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Comment by austinl | Hacker News Reader

Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example.

Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time.

Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform).

[1] https://spellingbee.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... [4] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

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It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions,

And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.

> And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english.

The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.

The point was that learning a smaller subset of the language makes the challenge doable at all, which is what is happening here.

> American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford

Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.

Well, I think one should be free to dream of the Americans finally learning how to spell correctly.

>And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.

The full Webster's (which is probably the closest to a standard for American English) is 263K entries (which Google tells me is what is used for the Scripp's spelling bee) vs. 350K for Oxford. So smaller but not that much smaller. The standard Webster's is "only" 75K but there's also a truncated version of Oxford that's 125K.

This surprised me, so I've just looked it up. I'm now surprised for a different reason.

"Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 entries" and it's a single volume, albeit a hefty one.

"Oxford English Dictionary" on the other hand, has "301,100 main entries" and yet the last paper version was 20 volumes. Presumably because OED contains more details per word.

Of course, for anything but a spelling bee it's pretty absurd to compare dictionaries by number of entries. Beyond a certain point: you're just buying more chaff like family names and alternative spellings.

This is what Merriam-Webster says: "Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number." (That's different from the other list I saw.)

But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.

On the homepage of the OED it says "More than 600,000 words, over a thousand years". Who's right? Who knows anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Entr...

> Supplementing the entry headwords, there are

> 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives;[8]

> 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations;[9]

> 616,500 word-forms in total,

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

> The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 lemmas [word, compound, phrase, or derivative],[2]

Lately the words I see from the last round of spelling bees are unnaturalized words from foreign languages. One was German.

Are you kidding? It’s prime time TV in France.

Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL.

Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.

I ran into this phenomenon when I was idly learning the Shavian alphabet. It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. So, while it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to read it, (accurately) writing it would have required about as much rote memorization as it does in any other alphabetical language I'm familiar with.

(https://www.shavian.info/)

> It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it.

The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim.

> While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1]

I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way.

[1]: https://shavian.info/alphabet/

> think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person

An English person and only from the south of England at that. I’m English from Liverpool and I say past the same as y’all!

Fascinating! I guess it doesn’t help that the Cambridge dictionary shows UK as one way and US as the other. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/past

As a southern American, I use pretty much the same vowel in "y'all" that most English people would in "past" or "bath". "Past" and "bath" are the same vowel as "cat" uses in the Queen's English.

Hahaha no. I just meant same as you. Not same as you pronounce y’all.

I’ve been in Texas 20 years and picked up y’all as a verbal tick same as well…y’all.

It's an immensely useful word. Cf. "yinz" of western Pennsylvania, which is a contraction of "you 'uns" of Appalachia, which is a contraction of "you ones". The popularity of rap has spread it immensely in the past thirty-odd years, because Black English is strongly influenced by long association with white Southern dialect (and vice versa).

That distinction doesn't really resolve it, though. English dialects are diverse enough that there are many pairs of words that are homophones in one accent, and sound different in another. For example, I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.

So, depending on your native accent, Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which), or use the same letter for multiple sounds. Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.

> I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.

Yes, some hard choices do need to be made. In cases like these, it’s almost always better to err on the side of preserving distinctions even if the speaker does not recognize the distinctions. Because over time, they will start to recognize patterns and understand the distinctions more while nothing of value is lost in English.

> Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which)

Yes and for the most part I think this is a good thing. It is a very small concession to make considering the alternative.

> Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.

One single prescriptive spelling for global english may be impossible for the time being. But I am very interested in further researching a kind of neo-mid-atlantic accent.

French is even weirder because the adopted words are often pronounced in a completely different way than the original. We encountered that 2 days ago when my children (who are bilingual French/German) tried to explain to me about the Highland cows they learned about in a book they got. They book had instructions to pronounce the word so it sounded like "Island" so I got quite confused, if this was cows form Ireland or maybe Iceland.

The elusive "h". It is very common (for French speaking English) to either remove an h as they did there, or insert it where it don't belong as in "hot hair balloon" or the city of "Hamsterdam".

Nothing used to annoy my Essex friends as much as telling them they sound French because they treat “H” the same way

It’s fun, after being taught about the H, to see that fellow French people don’t hear the presence or absence of H until they are taught; It’s like white noise, we assume the guy needs to breathe.

That h? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6oeAdemFZw

After 20 years of speaking english (french mother-tongue here) someone finally told me that you don't pronounce the "h" in "hour". I (and, I think, most french people speaking english) really do have to think of the spelling of a word before pronouncing it. And there I was being extra careful with that h at Hour. Now I have to be extra careful not to pronounce it…

But on a positive note, discovering all these small quirks are like "Achievement unlocked" kind of moments if you like learning languages.

I am French too and I am trying to understand how you pronounced "hour" before (my dog, cat and wife are already looking at me suspiciously).

You pronounced the "h" like in "hot"? (with the "h" making actually a sound?). I am quite surprised because we do not pronounce and "h" when it starts a word (usually at least), and I've been learning English in the 80's with Brian and Jenny (kudos to the ones who had the same manual) and it was not taught that way either.

English has a similar confusion with the word hotel. A loan-word from French, the correct indefinite article is counterintuitive. An hotel, a house.

As a native (American) English speaker I would never write or say "an hotel" and I don't think most people would. I confess I didn't realize this was even a debate. An hotel is apparently an older English grammar rule that it appears is considered largely obsolete.

ADDED: You do see a remnant of this with "an historical" but even that is generally not preferred in most dialects. https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw007.html Basically, it has to do with whether the initial "h" is pronounced in a given dialect of English.

It might also have to do with avoiding confusion with the word "ahistorical".

In English you almost always pronounce an H at the start of the word. In fact I can't think of any examples other than Hour for when you don't pronounce it

e.g.

Hot Happy House Hotel Humble Hundred Help Hippo

Herb, whether you pronounce the H depends on whether you speak British or American English.

Honor, heir, honest. Together with herb and hour, those are the only ones I can think of.

Also homage. This page gives a list, which is just those plus derivatives:

https://yolainebodin.com/the-language-nook/english/english-w...

That's a good point - thanks. This would explain "hour" in OP case.

Yes exactly like for hot. And I was even "proud" of not forgetting to pronounce it…

How-er

25 years in Canada and I still pronounce the L in salmon and all the letters in Bomb. To amusement of everyone but its still understandable :-)

And then there's knight and knife :-O

The particular problem you're describing is our (I'm French too) very specific issue with the sound "h" I think. Same with "th".

Heh. I was watching this TV series, in French, about some retired superheroes in a village. In the first episodes they were talking about a supervillain, but I couldn't quite catch his name, it was something like "zoolord", "zolord", "zelord"...?

I looked it up on wikipedia and of course it was "The Lord" XD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Corp#Main_characters

Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)

> Are you kidding? It’s prime time TV in France.

Sort of like a “where’s Waldo” only it’s “where’s the pronounced vowel”?

I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.

Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.

I'm a German native speaker, and I still sometimes get tripped up by things like it being spelled "Flannel" in English, but "Flanell" in German.

Same spelling in Swedish, and until you mentioned it just now, I never even realised that the word is spelled differently in English.

It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.

For "Flannel" and "Flanell", it makes a surprising amount of sense when you then look at the pronounciation. The English word is stressed on the first syllable, like "FLANnel", which makes the N sound longer, whereas Germans say "flaNELL", which makes the final L sound longer.

Try Turkish, everything is spelled as they are written, although the grammar will make you insane.

Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C...

Detecting cat pictures is nothing compared to deciphering sütterlin. Even Unicode has rejected it, despite accepting useless text like Linear A.

On suetterlin (or the overall topic of current) its not just a change about handwriting. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German books were published in blackletter (Fraktur) until it was abolished by the Nazi regime (internal reasoning "you cannot rule the world if the world cannot read what you type", what was communicated "Fraktur is jewish").

I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier.

For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries.

Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore.

Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.

Linear A is not useless! It is widely used by Greek teenagers as a shorthand for quick text messaging.

Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down.

However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases.

'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch'

Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past.

In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters.

(gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...)

There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like

'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea

Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.

In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it.

There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O

I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin.

Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.

I find Hungarian itself pretty easy to learn, it's just that all words are unfamiliar, except those of Germanic or Slavic or Latin origin :)

> Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996

That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.

> switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.

[Citation Needed]

It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."

You just don't frequent the same 'socioculutal strata' ;)

I find "Photographie" all the time, most prominently in photography-related organisations and publications, so that might be carried over from old times before 1996... when "Fotografie" was already a valid variant spelling.

I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.

I think "Photographie" is common when you want to sound stuck-up-your-ass artsy-fartsy. In regular use the word "Foto" is way more common than "Photo", unless you're the publisher of a black and white analog photography publication dating back to 1888.

My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.

> since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries

You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours?

I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß

Liechtenstein, too, in that agreement.

More German speaking countries (language with official status) who were not involved: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Namibia.

There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...

The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.

It is pretty much a thing in French too, sadly.

On the other hand, you also have languages like Danish where the pronunciation is just as messy as English.

And just when you think numbers can't be any sillier than in French, Danish comes along and proves you wrong.

The rest of Scandinavia love to point it out. From Norway: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

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