• fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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    10 days ago

    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.net
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    10 days ago

    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.world
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      10 days ago

      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.org
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        10 days ago

        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.xyz
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      9 days ago

      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.pub
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        9 days ago

        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.works
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          9 days ago

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

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

          • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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            8 days ago

            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.works
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              8 days ago

              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.pub
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                7 days ago

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

  • Eunie@feddit.org
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    10 days ago

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

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.xyz
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      10 days ago

      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.world
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        10 days ago

        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.xyz
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          9 days ago

          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.xyz
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        10 days ago

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

        English butchers words too.

        • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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          10 days ago

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

          But yeah, you’re right of course

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.de
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        10 days ago

        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.works
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          9 days ago

          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.

    • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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      10 days ago

      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’

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.lu
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      9 days ago

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

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        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.world
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      9 days ago

      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.world
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        9 days ago

        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.world
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          8 days ago

          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.world
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            8 days ago

            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.ml
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      9 days ago

      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.world
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        9 days ago

        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.ml
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          8 days ago

          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.org
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    10 days ago

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

    • pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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      10 days ago

      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.de
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      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…

      • rotkehle @feddit.org
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        9 days ago

        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.

      • lorty@lemmy.ml
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        9 days ago

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

  • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca
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    10 days ago

    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.net
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      9 days ago

      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.ca
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    10 days ago

    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.ee
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      10 days ago

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

    • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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      10 days ago

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

    • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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      10 days ago

      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.xyz
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        10 days ago

        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.world
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        10 days ago

        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.world
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      10 days ago

      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.uk
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    9 days ago

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

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        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.

        • Daemon Silverstein
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          Brazilian here. Brazilian Portuguese has lots of variation across the country.

          One thing that I can remember of European Portuguese is “tu” (singular 2nd person). Brazilian Portuguese vary, with states such as São Paulo and Minas Gerais using “você” (you) while states such as Pernambuco and Ceará using “tu” in a peculiar way.

          For example, Cearenses, Pernambucanos, among other northeastern states, they would say “tu tá fazendo o quê hoje?” (English: “What are you doing today?”), when “tá” is a shortened “está”, the verb “estar” (be) conjugated in the singular third person, but “tu” is the singular second person.

          European Portuguese would say “tu estás a fazer o que hoje?”, with “estás” correctly conjugated in the single second person (“What art thou doing today?”).

          And there are Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. I was born Paulista (São Paulo state), and paulistas speak slightly differently from Paulistanos (São Paulo city and capital of its homonym state). This includes slightly different dialects, terms, colloquial expressions and, especially, different accent. But both paulistas and paulistanos say “tá fazendo o que hoje?” or “você tá fazendo o que hoje?” (The first implies an “você”).

          Minas Gerais, as well as some places within Sao Paulo’s interior, would say “cê tá fazendo o que hoje?” or “ocê tá fazendo o que hoje?”, where both “cê” and “ocê” is a shortened “você” (“ocê” is very stereotypical of Mineiros).

          There are many other aspects and examples that could be mentioned as well, but my comment is already long. But, basically, Brazilian Portuguese differs a lot from the European Portuguese, which also have their own regional variations (e.g. the Portuguese spoken in Porto differs from the Portuguese spoken in Ilha da Madeira).

          As for sounds and accents, the northeasterners as well as the Cariocas (Rio de janeiro) have more in common with Portugal as their “s” sounds like “x” (not your English x, but the “sh” sound as in “shell” and “ash”). Paulistas even make some lighthearted funny from cariocas when they say “isqueiro” (lighter) and “chiqueiro” (pigsty), because they say both words in a very similar manner (“eesh-kay-roo” and “sh-kay-roo”). In contrast, paulistanos say something like “ees-kay-roo” (our “s” sounds approximately like the ending sound from the English word “fizz”.

            • Daemon Silverstein
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              Probably. For example: European Portuguese often uses “está a fazer” / “estás a fazer”, Brazilian Portuguese often uses the gerund form (“está fazendo”). Also, there are slight differences on how some words are written: Brazilian Portuguese uses “objetivo” (objective/target), “ação” (action), “tela” (screen), “mouse de computador” (computer mouse), while European Portuguese respectively uses “objectivo”, “acção”, “ecrã” and “rato de computador”.

              However, I once heard that a “Brazilianization” of European Portuguese is happening through the European Portuguese youth due to how major online Portuguese-speaking influencers are often Brazilian, such as Lucas Neto (an infuencer whose content focuses on the youth). Considering that the youth people has more online presence than older people, chances are that the variations of Brazilian Portuguese (especially the “Carioca” variation, as those Brazilian influencers often come from Rio de Janeiro’s city) is overriding European Portuguese among the European Portuguese people all over the the web. This makes it slightly hard to identify the nationality solely from written text.

              (Edit: “Brazilianization” is different from “Brazilification”. The latter refers to ethnic diversification, while the former refers to “An increase in the percentage of Brazilian people or cultural elements in an area or industry” (to paraphrase Wiktionary). Although the ethnic diversification is also indeed happening across the world, the focus of my reply is the cultural and linguistic realm, so “Brazilianization” seems to fit better.)

  • voracitude@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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
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      10 days ago

      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
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          10 days ago

          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.xyz
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      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.com
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        10 days ago

        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

  • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Name a language without weird exceptions. I think in most this is still impressive.

    • DampCanary@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      balkan ones: serbian croatian, slovenian, …

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

      • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        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.world
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          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

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    9 days ago

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