[HN Gopher] Ghoti
___________________________________________________________________
Ghoti
Author : perihelions
Score : 167 points
Date : 2023-03-26 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (english.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (english.stackexchange.com)
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Reminds me always of Mark Twain's hilarious Plan for improvement
| of English spelling.
| https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I wonder if he wrote that before or after studying German. His
| famous essay on it actually noted its phonetic spelling as a
| pro. [0]
|
| [0] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
| dang wrote:
| Uh oh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
|
| (it actually originates in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science
| Fiction. Sometimes the truth is stranger than astounding
| science fiction)
| svat wrote:
| To be clear: the essay "The Awful German Language" is
| indeed by Mark Twain, while the short note "A Plan for the
| Improvement of English Spelling" is not.
| Chinjut wrote:
| As with so many things attributed to Mark Twain, this was not
| written by Mark Twain. According to
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain:
|
| Actual source: A letter to The Economist (16 January 1971),
| written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the
| letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's
| Words at Play books. This was a modified version of a piece
| "Meihem in ce Klasrum", published in the September 1946 issue
| of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
| smoyer wrote:
| My grandmother introduced me to this when I was in elementary
| school - https://www.exploratorium.edu/files/exhibits/ladle/
| kibwen wrote:
| And this more recent version of the joke, "English to become
| official language of the EU":
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o4rkq/english_to_be...
| [deleted]
| panzi wrote:
| Did they back then pronounce i and y the same way? Or do I
| mispronounce year and it should sound like eear?
| Falkon1313 wrote:
| As the saying goes, "Y is a crooked letter and can't be made
| straight.", although that has totally different meaning.
|
| Similarly, the y in 'finally' makes an i sound (as in the i
| in 'machine'), while the y in 'tyrant' makes a different i
| sound (as in the i in 'finally'), and of course the y in
| 'year' makes yet another totally different sound. And then of
| course you have 'lye' and 'lie', which sound the same but
| with very different meanings.
|
| That is what these jokes were about, simplifying so that each
| letter has only one sound and a spoken word can only be
| spelled one way while a written word can only be pronounced
| one way.
|
| It doesn't work and is silly because letters take their
| sounds from context, combination, and position, as does the y
| in 'year'. And there aren't enough letters for all the sounds
| in English.
| panzi wrote:
| Well, one could use IPA. :P
| dheera wrote:
| Reminds me of the English word "gaol".
| rmk wrote:
| I could barely understand the last sentence! Thank you for this
| hilarious passage.
| capableweb wrote:
| Me neither. Thankfully, technology to the rescue:
|
| > What does this mean?
|
| > Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi
| wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-
| spiking werld.
|
| >> This text seems to be an example of a proposed spelling
| reform for the English language. The author has purposefully
| misspelled words to demonstrate how this reform would change
| the current spelling system. Here is a translation of the
| text into standard English:
|
| >> "Finally, then, after some 20 years of orthographic
| reform, we would have a logical, coherent spelling in use
| throughout the English-speaking world."
|
| >> The text suggests that after 20 years of implementing
| changes to the spelling system, the English-speaking world
| would have a more logical and coherent spelling system.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Funnily enough it was pretty easy for me as a native
| Portuguese speaker
| csa wrote:
| I'm not sure whether I'm proud or embarrassed that I didn't
| need to slow down for that part.
|
| _linguistics nerd flex_
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Concerning "pronunciation-vs-spelling" the Tibetan script has one
| of the most (egregious) mismatches.[0][1]
|
| So, relatively speaking, written English is just slightly worse
| than Hangul.[2]
|
| [0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script
|
| [2]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K53oCDZPPiw
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Ghoti_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 - June
| 2020 (239 comments)
|
| _Ghoti_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296927 - March
| 2011 (3 comments)
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Not sure where it came from, but it's very old. My dad (who was
| a school teacher) presented it to me 50 years ago.
| kuhewa wrote:
| Ghoti papers is a type of article in the journal Fish and
| Fisheries which say it was a George Bernard Shaw joke
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| To the contrary of most people, I think that English spelling is
| actually excellent because the spelling tells you less about
| actual phonology than etymology, and from there you can derive
| the pronunciation, thus the script is able to accomodate the
| accurate representations (phonologically) of every word from
| every language. There is no other language where people care
| about the correct pronunciation of words, because in most other
| languages the realm of possibility for the representation of
| sounds is extremely limited (take, for example, Hindi, with its
| supposedly phonetic script). Whereas Roman script can represent
| the accurate pronunciation of every word in Hindi, the Devanagari
| cannot even come close to representing all English words, not
| even all words written in Roman--which is probably why Roman
| script is becoming a dominant writing system in South Asia.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| So you can tell me the etymology of tear (liquid from your
| eyes) and tear (like a ripped paper) from the spelling?
| jamincan wrote:
| English is way too irregular for this to work. Good examples
| are reign vs. sovereign and isle vs. island. The etymologies
| aren't linked and the modern spellings are basically due to
| scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting
| their spelling to reflect that.
| croes wrote:
| How would you pronounce "read"?
|
| As read or read?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Similarly: the tear through my a Achilles tendon brought a
| tear to my eyes.
| GoatOfAplomb wrote:
| Read, obviously.
| illiarian wrote:
| I always read `ea` in `read` as in `lead`, it's easy to
| memorise
|
| :-)
| [deleted]
| anonymousiam wrote:
| How do you pronounce the name of the town Reading, PA?
|
| https://www.howtopronounce.com/reading-pennsylvania-2
| Symbiote wrote:
| Now the common American mis-pronunciation of Reading in
| England makes no sense. It's the same!
| NeoTar wrote:
| In the town of Reading in the UK there was at least one
| 'Reading Book Shop' to ensure it made sense in either of
| the possible common pronunciations
| tines wrote:
| > Whereas Roman script can represent the accurate pronunciation
| of every word in Hindi
|
| Isn't this only true if you already know how Hindi specifically
| is supposed to be pronounced? I don't think you could show
| someone a romanized Hindi text and expect them to even come
| close to an accurate pronunciation. For example, doesn't Hindi
| have like six ways of making the English "D" sound?
|
| Same thing for e.g. Chinese, you can't represent tones with
| unaugmented Roman characters.
| illiarian wrote:
| > because in most other languages the realm of possibility for
| the representation of sounds is extremely limited
|
| What.
|
| Most other languages do not shy away from having _more_ ways of
| presenting sounds native to that language than English.
|
| There are 24 consonant and 25 vowel phonemes in Received
| Pronunciation alone. All inadequately represented by just 22
| letters.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This isn't always true; see e.g. rain versus reign.
| croisillon wrote:
| obligatory mention of "the chaos"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| English is really four languages (Germanic, French, Latin, Old
| Norse) that have been corrupted and morphed into an insanity of
| unnecessarily complex structures. The linguistic equivalent of
| four different cars taken apart and turned into an economy
| tractor race car used for pizza deliveries. Yes, it can go fast
| and deliver pizza to a farmer. But I wouldn't wanna learn to
| drive the bastard.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Oh man, even if English is a pretty simple language having to
| learn the pronunciation of every word is tough...
|
| I remember when I was mispronouncing _recipe_ and no one had a
| clue what I meant (it wasn't even in a cooking context). I was
| dumfounded when I found out how words like _tomb_ or _womb_ are
| pronounced. Or how about _colonel_? Or how _nation_ is pronounced
| differently as a whole word vs when it's part of _national_.
|
| In contrast Spanish must be a bitch to learn as an adult due to
| all the verb tenses, but once you know the pronunciation rules
| you can read anything correctly even if you have no clue what
| you're saying.
| 13of40 wrote:
| My wife has been in the US for about 25 years at this point,
| and we just had our talk about how to pronounce February,
| Wednesday, and turmeric yesterday.
| wincy wrote:
| I don't like the correct people when they say Wed-ness-day
| though. I wish I lived in a world where the pronunciation
| made sense like that.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| > In contrast Spanish [...] you can read anything correctly
| even if you have no clue what you're saying.
|
| Except for the letter X which has 3 pronunciations, and some
| other weird stuff. Admittedly, nothing as bad as French or
| English.
| MrJohz wrote:
| The trick with French is not to think about it in terms of
| individual letters, but rather letter clusters, and then it
| becomes fairly regular. The individual letters can do wild
| things, but a given combination of letters generally has
| fairly clear rules about how it should be spoken. This is
| very different to English where, for example, "ough" can be
| pronounced in several different ways just by putting
| different letters in front of it. (oo, uff, ow, uh, oh, etc).
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Or Kansas (can-zuhs) vs. Arkansas (ar-kin-saw).
| rfmoz wrote:
| The languages that hadnt had an early written grammar, have
| nowadays a close relationship between the spelling and the
| written form.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| (waiting for the 90's Christian rock kids to show up in this
| thread)
| croisillon wrote:
| You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term
| is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to
| clear that up
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I figured out the gh at one point. Gh used to be its own phoneme.
| It slowly phased out of spoken english and got replaced by semi-
| random similar sounding phonemes. This g(h)/ch phoneme still
| exists in dutch and german though, and once you know about it you
| start finding a lot of cognates between the languages!
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Every time this comes up someone shares the joke about the
| European Union's changes to the English language ..
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Reminds me now of "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough",
| collected works by Dr. Seuss.
| IshKebab wrote:
| In fairness how many languages have letters that are always
| pronounced the same _regardless of context_? Even languages with
| highly regular pronunciation like Italian have letters that are
| pronounced differently depending on the other letters around
| them.
|
| The o in women is really the only one that is completely
| irregular. The others follow.. not rules, but at least
| heuristics.
|
| I'm not defending English pronunciation. It's clearly a mess. But
| this feels like a disingenuous way to demonstrate that. (Yeah I
| know it's clearly a joke.)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| > In fairness how many languages have letters that are always
| pronounced the same regardless of context?
|
| Finnish does. But the Finnish language only gained a writing
| system in common usage relatively recently, in the 1800s.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Th@ prablem with a sist@matic, fonetic chanj in Inglish speling
| is that it ras@s th@ questy@n of wat acsent tu fav@r. F@r an
| @merican en Ohio, this transcriptsh@n prabable maks s@m sens,
| wuns yu get past th@ shwa. I dout an Inglishman or ev@n a Nu
| York@r wud find it yusful.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| That is surprisingly easy to read, even though I'm not a native
| English speaker
| posterboy wrote:
| But this is not phonetic. The Is in "Inglish" are hardly the
| same in any dialect.
|
| And it doesn't solve the problem on the graphematic level. It
| ought to allow anyone to read the chosen dialect
| phonetically. But it suffers from an arbitrary choice of
| glyphs, so I have no idea how to pronounce eg. _an_ (an
| actual problem I have pondered today is _a-typical_ ).
|
| Conversely, if the spelling ought to be predictable for
| language learners, you are probably better of learning
| Mandarin (^_^)
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Same
| getoj wrote:
| Thr is anthr wy, whch ws dscvred ntrlly by early intrnt usrs:
| txt spk essntlly rduces englsh spllng to an abjad lk Arbc. Lk
| Arbc, Englsh is vry cnsnant hvy, and dialctl dffrnces are almst
| entrly vriashns n vwl qualty, so an abjad is the prfct wrtng
| systm fr us.
|
| The perfect English abjad would use diacritics to mark vowels
| and some clever way to identify syllable boundaries (so you can
| distinguish ideal from idyll). But alas, we're probably stuck
| with an alphabetic script forever.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > ntrlly
|
| This one took a moment. (It's "naturally", not "neutrally" or
| "entirely".)
|
| The rest is surprisingly readable.
| skrause wrote:
| Spanish has as much accent variation as English and has managed
| to develop a reasonable spelling where you know how to
| pronounce a vast majority of words just by reading them. The
| spelling doesn't have to be phonetic, just consistent. It
| should work for English, too.
| lucb1e wrote:
| So how do we fix it? I remember Dutch having had a spelling
| reform at some point, and I'm pretty sure I've heard of similar
| things in both German and French. Does English (in any country or
| group of collaborating countries) have a standardization body or
| some volunteer group of people that might publish optional
| guidelines that people could follow?
|
| Making it all consistent overnight would result in nobody being
| able to read (let alone write) the language anymore, but
| incremental tweaks that are gradual, obvious, and consistent
| could be doable.
| zokier wrote:
| English is distinct in the sense that there is no one claiming
| authority over the language the way French Academy rules over
| French, or similar organizations in other languages. Simply put
| there is no right or wrong way to write English
| skrause wrote:
| > _Simply put there is no right or wrong way to write
| English_
|
| Gud tu nou.
| chasing wrote:
| Is it broken?
|
| Also, language is an evolving tool that we all co-own. If you
| want to see a change, modify how you write. People do this all
| the time. If it's a good idea, maybe it'll catch on.
| Kamq wrote:
| > So how do we fix it?
|
| I don't think we can, at least not while preserving its value.
| For one, english started as basically a pidgin or creole from
| the british isles being invaded by so many groups over
| centuries, so we're not starting off at the best place. Two,
| the other examples of spelling reform I'm aware of are either
| from highly centralized places (the French empire), or small
| groups of countries that border each other (German spelling
| reform). There's not really a way to get the US, UK, India, and
| parts of Africa to agree on how something is pronounced (and
| therefore agree on what the proper spelling should be).
|
| The only way to "fix" it would be to have each country (or
| region within a country potentially), reform the language in a
| different way, which would destroy most of the value of having
| so many people in disparate places speak that language and be
| able to communicate.
| tgv wrote:
| > I remember Dutch having had a spelling reform at some point
|
| Several. But for an easy grapheme-phoneme correspondence, you'd
| better look to Spanish. You can learn that in an hour or two.
|
| > incremental tweaks
|
| will slowly render older texts unreadable. Nobody (ok, almost
| nobody) can read old Dutch texts. Even 19th century Dutch is
| awkward to read.
| occamrazor wrote:
| German also has almost deterministic pronounciation rules.
| Italian too, except for the position of the stress.
| jamincan wrote:
| Much of the differences between British and American spellings
| are due to Webster's attempt at spelling reform in the early
| 19th century.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-26 23:00 UTC)