Ghoti
english.stackexchange.com
english.stackexchange.com
> What does this mean?
> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
>> This text seems to be an example of a proposed spelling reform for the English language. The author has purposefully misspelled words to demonstrate how this reform would change the current spelling system. Here is a translation of the text into standard English:
>> "Finally, then, after some 20 years of orthographic reform, we would have a logical, coherent spelling in use throughout the English-speaking world."
>> The text suggests that after 20 years of implementing changes to the spelling system, the English-speaking world would have a more logical and coherent spelling system.
Edit: wow, over twenty actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X#Other_languages
linguistics nerd flex
[0] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
(it actually originates in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Sometimes the truth is stranger than astounding science fiction)
Similarly, the y in 'finally' makes an i sound (as in the i in 'machine'), while the y in 'tyrant' makes a different i sound (as in the i in 'finally'), and of course the y in 'year' makes yet another totally different sound. And then of course you have 'lye' and 'lie', which sound the same but with very different meanings.
That is what these jokes were about, simplifying so that each letter has only one sound and a spoken word can only be spelled one way while a written word can only be pronounced one way.
It doesn't work and is silly because letters take their sounds from context, combination, and position, as does the y in 'year'. And there aren't enough letters for all the sounds in English.
Actual source: A letter to The Economist (16 January 1971), written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's Words at Play books. This was a modified version of a piece "Meihem in ce Klasrum", published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
> Whenever the subject [of English spelling] comes up, someone is sure to bring up … George Bernard Shaw's ghoti -- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee.
He goes on to substantiate the claim that it has rules, too, by explicitly stating and testing them!
The way that's written gives the impression that the author thinks "over 85% of the time" is something to be particularly proud of - but I'm not so convinced it is. There's still an error rate in there of more than 1 in 7 words, and even this short paragraph I've written has 64 words. Following the rules should still result in 9 pronunciation mistakes, which seems like a lot.
Arguably the author concedes Shaw's point before moving on to more interesting stuff.
> This fallacy arises from the incorrect application of the rules linking orthography to phonology1
I remember when I was mispronouncing recipe and no one had a clue what I meant (it wasn’t even in a cooking context). I was dumfounded when I found out how words like tomb or womb are pronounced. Or how about colonel? Or how nation is pronounced differently as a whole word vs when it’s part of national.
In contrast Spanish must be a bitch to learn as an adult due to all the verb tenses, but once you know the pronunciation rules you can read anything correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying.
Weddin just lies on the spectrum between Wodan and Odin.
When I noticed that first 'r' I questioned everything I thought I knew about the universe...
Except for the letter X which has 3 pronunciations, and some other weird stuff. Admittedly, nothing as bad as French or English.
Your comment actually articulates something I’ve always sensed but never explicitly acknowledged.
*adult Hungarian learner laughs*
You can memorize the Spanish verb tenses in a weekend. They're very regular and you essentially just have to memorize first, second and third person singular and plural for -er, -ar and -ir verbs. 3x2x3=18 endings. Using the regular form for irregular verbs is mostly understandable and even a common mistake for native speaking children.
Also, in addition to being a phonetically spelled language, it's also aspirated, which means that the sounds are pronounced very sharply and clearly and easy for ears to pick up.
It's entirely possible for an adult Spanish learner to become conversational in a couple of months.
Good luck learning all of the possible forms of Hungarian words. And though it's phonetically spelled, it's not aspirated, so the pronunciation sounds muted and mumbly, and it's hard to distinguish between sounds like D and N or P and B. Statistically speaking it takes 4-5 years of immersion for an English speaking adult to become conversational in Hungarian.
I've never tried to learn Hungarian but as a casual traveller there I deeply appreciated the phonetic spelling. The Hungarian alphabet can be memorized in an hour or two and then you can immediately pronounce any written Hungarian word and be understood (terrible accent I'm sure but the locals will get it).
By comparison, I've lived in Vietnam for several years now. The grammar is very simple. Every word is one syllable. A lot of common words are made from compounds of basic words (long horn animal = rhino type thing) so you can make educated guesses once you've learned a few words.
The problem? Nobody, including even my close friends, partner, and coworkers, can understand anything that I say in Vietnamese. Anything more complicated than "thank you", "hello", and a handful of numbers. And I cannot understand them either. If I pronounce a word as written but get the tone very very slightly wrong, it seems 100% impossible for Vietnamese people to infer the word I meant to say. It's incredibly frustrating and I've started and given up learning Vietnamese many times. I've learned some basic grammar, I've learned enough words to string a few sentences together. But what use is that when I go into a market and order something basic like "ice" ("nuoc da" , or just "da") and nobody has a clue what I'm saying?
Every conversation where I try to learn a new word in Vietnamese turns into ten minutes of "no, you're still not saying it right, the tone rises and falls at the end", "no, too much rise, say it like this" over and over until I give up. And that's not even mentioning the accents, differences in tone, and entirely different words used for basic things between the north and south of the country. Or the fact that locals are not in any way interested in trying to help a foreigner speak their language.
Learning Vietnamese is the most frustrating thing I've ever attempted in my life. I'm good at learning things. I'm sure I could sit down for a few days and memorize a hundred irregular verb conjugations. But I can't overcome this problem. How can you learn a language that you can't pronounce or hear?
But when a non-native person speaks English it can be difficult if their accent does not map to an existing named set of vowels. If they have learned a specific accent e.g. “International American” accent it makes life much easier. In many cases with minimal pairs, knowing what accent someone is speaking is crucial to comprehending what they are saying.
I suspect that something similar is happening in Vietnamese. It seems unlikely that everybody in Vietnam uses the exactly same set of tones, given the history of the country. Instead of learning Vietnamese tones maybe you need to learn the tones of a particular city and ignore speakers from outside that city?
And it doesn't solve the problem on the graphematic level. It ought to allow anyone to read the chosen dialect phonetically. But it suffers from an arbitrary choice of glyphs, so I have no idea how to pronounce eg. an (an actual problem I have pondered today is a-typical).
Conversely, if the spelling ought to be predictable for language learners, you are probably better of learning Mandarin (^_^)
The perfect English abjad would use diacritics to mark vowels and some clever way to identify syllable boundaries (so you can distinguish ideal from idyll). But alas, we’re probably stuck with an alphabetic script forever.
This one took a moment. (It's "naturally", not "neutrally" or "entirely".)
The rest is surprisingly readable.
"Thee proplem weth a systhemateck, fhoneteck chaigne en
Englush speleeng es thet et raeses thee questeon uv wut
aksent to faivor. Fer an Americon en Oheo, thees
transkriptshon probubly maeks sum sens, wunce yu get paest
thee skwaw. I daut an Engleshman or eaven a Nue Yorcer wud
fynd et ueseful."
"Th' proplem weth a systh'mateck, fhoneteck chaigne en
Aynglsh speln iz thayt et raeses th' questyun uv wut aksent
ta fayver. Fer a Amur'can down yonder in Ohayo, thees
transkripshun prahbly maeks sum sens, wunce y'all git past
th' skwaw. Ah daut an Engleshman or ev'n a Nue Yorcer wud
fynd et much ueseful."
- GPT-4 / https://sharegpt.com/c/Q5DW1wgFirst was a programming language called "Tang" ("Template lANGuage", also a type of fish). Project available on GitHub.
Second was a thread pool worker queue call "Pool". Also available on GitHub.
Now I'm working on an HTTP server named "Wave". For surfing the web, of course. Still working on it, not ready for public consumption.
Yes, they are bad puns and double meanings. No, I don't care. Yes, I'm enjoying it.
And I still love the word "ghoti"!
Ghoti - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 - June 2020 (239 comments)
Ghoti - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296927 - March 2011 (3 comments)
Fewer people seem to be aware that ghoti is silent:
gh as in right
o as in people
t as in mortgage
i as in business
So, relatively speaking, written English is just slightly worse than Hangul.[2]
[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug
In comparison, most of irregularities with English spelling are either caused by extensive word loaning or by language changes that happened too long ago to make sense today.
So no, they're not the same.
The o in women is really the only one that is completely irregular. The others follow.. not rules, but at least heuristics.
I'm not defending English pronunciation. It's clearly a mess. But this feels like a disingenuous way to demonstrate that. (Yeah I know it's clearly a joke.)
Finnish does. But the Finnish language only gained a writing system in common usage relatively recently, in the 1800s.
Making it all consistent overnight would result in nobody being able to read (let alone write) the language anymore, but incremental tweaks that are gradual, obvious, and consistent could be doable.
I don't think we can, at least not while preserving its value. For one, english started as basically a pidgin or creole from the british isles being invaded by so many groups over centuries, so we're not starting off at the best place. Two, the other examples of spelling reform I'm aware of are either from highly centralized places (the French empire), or small groups of countries that border each other (German spelling reform). There's not really a way to get the US, UK, India, and parts of Africa to agree on how something is pronounced (and therefore agree on what the proper spelling should be).
The only way to "fix" it would be to have each country (or region within a country potentially), reform the language in a different way, which would destroy most of the value of having so many people in disparate places speak that language and be able to communicate.
My point is that, because you have so many disparate groups with completely different pronunciations (and therefore different target idealized spellings), reformation will destroy the majority of the value.
And nobody who actually speaks english has an interesting in destroying the value of understanding that language.
Several. But for an easy grapheme-phoneme correspondence, you'd better look to Spanish. You can learn that in an hour or two.
> incremental tweaks
will slowly render older texts unreadable. Nobody (ok, almost nobody) can read old Dutch texts. Even 19th century Dutch is awkward to read.
English is n:m, everything is possible and you just need to learn it.
Finnish is >99% 1:1. A native speaker can should be able to write each word correctly. In practice spelling errors do exist. Partly because in colloquial speach / dialects not all words are pronounced fully according to the rules. Partly because some people are just unable to apply the rules. Not being able to pronounce a written word seems mostly impossible.
However, foreigners should not think Finnish is easy for that reason. There are many sounds foreigners cannot pronounce correctly. And several pairs of sounds that foreigners' ears cannot distinguish.
With previous experience of English, French, German and Spanish, when I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology I don't feel intimiated like I do by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology or get the sense of dispair that I get from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology
Gud tu nou.
Yes, but this is true of literally every language. English is not special. This is Linguistics 101 stuff.
Friends don't let friends be prescriptivists.
Also, language is an evolving tool that we all co-own. If you want to see a change, modify how you write. People do this all the time. If it’s a good idea, maybe it’ll catch on.
Exactly: the the answer is an emphatic "No."
There is nothing to be fixed; to imagine that there is some sort of Platonic Ideal English is absurd on its face - and in even asking the question of quote-unquote fixing it, you can really see the HN-stereotype penchant for a clear set of rules showing through. Linguistics moved past this a hundred damned years ago.
Natural languages are not programming languages. There is no such thing as "correct"; as with any language, there is only such thing as the many-varied ways in which native speakers speak.
As read or read?
:-)
Isn't this only true if you already know how Hindi specifically is supposed to be pronounced? I don't think you could show someone a romanized Hindi text and expect them to even come close to an accurate pronunciation. For example, doesn't Hindi have like six ways of making the English "D" sound?
Same thing for e.g. Chinese, you can't represent tones with unaugmented Roman characters.
Interestingly this hasn’t stopped people from trying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh
What.
Most other languages do not shy away from having more ways of presenting sounds native to that language than English.
There are 24 consonant and 25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation alone. All inadequately represented by just 22 letters.
1. I didn't say it was a bad thing
2. English actually can't represent a grwat number of sounds using a small set: there are many, many sounds in English that are not actually represented by its set of letters. The most common of them, shwa, isn't in any shape, way or form represented by English language. It's a mess of different letter combinations in different contexts, none of which adequately express the sound.
To quote Wikipedia: "In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with.
3. You claimed that "in other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited" which is, of course, untrue.
I watched a video about this recently I found fascinating, I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because it occurs only in certain stress positions of a word, which changes depending on the surrounding words. But notice when you "talk slowly", that is, fixate on each and every word, you actually don't pronounce the shwa very often, if at all.
Couldn't find the video but it turns out there are a million on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus
Doesn't matter. You claimed English is so much better at representing sounds than other languages. And yet, it cannot represent the most common one. And of course, shwa is just one of them. As I mentioned before, English has significantly more sounds than letters, and of course cannot represent most of them even if those exist when you "soeak slowly".
More over, its so poor in expressing these sounds that it re-uses and repurposes completely different letter combinations for the same sound. Or the same letter for completely different sounds.
Because of course get/gist and use/you and fashion/mission/faction show us not the poor expressiveness of the language but how wonderfully rich it is in representing the different sounds.
this is actually explained by something called the Indo-European ablaut, or as the Indians who original came up with this call it, Guna and Vrddhi. Basically, there is a set of vowel grades in the IE languages: a -> (long) a -> (long) a; i -> e -> ai; u -> o -> au; (vowel) r -> ar -> (long) ar. The reason for the ablaut changes are fairly complex, but notice how in your example reign has the "e" as in pain, whereas "sovreign" has the "i" as in "bit", reign is actually the "guna" or first grade of the ablaut. English spelling doesn't generally represent these changes, nor does it have to, because people are aware of the sequence without knowing it, and those sound changes do not sound strange or out of place for them.
>scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting their spelling to reflect that
English actually has no official spelling for any words, its just that the King James bible was the first widely distributed printed book that people were able to read in the English speaking world, so people adopted the spellings for words in that book. Its quite arbitrary, which makes the elegance of the spelling system even better--the fact that no one got involved meant that we were able to create this beautifully complex system that could represent nearly an infinite number of sounds, because nobody tried to "standardize" and phoneticize English spelling.