[HN Gopher] The Chaos (1922)
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The Chaos (1922)
Author : devvvvvvv
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-01-11 06:41 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ncf.idallen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ncf.idallen.com)
| tempodox wrote:
| A well deserved slap in the face of the English language,
| delivered with splendor.
| nine_k wrote:
| But it says little about the English language proper, things
| like syntax, the system of verb tenses, or even phonetics. It's
| only about the spelling, and specifically the hodgepodge of
| various historical spellings, and the tendency to import a word
| with its foreign spelling _and_ foreign pronunciation. Chunks
| of Romance languages, mostly Latin and French, stick out as
| especially noticeable: things like "bona fide", or "corps", or
| even "beauty".
|
| Most languages in which the connection between the written form
| and the sound is straightforward, like Spanish or Japanese,
| import foreign words by writing down the _sound_ and ignoring
| the original spelling. The problem is that in Britain, French
| was directly spoken and written for centuries, and for a person
| who speaks and writes French daily, it would be rather jarring
| to write "bohteh" instead of "beaute" or "ko" instead of
| "corps". To have a taste of that, trai tu rait inglish
| fonetikalli. It's an attempt to avoid that what has driven us
| to the current situation.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Isn't wild that if you said that sentence about why other
| language, particular, a non-Western one, this would be
| considered hate speech? It's interesting how language works.
| ben_w wrote:
| People are generally given a free pass to criticise their own
| in-group.
|
| There's a famous Chinese poem demonstrating an issue in the
| Chinese language, IIRC spelling reform; but were I to speak
| it (I can't*) I suspect anyone who couldn't speak Chinese
| would think I was mocking the language despite the original
| being from a native speaker:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
| Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
|
| * I lack the skill to tell if this is correct pronunciation:
| https://youtu.be/vExjnn_3ep4?si=hbg3b3niapF6X4TH
| orjpap wrote:
| Early MF Doom verse
| z3phyr wrote:
| I would love to listen to an Eminem rendition of this poem as a
| rap.
| codechicago277 wrote:
| With suno.com this would be quick to create
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Nah, it's too long. You can do it but it's going to be a pain
| trying to extend and add different lyrics. Would probably be
| a full evening of work, multiple tries per section.
| petercooper wrote:
| A similar one but a bit more entry level. Good for confusing the
| kids with: http://holyjoe.org/poetry/anonA.htm
| Gimpei wrote:
| Wait, made and bade are pronounced differently? Is this an
| anglicism or have I been doing it wrong?
| j-h-k wrote:
| It is /baed/ vs /meId/
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/bade
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Is this gonna be like "pin" and "pen" where everyone insists
| they're different but they sound the same to me?
| pxeger1 wrote:
| What's your accent/dialect?
| teddyh wrote:
| Complete version as originally published in 1920:
| <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos>
| jrmg wrote:
| There's a thorough explanation of the history of the poem and
| the research that went into rediscovering the author of the
| poem and [re?]producing the 'final' version presented in the
| article - scroll down to after the poem.
|
| The conclusion is that "This version is essentially the
| author's own final text, as also published by New River Project
| in 1993" (so '1922' in the page title and link text is arguably
| wrong, or at least misleading).
| csours wrote:
| Reading and writing are different transformations - they are not
| complementary or inverse - they are just different.
|
| Phonics gives you some clues to remember a word, context gives
| you other clues. Eventually, you may learn what kinds of words
| come from Latin, Greek, and French, and those are more clues. But
| before those clues do anything at all for you, you have to care
| and want to read.
|
| Four righting ewe jest halve two remmemmber thee spellin.
|
| > "There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held
| sway in schools for more than a generation -- even though it was
| proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching
| methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to
| learn how to read."
|
| https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (and hn discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 )
|
| > "Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she's cast as the
| reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she
| reclaim her good name?"
|
| Gift link:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca...
| pavlov wrote:
| English spelling could be significantly improved by adding a few
| optional accents. They could be purely additive: the ASCII
| spellings would remain valid for those who prefer to use them.
|
| Native English speakers don't seem to quite grasp how difficult
| the spelling is. I've been using this language for thirty years
| and I sometimes forget how some basic words are pronounced
| because I mostly write it.
|
| There's no need to change physical keyboards. In the smartphone
| era, most English around the world is already being typed using
| soft keyboards and autocomplete. A spelling reform could be
| agreed between Google, Apple and Microsoft. They are the de facto
| equivalent of Academie Francaise for the English language, even
| if they don't use that power.
|
| Here's my basic suggestion for the optional accent marks:
|
| A long vowel is marked with an acute accent. The sound is simply
| the one you're familiar with from how the alphabet is pronounced.
| This lets us distinguish between lead (the verb) and lead (the
| metal), live (the verb) and live (as in streaming), low and how,
| fear and bear, bleak and break, infinite and finite, etc.
|
| It also fixes the spelling of many loan words that look like the
| final e would be silent and today you just have to know it's not:
| catastrophe, epitome, Eurydice, etc.
|
| This easy rule doesn't nearly cover all the weird vowel
| spellings, but it already fixes a substantial part of the worst
| obstacles for English learners.
|
| Two more accent marks could be deployed:
|
| The macron is already familiar to Japanese learners. It's a long
| version of the short vowel sound, as in Osaka. The spelling of
| many English loan words could be unified by deploying the macron
| consistently. It would allow replacing e with e in French loan
| words like fiance.
|
| The grave accent could be used to assign a third vowel sound, but
| it's not as obvious what this should be. As an example, maybe for
| the letter A, it could be the sound in words like all and haul
| and awe. Again, the point would be to give a consistent and
| useful hint of a sound that doesn't follow the basic rules, not
| to make the spelling perfect in one stroke.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| This seems like a good idea that isn't likely to catch on
| widely, but could maybe be deployed in places like the Simple
| English Wikipedia and other contexts where non-native English
| speakers are a major part of the target audience.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Looking at extreme examples of _historical spelling_ (e.g.
| Tibetan) English isn 't particularly bad, even in the context of
| Great Britain, e.g Manx [0] is way more off.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Spelling_to_so..
| .
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(page generated 2025-01-11 23:00 UTC)