What Makes the Spelling Bee So Hard | Hacker News Reader

What Makes the Spelling Bee So Hard

fivethirtyeight.com

36 pointsnafizh17 comments

As a one-time national Scripps Bee competitor who ultimately lost out in an early round to a (now-known to be) ridiculously easy word[1], this was a very good article.

Point 1 (Length) can't be stressed enough, while point 2 (Latin) is not always as helpful as you want it to be.

The one thing that isn't really covered there is that you have to know a whole friggin lot to be competitive. Sure, spelling is just spelling, but having effectively memorized the meager dictionaries that my poor upbringing brought me access to, that doesn't begin to prepare you for Scripps, which is sure to challenge you with words from most language origins, and are beyond the memorization capabilities of all but the very best.

I wasn't a "contender" by any stretch of the imagination, and I never had any coaching done, so I was at a strategic disadvantage as well as a skill disadvantage of the others, but I remember how smart I was when going to the library and trying to familiarize myself with Latin, Greek and other language origins, if only to familiarize myself with the structure and which things were most likely to reoccur so that, if challenged, I could at least make some good guesses, but unless you're absolutely, positively dedicated, it's really, really hard to know "enough" to do well.

[1] - The word was "paunchy", from the Latin "pantex", and borrowed from French "panche" and Old Northern French "pance". None of the above have a 'u', and neither did my spelling. Such was the pain of my failure, I now know this without having to look it up.

that's pretty cool :)

I remember reaching my state spelling bee and noticing that some of the other kids had a book I had never seen. It turned out to be _Valerie's Spelling Bee Supplement_ and when I got to the national bee almost every competitor had one. I felt like the knife guy at the gunfight.

The spelling bee seems to be a phenomenon unique to English because it is entirely dependent on the byzantine (bordering on the perverse) structure of the language.

https://www.quora.com/Are-there-spelling-bees-in-languages-o...

Definitely. I wonder if there will ever be an attempt to simplify (and make more consistent) the english orthography, similar to the 1996 german orthography reform.

Webster made just such an attempt and it was responsible for a lot of the US/UK spelling divide.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform

Unlike a lot of other European languages, there's no central authority to make that decision. Even the German reform added differences between German and Swiss spelling.

Yeah, part of what makes spelling bees so bizarre to me, is that there is no orthography (This is touched on in the mumu muumuu example).

Given that they use MW, how long until "dord" is asked? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord

There've been multiple attempts to simplify English orthography.

The issue with English is not just orthography, it's pronunciation. The lack of a correspondence between spelling and sound means that pronunciation is free to change. And since it became different in each region or country, to enforce a writing system that matches phonemes would either cause the language to be written differently in each region, or people to modify their pronunciations in accordance to the new writing system. We're talking about Americans starting to speak in British English or vice versa.

Japan has a somewhat analogous Kanji kentei that is highly competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

Consider the imperial vs metric debate: the costs are humongous, the resistance immense and the advantages dificult to justify.

In addition there's a sense of pride in all those things that makes us different. It's one of those tasks easier to accomplish in a declining empire indeed.

I want to point out that one of the sources for that quora answer is this post on Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5669), which is well worth reading. There's quite a lot of good reading there about spelling, writing systems, and so on.

the first japanese spelling bee is still going on

Well, listening to some of the examples in the article and trying my luck, the first thing that comes to my mind is that maybe they should complement the challenge- if not replace altogether- with a pronunciation bee. Opificer is read as "huh-pificer", but the common pronunciation, and the only one that makes sense to me, is "oh-pificer" (the stress varies freely as well in all the examples I found online). Hechsher (presumably with a hard "ch" sound) is pronounced heksher. The french word "Beurre" is happily pronounced "bur", without any attempt to a french sound. Don't know enough Spanish tell the correct pronunciation of Pejerrey but I'm pretty sure it's not "payray". If this is how it works, it seems a double challenge: first guess which word they're actually trying to pronounce, then write it down correctly.

What makes it hard is that it's a tournament. A popular tournament of anything is hard.

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