[HN Gopher] Typos, tricks and misprints
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Typos, tricks and misprints
Author : erehweb
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-07-31 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| pxc wrote:
| I really like languages whose phoneticism is reinforced through
| series of orthogtaphic reforms, because it gives them an aspect
| of regularity and predictability that is rare in non-written
| aspects of natural languages, since natural languages are
| fundamentally social and evolve over time.
|
| But I also love the etymological richness of languages like
| English where little or no attempt is made to truncate the
| visible histories of loan words by normalizing their spellings
| (or pronunciation or grammar, for that matter-- in English,
| spellings and pronunciations of words that are identical or
| similar to their original, foreign ones usually remain acceptable
| even as more Anglicized forms naturally develop alongside them).
| There's something magical about how rich the English language is
| with historical traces, even to foreign lands and tongues.
|
| If you're attentive to spelling, English's orthographic
| conservatism also exposes the relationships between words to you
| in a way that spelling reforms can obscure. It lets us recycle
| words, too, so that words of ultimately identical roots (and
| sometimes grammatical role, too) come to bear different shades of
| meaning and connotation that reflect their histories. For better
| and for worse, words get to have a kind of 'path dependence' in
| English in this way.
| fortyseven wrote:
| The "blogger from 1990" huh?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| English has never been standardised because England didn't
| suffered an invasion (post 1066) or had a strong central
| authority the way other countries have had.
|
| English isn't a "real" language. English started as old German
| (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion
| added a bunch of French words. And the grammar got massively
| simplified. Both these factors are to suit the invaders for
| instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the
| cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat
| the cows so they use the French word.
|
| Over time we have added some Latin and Greek and basically any
| other language we could "borrow without asking" from.
|
| The result is that every rule is at best a guideline. That the
| same sound is spelt differently in different words. And that
| different sounds and spelt the same in other words.
|
| I'm a native English speaker and it must be a nightmare for
| anyone learning it. I speak ok German but I can spell most words
| in German effortlessly because German spelling makes sense.
| Because it was nice ver such a mess and it's regularly
| standardised.
| msrenee wrote:
| English isn't a real language because it's had additions from
| other languages and the grammar has changed over time? Is
| French a real language? They've also lost most of their case
| declensions and have plenty of loan words. Same with Spanish.
| There's actually a decent number of Arabic loan words in that
| language. The Spanish spoken in Mexico has quite a few
| borrowings from Nuhuatl and other languages that were in the
| area before the Spanish settled there. Russian has lots of
| English loan words that honestly sound a little silly when
| surrounded by Russian words. Quite a few from French too and
| some of their pronunciation changed to mimic French as well if
| I'm not mistaken. They do have lots of cases though. Does that
| cancel out the loan words?
|
| English is just a real of a language as any other. It's got an
| interesting and complex history, but so does every other
| language in this world.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| You may be over-reading what I meant when I said real (I did
| use speech marks?). I don't mean any offence, sorry if I
| caused some.
|
| My point above is that English is made of 2 languages (Old
| German and Old French) and they have been messily combined
| and never cleaned up. That's really not true of any other
| language I am aware of? Most languages come from a root,
| evolve and exist. Taking 2 and splicing them together is the
| reason behind it's unusual grammar, illogical spelling and
| it's low overlap of nouns with other languages.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it
| over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words.
| ... Over time we have added some Latin and Greek
|
| Aren't you leaving out the much earlier Roman conquest? And
| didn't Latin already have a big influence on the Germanic
| languages even before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Great
| Britain?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The Romans left before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so when they
| replaced the existing peoples the latin influence mostly
| disappeared. I don't think they ever made it far enough into
| North Germany to influence them before they left but I don't
| know. It would be interesting to see how many romans lived
| for how long in England, Northern Germany and (say) France
| (as a reference). I wonder if you can see a correlation
| between that number and the amount of Latin retained?
|
| Latin had a pretty big influence all over the place so I
| don't want to talk it down. We can add it to the mix, but
| then you have even more volcab and grammar mixed up in an
| even bigger mess that still never got standardised. And
| that's sort of my point here. Other nations have 1 language.
| England has 2 (plus latin if you like?) mashed together badly
| and never cleaned up.
| Bertom wrote:
| English not being standardised because England hasn't been
| invaded since 1066 feels like a red herring, maybe this is part
| of a greater argument with more context but I'm just completely
| missing what relevance this has at all.
|
| English not being standardised because there's no central
| authority is an easily acceptable proposition, although in
| defence of English it's hard to standardised a language when
| it's being spoken by independent industrious nations on
| entirely different continents. Had French remained the lingua
| franca or had Spanish overtaken both English and French we'd be
| having the exact same conversation about how those languages
| never underwent standardisation like English would have done in
| this alternate history.
|
| Something to remember about standardisation that you yourself
| also noted is that German, and indeed most languages that have
| been reformed and standardised, did so fairly recently and
| require regular standardisation attempts to reflect the ever
| changing nature of language. Dutch, French, and German all
| underwent unification/standardisation around the 18-19th
| century as well as introduction of spelling reforms in the
| 1990s. Brazil and Portugal both had two reforms in the 20th
| century. Norway has had half a dozen reforms since the start of
| the 20th century. Even non-European languages like Japanese and
| Chinese have reformed since WW2. Spanish did successfully
| reform in the 18-19th century but has mostly remained the same,
| possibly for the same reasons that would make a modern English
| language reform difficult.
|
| As far as English being difficult to learn, there are many
| aspects to consider when it comes to difficulty of language but
| spelling seems so far down on the list that it's barely worth
| considering. Sure, there are an obnoxious amount of spelling
| rules being stated as fact that happen to have more exceptions
| than the rule covers, and it's awkward not knowing how to spell
| a word after hearing it or being able to pronounce a word after
| reading it, but there's no radically different regional
| dialects to learn (despite being unstandardised) like in
| German. French is standardised but it has a complex (albeit
| consistent) spelling system that's based on etymology rather
| than phonology. There's no complicated grammatical gender
| system to learn, there's no real complex grammar like Finnish
| or grammar with exceptions like Russian, the phonology is
| fairly simple and pronunciation isn't too difficult or strict,
| etc. The main complaints about English from non-native speakers
| seems to be that spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent,
| which is something native speakers struggle with, it just
| doesn't seem like that big of a deal in the grand scheme of
| things.
|
| - ramblings below -
|
| >English isn't a "real" language.
|
| I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by this. A
| generous interpretation would be that English isn't a
| continuation of the language that has been spoke on Britain,
| which is clearly true, but you go on to say that it has a bunch
| of French and Latin words (30% and 30% of total vocabulary
| respectively). By this metric is French a real language? 20% of
| French vocabulary comes from German and Greek. The same can be
| said of German which is 20% French and Latin. How about
| Portuguese which has 25% of its Vocabulary coming from
| English/Arabic/French/Latin/etc. Up until around the 19th
| century written Norwegian was simply Danish, and even today
| there's a struggle between Bokmal and Nynorsk, is Norwegian a
| 'real' language?
|
| >English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it
| over).
|
| While you didn't explicitly say that English comes from Old
| German it's worth pointing out that there was no specific Old
| German for English to have come from. Old English during the
| migratory period (more recently but disputedly referred to as
| the Anglo-Frisian language or dialect groups) would have been
| extremely similar to the language/dialects that the Angles,
| Frisians, and Saxons spoke, and this lineage can still be seen
| today with Frisian followed by Dutch being the most closely
| related languages to English. Documented examples of written
| Old English even predate those for Old Saxon (or Old Low
| German) by a good 100-150 years, so while English is a Germanic
| language it's not necessarily something that just existed in
| the same form prior to the migratory period.
|
| >And the grammar got massively simplified.
|
| This was never something that happened from a singular event in
| a singular place, for example Old English started to lose
| grammatical gender around the time of the Norse invasions but
| Danelaw had a big effect on its decline, however in more
| conservative areas of the country grammatical gender would
| remain until the 13th century, that's a good 400-500 years that
| covers both Norse and Norman conquests as well as the Old
| English to Middle English phase.
|
| It's also worth noting that simplification of grammar is
| something that tends to happen to most languages that have
| contact with a large degree of adult settlers that are
| attempting to communicate with you, something like grammatical
| gender is difficult to learn as an adult, this simplification
| isn't something that makes a language 'less real'.
|
| When it's the case of the entire aristocracy or ruling class
| being replaced (as is the case during the migratory period or
| the Norman invasion) this step tends to be skipped as no
| attempt to learn the common language is made, instead the
| common language is replaced entirely (as was the case with the
| Romano-Celtic language spoke in lowland England) or the common
| language inherits vocabulary (as was the case for the Norman
| invasion). A good demonstration of this is the decline of the
| Cornish language that was accelerated by English replacing
| Latin as the language of the church.
|
| >Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow
| is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But
| Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows
| so they use the French word.
|
| We do use the French word 'beef' and it's commonly attributed
| to the Norman invasion but the same separation of finished
| products that the aristocracy could afford and unfinished
| products that the peasants would produce exists in other
| languages too, 'cow' in French isn't 'boeuf' but 'vache',
| kuh/rindfleisch, carne de res/vaca, etc.
| whall6 wrote:
| I've always been curious about how delineating "queens English"
| affected other dialects of English
| paozac wrote:
| With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to
| figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not
| with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry
| (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.
| goodells wrote:
| I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame
| here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking
| with one of the Chinese international students in college. He
| pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and
| "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious
| pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he
| was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion
| came from, even with the -ing suffix.
| lionsdan wrote:
| I've known multiple people with the last name spelled Koch. One
| pronounced it "Coke", one "Cook", one "Cock", and one "Cahch".
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| I also knew a Kock who pronounced it "Cuck", just to add to
| the list of pronunciations.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Dialects and accents really make this kind of difference very
| pronounced.
|
| In Edinburgh, Scotland, there is "Cockburn Street". Which is
| pronounced co-burn. Other good examples trip up tourists,
| such as Buccleuch Street which is pronounced "Buck-Loo".
| parenthesis wrote:
| My favourite street name in Edinburgh is "Horse Wynd",
| unfortunately not pronounced the comical way.
| zabzonk wrote:
| The BBC used to (maybe still does) have a Pronunciation Unit
| which dictated how proper names must be spoken on TV and radio.
| They were always getting things wrong. My family's bete noir
| was the pronunciation of "Sowerby Bridge", the small town in
| West Yorkshire where my dad's parents lived.
|
| Everyone for about 50 miles around: "Sorbey Bridge"
|
| BBC: "Sourby Bridge"
|
| My dad used to get quite irate about this.
| scubbo wrote:
| As someone who is clearly interested in words, I hope you
| will take this comment in the "let's share some interesting
| knowledge!" sense in which it is intended, rather than a nit-
| picky correction...
|
| It's actually "bete noir" - which is interesting because,
| commonly, e signifies a replacement/contraction of the "es"
| sound. So the original phrase would have been "beste noir",
| which makes it easier to see the English meaning of "black
| beast" - an evocative phrase!
| zabzonk wrote:
| I know - I can actually speak a bit of French, but I could
| not work out how to type the e-circumflex. Perhaps you can
| inform me?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| On Windows, you can open Character Map, find the
| character you want, click, copy, and paste.
|
| For characters you enter frequently, if your keyboard has
| a numeric pad, then you can use the Alt key and a numeric
| code as described here:
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/insert-ascii-
| or-un...
|
| Unfortunately that doesn't work with the number row, only
| the numeric keypad.
|
| On any OS, you can find several similar character tables
| online:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=unicode+character+map
| spockz wrote:
| On macOS you can either hold the e or option I + e. Iirc
| JadeNB wrote:
| > With most languages the spelling gives you enough information
| to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard
| before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer
| Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same
| problem.
|
| I think names are always going to be a source of orthographic
| irregularity. Even if English were an orthographically perfect
| language--which of course it isn't--it would still have to be
| able to deal with people whose names derive from any other
| language.
| 4t3gar wrote:
| This article is interesting and all but I think it is missing
| some
|
| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID
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| COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID COVID
| gumby wrote:
| A lot of the complaint about English spelling comes from a theory
| that the written form _must_ be phonetic. This is reflected by
| the mistake of teaching American kids "phonics": giving them a
| bunch of post facto rules and then immediately telling them that
| there are innumerable exceptions to said rules.
|
| As the article points out, a lot of the spelling reflects meaning
| (etymology) which is more useful when reading than the sound
| (unless, I suppose, you're reading out loud). The loose phonetic
| linkage is handy, but you end up simply learning a bunch of
| words, which is no different from learning Hanzi.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I would refine your statement about phonics as the mistake is
| HOW we teach phonics, not that we use phonics in itself.
|
| Phonics at it root is about decomposing a written word into its
| sub-units, and then applying rules to build back up to the
| whole word sound. The alternative to phonics (as unreliable as
| it is) is basically rote memorization (granted that English
| requires significant rote memorization anyways).
|
| Here's an article (it was previously on HN I think) that talks
| about the whole word vs phonics "debate"
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
|
| I found it really interesting.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's true that the phonetic linkage in English is loose, but it
| still requires massively less memorization than Hanzi.
| gumby wrote:
| Definitely!
|
| But also, apart from tiny nouns (cat, dog) when I was
| learning words as a kid (not just reading, but speaking) I
| was often told what its pieces were (not just obvious ones
| like "skyscraper", but "entrance? We enter through it."). Any
| other way just seems hard.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| The article argues that English spelling inconsistencies were
| heavily driven by the printing press appearing in a period of
| overall spelling turmoil in English, due to the displacement of
| written English from ~1066 to 1300s.
|
| As (basically) a native english speaker, does anyone know of how
| this works analogously in other European languages?
|
| How consistent was French or German spelling around 1450?
| canjobear wrote:
| The article's argument doesn't seem right. French and German
| had comparable spelling consistency within dialects before
| printing, although they had much more divergent dialects than
| English. The difference between them and English is that
| English went through a massive series of sound changes after
| the orthography was set, whereas German didn't. French did, but
| the sound changes were mostly deletions, leaving a relatively
| regular spelling.
| bradrn wrote:
| EDIT: Looks like the title's been changed -- it was previously
| 'Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?'.
|
| Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500
| years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other
| languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation.
|
| Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me
| elaborate:
|
| * English spelling was 'standardised' (for lack of a better word)
| roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation
| has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift
| [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, <ee>
| and <oo> used to be the same sounds as <e> and <o> , just
| pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions
| of <i> and <u> . The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving
| silent <gh> s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my
| dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like 'bottle'
| should really be spelt like <bottoo> . Even worse, some sound
| changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic
| change from /a/ to /^/ in some words, which is why <won> and
| <dot> have different vowels.
|
| * At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to
| make them more similar to 'related' words -- even when, on closer
| examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus
| <iland> - <island> (by analogy with <isle> ); <dout> - <doubt>
| (by analogy with Latin <dubitare> ).
|
| * Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey
| different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it's
| passed through another language on its way: e.g. <rhino> and
| <archaeology> . (Ancient Greek distinguished <ch> and <rh> from
| <c> and <r> ; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed
| the former as digraphs.)
|
| * For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to
| both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so
| far has been Websters'; American English adopted it partially,
| while British English did not, which of course just added to the
| confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to
| languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is
| standardised and updated by the Real Academia Espanola.
|
| Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its
| spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find
| practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are
| somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated
| ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name 'Tashi' is
| spelled bkr-shis-, in Roman letters <bkra-shisl> , which is
| indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As
| always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic
| systems, English is probably the worst.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
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