signs where people want things to feel old, because it is a word we think we don’t use anymore. People reading it probably pronounce it “yee” or maybe “yeh.” Except the original word was spelled with an archaic letter called “thorn” that looks like a Y and isn’t used in English anymore. It made a “th” sound, and the sign should be pronounced “The Old Shop.” Thorn was replaced with Y when printing became popular, and people forgot it existed. We also have “yee” which is still used in some dialects (like Irish), but it considered archaic in American English. So when people saw the Ye Olde Shoppe signs, they forgot they knew how to pronounce the word already and assumed it was a different archaic word they remember they had forgotten, forgetting that they remembered the word in the first place.

        • selokichtli@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 个月前

          Fascinating. I meant my other comment for those periods when not even recordings where available. In this case, that bit about poetry makes a lot of sense.

  • rotkehle @feddit.orgEnglish
    29·
    2 个月前

    I seriously never got the concept of a spelling bee competition until I learned English.

    • pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyzEnglish
      10·
      2 个月前

      I just learnt about the existence of “spelling bee competitions” through this post. But in English it makes sense that this exists.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      43·
      2 个月前

      i still don’t get it, and i don’t get why people are so up in arms about english in general, feels like people just enjoy having an arbitrary thing to all hate together.

      the only really unique thing about english is just how many places were forced to speak it, but it’s not that much more than french…

      • lorty@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        2 个月前

        It’s jarring if you don’t come from a language with fucked spelling however…

      • rotkehle @feddit.orgEnglish
        6·
        2 个月前

        in many languages theres clear rules how to pronounce vowels, consonants and combination of such. in english there’s no rules at all. sure there will be always exceptions and oddballs to the rules in other languages but usually you see a word and just by looking at it you know how to pronounce it, but thats not the case in english. not hating on english, its super simple and straight forward in a lot of aspects but the pronunciation clusterfuck is at a stark contrast to being otherwise one of the easiest languages to learn.

  • SomeoneElse@lemmy.caEnglish
    26·
    2 个月前

    I’m really awful at spelling, or pronouncing words I’ve read but haven’t heard before. I’m not dyslexic so I thought I was just weirdly bad at spelling. Then I started learning Spanish and it turns out I can spell just fine - English is the problem, not me.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      I remember being in second grade and being taught all sorts of rules about pronunciation and then a few minutes later, be given edge cases.

      It was the moment when I gave up saying things correctly. Herb with a hard H, phone with a hard P. City with a k noise. English is stupid.

  • Eiri@lemmy.caEnglish
    251·
    2 个月前

    People will really say shit about the silent letters in French and then completely ignore the unbelievably inconsistent pronunciation of “gh” in English.

    • Evil_incarnate@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 个月前

      I’m there. I asked how to pronounce a word from a newspaper once, and was told,“like it’s written…?”

    • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      2 个月前

      I know spelling bees from US media. We had read aloud competitions, that’s the closest thing I know from real life

    • lseif@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      2 个月前

      too often it’s some proprietary phonetic spelling which barely makes sense even in the target dialect. yet they have the audacity to use square brackets for it.

      Worcestershire (noun)

      [ wurs - teir - sheh ]

      • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        7·
        2 个月前

        These I totally hate. As a non native speaker, I have no intuition or at least IPA would be much easier for me. It’s called international for a reason. Good to know that native speakers have problems too, or maybe not good, you decide.

      • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 个月前

        are you having trouble figuring out how to pronounce words because spelling rules aren’t consistent and don’t make sense? here’s how to pronounce them in a different spelling that follows the same rules.

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      I’ve learned Hangul just for fun, it is extremely easy and quick to learn. It is almost perfect, except for the double consonants and a lot of double vowels. Those make no sense at all to me.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    10·
    2 个月前

    Listen pal, you spend several centuries invading others and looting their vocabulary and see how much sense your language makes!

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        62·
        2 个月前

        Not necessary. You can “have your cake” and eat it with spoons of both Aluminum and Aluminium, too. It just has to reflect spoken sounds in some kind of reasonably-direct way.

        Hmm. Do Brazilians still spell stuff the Portuguese way? Most of the European languages probably have some kind of prescribed national dialect, Arabic has classical Arabic, and Chinese has non-alphabetic characters, but I don’t know about that one.

  • voracitude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    157·
    2 个月前

    people who speak a language with a decent spelling system

    So not the fuckin’ French then 🧐 😂🤣😂 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇪🇬🇧 🫖🎩 laughs in Her Majesty’s English

    (On a related note, does anyone else have this much fun lampooning British nationalism?)

    Edit: Only Parisians are downvoting this, glory to Britannia

    • Skua@kbin.earth
      9·
      2 个月前

      Playing Rule Britannia (bass boosted) over voice chat when you declare war on your friends with a huge navy in Civ is great

        • Skua@kbin.earth
          3·
          2 个月前

          Gotta be honest I like VI better. V is great for sure, but I think that VI offers far more variety in terms of viable gameplay approaches and interesting decisons to make. Each to their own, of course, I’m not about to tell anyone that they aren’t allowed to prefer V

    • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      5·
      2 个月前

      I don’t speak French but isn’t pronunciation quite straightforward while not intuitive? There are letters that are always silent at the end and vowels go wild but once you know which is which, you’re not confused that <oi> is /wa/ anymore since it’s consistent. No <gh> that can be anything

      • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        41·
        2 个月前

        Same in English. You can intuit which words follow Latin rules, which words follow Greek rules, and which words follow Germanic rules. Once you have a feel for it, spelling starts to feel natural for some fucking reason

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    2 个月前

    I’m pretty sure someone fucked up this timeline because that’s definitely something from Idiocracy (2006)

    • DampCanary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      balkan ones: serbian croatian, slovenian, …

      you read as you write, no bogus letters(and sounds)

      • Ziglin (they/them)@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        Now I personally don’t know those but I’m sure there are still some weird words that are spelled in an unexpected way, especially if we include words that originated from other languages.

        • DampCanary@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 个月前

          What we usualy do is write what re(edit: how we) read e.g.:
          transit -> tranzit
          scale -> skala
          band -> bend
          buisness -> biznis
          display -> displej

          eins -> anjs
          anlasser -> anlaser
          ziegel -> cigla
          ziehverschluss -> cifersluš

          böbrek -> bubreg
          yastık-> jastuk

          reggipetto -> ređipet
          scatola -> škatola
          asciugamano -> šugaman

          ambassade -> ambasada
          clochard -> klošar
          directeur -> direktor