For the Spelling Bee, 472k Words May Not Be Enough

nytimes.com

13 points·igonvalue··4 comments

When I had look at it, as a foreign speaker, it sounded like a joke. It seems that the gist of it is to be able to write correctly tons of completely mispronounced foreign (non-English) words. What about a pronunciation bee? A contest where native English speakers are challenged to pronounce correctly, or at least intelligibly, words coming from French, Spanish, Italian?

I share the same sentiments. At lower levels it's useful in the sense that it teaches children how to write commonly spoken English words (since English has non-phonemic orthography).

But competitively, we enter the territory of words that are never, if ever, spoken out loud, except perhaps by specialists, so it's doubtful that these words have a standard English pronunciation.

write correctly tons of completely mispronounced foreign (non-English) words.

Except they're not foreign words, they're English words with foreign origins. Once a word becomes a part of the English language both its pronunciation and meaning (and even spelling) can start to diverge from its origins, without those pronunciations or meanings being 'wrong' in any meaningful way. Also since there is no standardized pronunciation guide for the English language its hard to say what pronunciations are right and wrong other than referring to common usage.

Generate a few million random 20-chracter ASCII strings and let the games begin!

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