Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

This always irritates me somewhat. Let me link [0], as I do every time this comes up:

> 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!

[0] http://zompist.com/spell.html

View on HN

> The purpose of this page is to describe those rules -- to explain the system behind English spelling, the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time.

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.

"the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time."

Arguably the author concedes Shaw's point before moving on to more interesting stuff.

jan Misali (or possibly others, but this is the first known occurrence to my knowledge) has argued that a much better example would be pfysche [1], which is within the observed English spelling rules and still hard to predict its pronunciation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEsqY4MH40s&t=25s

As a non native speaker I had a hard time with "scythe" which as far as I can tell is not matching all the rules in this page, and at the same time is relatively common.

I think rule 12 covers the vowel, and then rule 20 explains why it's sï+ not skï+ but I could be wrong about whether the vowel is a front vowel or not.

This irritates me immensely. Whenever somebody posts an article saying that this pronunciation doesn't make sense, somebody will assume that the article doesn't say that and then comment that it doesn't make sense posting yet another article. From the article:

> This fallacy arises from the incorrect application of the rules linking orthography to phonology1

Hmm, good point, I didn’t notice they made it clear that this is a fallacy. But often people don’t!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com