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Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:

> Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.

In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:

> I go to my practice to practise medicine.

The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.

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So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour.

If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

> and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth

What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping?

Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default to US English.

I work at an international organisation, and can confirm. My understanding is that is that at the international level, only the US-based international organisations use US English.

To be sure, I don‘t have any dog in this fight, just highlighting a fact from my experience that many here might not know.

That sounds surprising. As an European, I thought that UK only thinks their English is the dominant one, because it's the one officially taught everywhere. Meanwhile, the reality is, people learn English primarily from Hollywood and MTV; music, video, television and computer games are both the primary exposure and the main reason for people to pick English up, and they're almost all in US English. Secondarily, computers - the OS, software, SaaS - all of that is either in US English or localized to wherever the users live, and even then the US English version is usually better.

Nobody actually uses UK English here, except for English teachers. Computers don't. TV doesn't. Corporate jobs don't. And so regular people don't either.

Where is "here"?

I believe at least in all of Eastern Europe (including those guys who call themselves Central :wink:) US English dominates in pop culture, and business. I also used to work with a few Italians, and Portuguese and they all wrote US En too, so I suspect it's the same for them too.

Those who call themselves Central Europe are a part of the European Union, and so lean towards the UK English since school education and relevant English certifications are geared towards it. Perhaps those who would like to ignore the fact that Central Europe is a region distinct geographically and culturally from the Eastern Europe, nowadays more than ever, should not project their views unto others and speak for them?

"Here" is Poland, but in my trips to other places in Europe (and around the world), I never saw anything that would suggest this is an unique experience. On the contrary, it's pretty much self-evident, and having it be otherwise would require the last 200 years of world history to be dramatically different from what they were.

The kind of organization that identifies as an "international organization" is disproportionately likely to be hyperaware of its working language choice and standardize on a particular English dialect by policy and pick en-gb.

Without such a conscious choice, yes, Americanisms do seem a fair bit more globally pervasive and easy to fall into "by accident".

I'm assuming we're talking NGOs here, because if we expand "organization" to include for-profit entities, then I'd argue vast majority of them will not just be US-English speaking, but US-originating and US-headquatered.

> Without such a conscious choice, yes, Americanisms do seem a fair bit more globally pervasive and easy to fall into "by accident".

You'd need choice and enforcement - unless such organization is testing for Received Pronunciation during interviews and filtering out people who cannot into Queen's English[0], I'd wager most of the members in such org, who don't come from UK (or a few related countries), will be speaking "British English" with distinctly US pronunciation. Because while an organization can make a conscious choice here, for most people, learning a second language is a long-term endeavor that largely happens "in the background", and it's very easy to learn a blend, with UK English being present in schools, and US English everywhere else.

[0] - Or is it King's English now?

Coming from the horse's mouth, my expectation is that GP works at some kind of (non-military?) treaty organization? ime while outsiders might include NGOs under the umbrella, the kind of people who work at the "international level" tend to uhhh, care about their taxonomy. Multinational corporations are almost never lumped together with these (and generally don't really care about international cooperation as a goal, except instrumentally), outside the barest sense of "yeah, I guess they're organizations and they work internationally".

Majority counting by combined headcount of the organisation type maybe, but almost all multinationals are very big companies so by the law of "you get fewer number of pieces if each piece is large" there just aren't very many of them.

My experience with a large multi-thousand Eng department where the majority are in the US or UK: US-based or influenced employees will write usually with American English spellings and continue to do so even if based in the UK. UK-based or influenced employees will write with British English spellings and continue to do so if based in the US. No one conforms to the other and everyone can understand each other perfectly fine because the spelling of these words does not matter for comprehension. This applies to writing as well as words in code or API names.

This feels wrong, I work in China in a European multinational with low number of Americans, yet we all spell in a mixture with no expectation of consistency: half the sentence can be in British, the rest in American and it will be an Australian reading the email and they will feel absolutely nothing: multi national corporations full of non-native speakers are completely used to the confusion. I'm French myself, I write color as often as I write colour, and practice and practise are completely identical to me.

Not sure what is international level? If it's a kind of supranational organizations which mandate a particular version of English, I'm ready to believe that in EU it's UK En. But for commercial companies my experience is exactly opposite: it's mostly US En unless you're communicating with Brits, or someone from a country which inherited British education.

This is my approach/experience as well, hence my comment and question to the previous poster.

Plenty of European companies and organizations use American spellings. In general I’d say it’s pretty much random and 50/50.

I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.

It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?

Speaking for myself (an American), when I read published work that uses British spellings and I know the author is American, it feels to me that the author thinks American spellings are somehow vulgar or improper and he/she is trying to rise above our shameful misspellings.

British Commonwealth authors (well, really any author I know to be not from the USA) get a pass because these are the spellings they were taught. Nothing wrong with that.

This is a phenomenon I've only noticed in the last two decades or so. I don't know if American students are now being (wrongly) taught British spellings in school or they merely think their writing will carry more weight if it has a British "accent" but it just seems arrogant to me.

The OED is a useful resource but it is not our dictionary of final arbitration. Americans should use the American Heritage Dictionary.

I do not think you should ever feel that way. If any English-speaking listener has an issue with another speaking the dialect of English they were raised with, the listener has an issue with themselves they need to work through.

As an American English speaker, I have in the past used UK spellings when communicating at work with a group that I know only contains British English recipients. There is nothing wrong with that -- anything that makes communication more fluid should be welcome.

I believe the arrogance angle exists in a situation where an American English speaker with no British English education is using British spellings when communicating with other _American English_ speakers to purposefully create an air of superiority. If you do this, even if no one says anything, they definitely notice.

For other English dialects, my personal take is that most Americans (at least the ones who travel or interact with foreigners personally or at work) will assume they either are or are heavily influenced by British English due to history.

I have always been "aware" of the concept that they can be perceived as arrogant, but really only "colour" - it sounds kind of deliberate and like some attempt to sound "fancy," like enunciating "theater" as "thee-AY-tour" But even so, I usually see it as a humorous thing. The person is purposely trying to sound over the top arrogant/refined as a joke. I've never actually read "british" spellings and gone "what an ass." I usually assume that's how they write or it's a joke.

Huge quantities of english speakers, who are not from the Commonwealth, learn British English.

We learn both, tbh... And then get confused all our life, it's not like we choose one style in school, school teaches us that English actually has two dominant spellings and here is the American, here is the British and deal with it.

Non-native English speakers don't learn English exactly the same way as natives learning from their parents.

Americans finding anyone else arrogant is quite rich.

That's a mighty broad brush you're painting with

I guess it's more of a shit throwing contest than an artistic practice.

In the real world, it boils down to a game of "count the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers".

As a Frenchman, I enjoy writing colour and being arrogant.

Quelle que soit la facon dont ils ecrivent, ce sera toujours une faute d'orthographe, puisque la seule vraie facon d'ecrire serait couleur. L'anglais, americain ou britannique, n'est qu'une geante faute d'orthographe du francais.

Come on, write couleur and let them eat cake ;)

Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?

I don't think OP meant "arrogant" in terms of more prestigious, but in the sense of any native US-English speaker using British English spellings as a way to seem fancier or more formal.

Non-native US-English speakers are not viewed in the same light (in my opinion).

I find there are a few specific Britishisms (like theatre) that don't really raise an eyebrow in the US and maybe can seem a bit more upper-class. Grey vs. gray are essentially interchangeable. Toward vs. towards is another.

> you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

That is simply not true. Maybe that's how you feel about it, but it is generally not the case (or even considered, really).

I learned colour at school in France.

I learned that both exist in school in France. It doesn't matter, I write both interchangeably and nobody ever cared nor corrected me.

Yes, we also had lessons about the differences between BE and AE so we are aware of both, it is just that when Brian was in the kitchen, he was asking about the colour of something.

The reference to Brian being in the kitchen is understandable only for Gen X in France. (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_is_Brian%3F, only in French unfortunately but you also have https://youtu.be/11jG7lkwDwU?si=gQoVL_AmBfQMrZbX&t=57)

Not "only" come on, I'm a little bit younger and I know it too ahah You even linked a youtube video, which I assume is the sketch in question (at work, no youtube): we can look at things from the past and learn them too !

Actually I posted my comment about who can understand it before adding the Wikipedia link, where I learned that Gad Elmaleh did a sketch about that (where a lot of people post GenX presumably learned about the expression).

It gives off arrogant vibes to have one accuse Americans of being arrogant for using alternative spellings.

That's very colorful[sic] thinking.

I get this.

> ... in 'full fat' English ...

English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

Setting the bar where it is well written and unambiguously understandable is IMHO completely fine for a 15$ product.

Having a text spell checked to comply with contemporary Oxford English is likely not the goal of this product.

> English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).

If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny

> there are many Englishes, many sets of rules.

Absolutely, but try to make a run-of-the-mill LLM understand this.

You still need to adapt it to where you are though, people expect this because it causes misunderstandings. If I as a British person go to the US, I know that I can't ask people to go and buy some booze from the off-license and when finished ask them to put their aluminium can in the bin ready for the rubbish lorry while wearing their jumper because that sounds anachronistic.

Not too mention that a jumper in the US is closer to a pinafore.

I'm American and have no idea what a pinafore or American jumper is. I know a jumper is a hoodie because I lived in Australia a while ago. But that's not a word I ever hear here.

It's like overalls with a skirt. In the 80s they were popular for girls.

Yes, I'm aware, a colleague moved to Berkeley and relayed a story where he confused a lot of people :)

> contemporary Oxford English

If you chose Oxford because of the Oxford English Dictionary, note that it's not regular en-gb, it's en-gb-oxendict. "the OED often favo[u]rs "-ize" (and its derivatives) over "-ise" for words derived from Greek roots, and may also include historical or less common usages."

I was not aware of this, thanks!

There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed:

> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.

> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.

> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729

The elephant in the room here is how you ethically get people to onboard without an existing community / fomo / money.

The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them.

Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.

Do what reddit did, use multiple accounts as founders, and with AI I'm sure it's even easier to do so. For content-based platforms you must have content, there is no way around it and I don't see adding fake content in the beginning to be unethical, it is a solution to the cold start problem (also a good book by Andrew Chen at a16z [0]).

[0] https://a16z.com/books/the-cold-start-problem/

Describing American English as “simplified” English is textbook bad linguistics. It’s a different dialect, not an inherently simpler or more complex one.

It's an old meme: https://imgur.com/thats-bit-harsh-steam-XCEdD8W

In the UK, it's considered good form to be humorous when making an argument; I gather that in the US, you're supposed to sound like you're making a speech to prepare troops for war. I apologise if, in the course of describing how a product is unsuitable for use in my culture, I made that argument according to the norms of my culture.

I once saw this movie where several UK English words were compared to US English and US came of very “simplified”. Ie, pavement “Side walk” (because walk on the side). And several things like Lorry and Hauler all becoming “truck”. I guess it was very cherry picked (I can’t find it now sadly).

Ah well, I once read an argument for “EU English”. If it’s anything like my Dunglish (Dutch-English “What talk you about”) it would indeed be simplified.

http://enwp.org/Euro_English

Banter (Traditional)

Banter (Simplified)

Simplified English is a thing that exists, for clarity - see for example https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice

I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.

Could the 'Simplified Spelling Board'[1] of 1906 have anything to do with the naming?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

Huh, that's an interesting tidbit.

> The Simplified Spelling Board was announced on March 11, 1906, with Andrew Carnegie funding the organization, to be headquartered in New York City.

Some big names here.

> The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that "English might be made the world language of the future"

He wasn't wrong.

> and an influence leading to universal peace,

That's still to be seen.

> but that this role was obstructed by its "contradictory and difficult spelling".

Well now.

It's interesting to scroll through the list of proposed changes; 100+ years later, many of them seem to be the default/correct spelling, but just as many look wrong, even when following the same transformation rules. E.g.: "brasen" -> "brazen" vs. "surprise" -> "surprize".

Thanks for linking this!

Yea, it’s insane to try and an entire country’s writing dialect as simplified. I guess it would be the only way to show off his snobbery though.

For what it’s worth, I’m a native British English speaker and don’t instinctively consider “practice” “grammatically incorrect”. Indeed, I would probably write “practice” myself.

Pretty sure I had this corrected on more than one occasion when I was at school. Also licence/license. I remember one day figuring out the parallel with advice/advise as a way to remember which was which. So C for the noun and S for the verb.

Weirdly (to my brain), Americans always spell practice with a C, but always spell license with an S.

That's why you need a good spellchecker.

Case in point: "Is there a educational discount?" I believe this should say "an educational discount". I wonder if the tool would have caught it.

Did the website originally say this? I just checked and it says "an" now... Perhaps they didn't use their own tool when writing the web copy.

Fluent American readers are likely to think "practise" is a typo. It's not even one of the commonly-known British/American spelling differences (like "color"/"colour"). Unless you know your audience is likely to be more familiar with British spelling, I'd avoid "practise."

They're not very smart then: most non-native people know there are several big mainstream ways to spell English, and we learn that on top of our own languages.

Couldn't American schools teach English the same way, like, that there are no single proper way ?

We know that there are spelling differences, but most of us probably only know the most prominent ones. In my estimation, this one is quite obscure.

I thought the difference between practice vs. practise was that the latter is British. My spell checker (US English) does not like "practise" though, it is underlined with red. UK English, however, does not underline "practise" with red. So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English? Because based on the spell checker, that seems to be the case.

> So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English?

Correct: practice is a noun, and practise is a verb, in non-US English. I don't have my (twenty-volume) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but Wiktionary has an explanation under 'usage notes': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practise

> British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African English spelling distinguishes between practice (a noun) and practise (a verb), analogously with advice and advise though without an analogous difference in pronunciation. In American English, the spelling practice is commonly used for both noun and verb.

I see.

Calling American spelling "simplified" is anachronistic. It'd be more accurate to call British English "embellished". UK English was irreparably damaged by some smug wannabe-Frenchmen who decided there weren't enough unpronounced letters in English after we broke off.

In American English, "practise" is incorrect. So if the screenshot is taken from a user using the en_US locale it is correct. Perhaps, if your locale is en_GB it will correct "practice" to "practise", but you can't know that from a screenshot.

Lets be fair here, this tool is new - the domain was registered on Saturday.

What you suggest does seem like a good early doors feature; but the cut they've made seems to be the right one to prove market potential.

It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.

Severe limitations? You sound like an a*hole tbf. The tool clearly provides the value, and it's a magnificent display how something like a simple LLM can be used to make your everyday life easier without compromising other minor stuff, you know, like letting other companies make profits by selling your own data?

Perhaps you live under a rock, I don't really know, but it maybe just happens that you're not a target audience? There's for sure many folks, and even more so companies, who will value their own privacy more over practice vs practise bikeshedding.

I have to go with GP here, being able to set the language to en_UK and en_US and getting the right corrections based on this setting is a minimal requirement for an English spellchecker. I can do without other English spelling variants but these two need to be supported correctly and consistently.

I have no idea how this tool is better than running local LLM. Should I buy it?

So you’re saying that for most English speakers it was correct, and that’s a problem?

There are many different Englishes. I would bet that this tool does not handle Indian or Malaysian dialects.

British English is still influential over most of the Commonwealth, ie a large number of countries.

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