I'm a native English speaker who is currently learning German. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING YOUR SPELLING Work GERMANY! Sorry about our mess of BS you have to learn to use English.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
(Edit 2: the Economist came later! see downthread)
Edit: the joke originated as a letter to the Economist in 1971: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof.... The classic internet version (referencing the European Commission) was a later rewrite—no idea by whom. It's interesting that the original was a UK in-joke ("Haweve, sins xe Wely, xe Airiy, and xe Skots du not spik Ingliy") but the rewrite became more outward-facing, a sort of Euroskeptic joke when light humor about that was still possible (I got it in an email in the 90s), as well as quite a bit funnier.
Misassigning it to Mark Twain is not surprising, because all great quotes by obscure people get reattributed to famous writers over time. Also, Twain wrote a famous and funny essay complaining about German (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html), and he was interested in alphabet reform too (http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1322/).
MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM
by Dalton Edwards
Somewhere out there is a web page tracing this joke. When I googled this yesterday, there was just a haystack of drecky results repeating the joke. But once you have two sources, you can search for them together, and that tends to bring up better results. I just did that, and probably the best one I found was this alt.usage.english thread from 1999: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.usage.english/iw...
Note the marvelous reply: "Thanks for your effort to clear up this ongoing mis-attribution. I remember well "Meihem in ce Klasrum" when John W Campbell Jr published it.
Btw, the author is apparently "Dolton Edwards", not Dalton, and is said to be a pseudonym (which explains the satirical "Dolt") of someone named W.K. Lessing (edit: or K.W.? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114), about whom I didn't find anything when I looked.
I thought we had discussed this on HN before, too, but all I could find was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263, which you posted 4 years ago. Perhaps the next time this comes up, several years from now, one of us will at least find the current thread.
Twain did write "On the Awful German Language", on which the false atribution likely leaned strongly.
The fact that "spelling bees" are even a thing is proof that something is wrong, at least if you are using an alphabet.
German is a lot better than my mother tongue (what kind of spelling is that? Tounge? Tung??) Swedish, which, while awful, is still better than English.
I would guess that the best in class would be Italian. I took an Italian spelling test (listen and write) and I got 95% correct without knowing any Italian.
Edit: and even though I read and write englush several hour a day, my spelling is still awful. I wrote a small elisp script to find out my most corrected words in flyspell. The list just grew in every direction until I gave up.
* You do not capitalize Nouns in your Sentences which is means I don't have to analyse the lexical Structure of a Sentence while writting stuff.
Stuff that is hard in English but rarely talked about because of the prominence of the phonetics-vs-traditional spelling:
* hyphenation (fairly complex, basically one needs to look it up or rely on tooling in english, rarely taught). * punctuation, especially placement of commas * capitalization in headings (a bit confusing, conflicting recommendations)
Oh and as for german there are a lot of strange things buried in what superficially looks like a fairly ok system.
* Typically you can infer from the roots of a word whether to spell with `e' or `ä' (i.e. schälen (to peel) is spelled with ä because it stems from Schale [peel]). But for some words that doesn't apply, for example Mehl (flour) is related to `mahlen' (to grind), but not spelled "Mähl". * Auslautverhärtung is not spelled out but implied. I.e. Hund (dog) is kind of pronounced as if it would end with a -t ("Hunt"), whereas "Hunde" (dogs) has a soft d sound. Turkish makes such things explicit (compare `kitap` and `kitabi`). If we went down the turkish route, we could introduce a soft-s and hard-s distinction in the alphabet (maybe z vs s) and get rid of the `ß/ss` mess. * `sch` should be replaced by Ş, w -> v (with existing spellings of v being replaced by f where necessary ("von" -> "fon"), z -> "ts", etc.
There is an obscure swiss organisation promoting a spelling reform for German(that differs from my suggestions) https://www.ortografie.ch
Its focus is a lot on vocal lengths and capitalization. Kind of interesting stuff (that will never make its way into the maintstream).
Just match how you talk with how you write, and it reads very naturally.
Swiss Standard German got rid of ß :)
i.e. "Fuß" vs swiss "Fuss"
Swiss spelling makes it appear as if "Fuss" (with a long u) could be pronounced like "Nuss" (with a short u), whereas standard German "Fuß" is clear on that.
Prior to the German spelling reform, Nuss was also written "Nuß" and back then the swiss way of spelling had the appeal of avoiding an extra character that is specific to the german language (and wasn't found on french typewriters for example).
What I meant was a spelling like "Fus, Füse, Nuss, Nüsse" but "Gras, Gräzer" (instead of Gras Gräser).
z would be the soft s-sound represented by s in traditional german spelling. s would be the hard s sound represented by ß or s in traditional german spelling.
Luckily for shell scripting, $ is unshifted (shifted would be £. I far prefer USD GBP CHF etc.)
(nonante-neuf > quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. Fais-moi changer d'avis :-) )
If it's any consolation, in my experience, no two native English speakers can agree on where and how often commas are needed either.
Also I think there is a ruleset that is just not really applied by most. That is problematic because it allows for people without good intentions to be strict marking up some students while being lenient with others (a double standard situation).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries when German was still a lingua franca of various scientific fields (linguistics, archaeology), it actually was the practice of some writers outside Germany to not capitalize nouns. One sees this in many German-language scholarly publications from Sweden and Finland, for example.
There's a lot of ambiguity and corner cases about what's a noun in German when you drill down to it (It maybe doesn't seem a problem coming English because you don't have to decide every time you write a word whether it's a noun or not). And Germans in highschool are drilled in this apparently, so many grow to hate it a bit. For example, take 'ein Paar'\'ein paar' (a pair) - in english you say oh pair is a noun so great. But in german whether you write it big or small depends on whether you're using it as an indefinite pronoun or a noun. You can apparently use it to distinguish a pair of trousers (in Paar Hosen) from a pair of trousers (ein paar Hosen), though don't ask me which is which...
And there are some fossilised expressions where even though things are nouns they're written small (e.g. 'durch dick und dünn' (through thick and thin.) ), and there are cases of capitalising things that sure look like adjectives though...I don't know how linguistics classify the parts of speech formally...
Or another example - if say "I take part" ("ich nehme teil") in something, is 'part' a noun? The german sentence is a word-for-word translation of the english, and 'Teil' is a noun in german (meaning 'part'), but you don't capitalise it because teil is part of the verb 'teilnehmen' and not independently a noun in this context.
(here's my personal menagerie of capitalisation rules for German: https://gist.github.com/increpare/b5d652b535656b794c47a77c1d... , and here's a relevant page (in German) by Duden, one of the two main authorities on German orthography - https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/Groß-%2... . It's not a short page, and not something that comes intuitively to people. They learn this stuff).
All that said, I like German orthography! I enjoy compound words and (plus or minus edge cases) its approach to capitalisation.
Learn the phonetics of each letter, and you can literally speak any word.
English is filled with homophones, and while you can almost always figure out which variant is meant through context, in writing the opportunity is reduced. (You can't ask a book a follow-up question.)
Minimal research turned up two lists. One only lists groups of n > 2 (88 triples; 24 quadruples; 2 quintuples; 1 sextet; and 1 septet) [0]. The other is for British English (441 groups) [1].
Your example, by the way, is a particularly interesting case! From the Wikipedia page [2]: 17% of Americans (primarily in the Northeast and most clearly in Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island) pronounce each distinctly, with a further 26% merging only 2/3 pronunciations. Accordingly, their distinct IPA pronunciations are /ˈme(ə)ɹi/, /ˈmæɹi/, /ˈmɛɹi/, respective to your ordering (the last, merry, is the one we've converged on). More frustrating still, the list of "multinyms" in [0] excludes this example so it's especially difficult to know how many there may be in practice.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160825095711/http://people.sc....
[1] http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.h...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...