Hacker News Reader

Comment by sikhbeats | Hacker News Reader

> Gregg eschews the parade of silent letters, like the “y” in “bay” that make English so difficult to learn as a second language.

I stopped reading here. I can't take this drivel seriously.

View on HN

srsly?

At least for me - a native German speaker with English as a self taught second language - I find that the `y` in bay actually makes it easier to figure out the correct pronunciation.

Since `a` is pronounced as `ah` in German, just having `ba` would make the `a` sound like the one in `bra`, which would make it hard to distinguish between `ba(y)` and `ba(h)` when first learning the language.

Removing the y's would also leave one with seemingly strange words like `awa`, `ga`, `sla` and `sta`. Which quite honestly to me, look much more like mnemonics rather than actual English words.

I'm a native english speaker I'd make the same assumptions about "ba" as you would. I'm not sure what accent "ba" would be pronounced "bay" in.

One where the graph 'a' referred to the long a sound only?

Maybe it works because there is no english word written 'ba', and in fact no english word that's 'b' followed by vowel(s) and nothing else, except for 'bay'. So there's no other word it could be.

But yeah, the extreme form of gregg shorthand definitely seems, from the OP, to rely on lots of contextual knowledge for it's concision. That seems to be it's strategy, eliminate letters where contextual knowledge will suffice to reconstruct them.

> and in fact no english word that's 'b' followed by vowel(s) and nothing else

  "beau", "bi", "be", "bee", "bao", "boa"

came to mind off the top of my head and are all in the dictionary; there are probably others. Of these, "be", "bee", and "boa" should be pretty non-controversial both in terms of "word" and "English".

For the original issue, "ba" pronounced with the actual letter names does in fact sound like "b-ay". Whether that's what Gregg shorthand does, I can't tell.

I think the main reason why unpronounced letters remain in English orthography is to give hints about the language of origin, which is used (usually subconsciously) to determine pronunciation.

In this case, you have explicit phonemes in some cases (especially for digraphs), and context. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out which word was intended.

interesting link: http://zompist.com/spell.html

I thought that at first as well (about the potential confusion), but then recalled that most of the "possible" alternatives aren't real English words:

"bah" is really only a sort of exclamation and the sound of a sheep, not something you'd really have appear in an interview.

As you pointed out, "awa(h)", "ga(h)", "sla(h)" and "sta(h)" aren't English words [1] that you'd confuse in context so "away", "gay", "slay" and "stay" are the only possibility for them. The "y" really is not necessary.

I really want to learn Gregg now...

1 "gah" like "bah" ends up being an exclamation, and "slaw" as a food... but I can't think of a case where it would be confused with "slay" in context.

EDIT: Clarification on gah, awa, etc

"only possibility for them" is not "the letter 'y' is silent", which the over-downmodded OP is complaining about. That it's not necessary for shorthand is not the same as being a silent letter.

For example, the vietnamese "chicken noodle soup" is spelled phở gà. It's pronounced something like fur gah. Every native English speaker I've heard (including me) that has seen that term written tries it out first as foe gah. If what the article was saying is true and the letter 'y' was irrelevant in such words, that first attempt would at least sometimes be foe gay - and I've never heard it that way at all.

Regarding 'sla', it's probably not going to be mistaken in context, but 'sla' is also a three-letter acronym that is moderately common - Service Level Agreement.

The 'a' sound in "Slaw" is a bit tricky. it rhymes somewhat with the 'o' sound in 'ostrich', 'ought' or 'taught', which are written with the symbol for an 'o'. Oddly though, the word "Father" is written with an 'a'. If it's really necessary to distinguish between these sounds, Gregg Shorthand does allow for diacritical marks over vowels, but they are rarely used, since the meaning is usually clear from the context (and they slow you down).

It may help to realize that John Robert Gregg was Irish - so imagine his somewhat British pronunciation of vowels. Since Gregg shorthand is written phonetically, the words "father" and "farther" are written pretty much the same . That becomes a bit confusing to an American speaker of English.

I taught myself shorthand in high school. I love foreign languages and found it fascinating. A "Secret Language" like someone said above.

But I agree with one of the other posters, if you do not use it often, you will find it very difficult to do well. The basics of Gregg shorthand are incredibly simple, but it is another thing entirely to master - to be able to write quickly and accurately takes practice. Still, it is not impossible and you use it quite readily only knowing the basics. Unfortunately it has become a lost art except to a very few.

It would be quite an undertaking to write OCR software for Gregg shorthand because the writer has a lot of freedom to construct abbreviations on the spot or join several small words together when convenient (rather like native Germans can come up with compound words you won't find in a dictionary). The other problem would be clarity. While Gregg Shorthand doesn't have rules like Pittman for placing certain strokes on or above a line, proportion is quite important because several letters share common shapes ("n and "m", "p and b", "t and d", "f and v" are all quite similar but vary in length or height).

So the writer would have to be consistent in their proportions and the software would need to be able to learn the writer's style.

The vowels in Gregg shorthand refer to one sound only. So it's more like writing 'bā' instead of 'bay'.

As a non-native speaker, I never really tried to reason about what letters are silent or not. It's all seemingly nonsensical, anyway, so I might as well just take it at face value.

Are you aware that less than 15% of English words have irregular pronunciation (which is not to say the "regular" rules aren't baroque). And the pronunciation of "bay" is certainly regular: it's not that "y" is silent, but rather "ay" is a digraph that is pronounced in a regular way.

> (which is not to say the "regular" rules aren't baroque)

Well that's my point! I haven't found it useful to figure out or reason about whatever regular rules there are, because they are baroque to the point that I find it easier to just go by intuition, for the most part.

Well that's what most people do -- it's the regularity that allows you to have an intuition. For all the baroqueness, eqrtlk will never be an English word and ghoti will never be pronounced like fish (despite claims to the contrary). I didn't mean to suggest that you should try to learn the rules from a book; I just meant you are wasting effort if you learn the spelling and pronunciation as completely independent items.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com