It just says "This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary".
It doesn't say "This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary correctly".
there should be a word for the feeling of when you can sense the top comment of a post before you open it
"The vision"
My favorite version of this is that spelling bees don't exist in most (any?) other language, because their systems are more intuitive and consistent, but with English, if you can consistently spell words they give you a fucking trophy and you get money for college
In french we have "concours d'orthographe". Pronunciation is pretty consistent, but we add a dozen letters for every sound we utter, so spelling's still a mess.
I've seen enough French spelling to get it, though, and I don't really speak French. English spelling is still often hard as a native speaker.
You guys can have second place, our system is the most ass "bar none".
Our system needs a deep reform; yours needs to burn to the ground and fully rebuild.
Uh oh, the internet is starting the Napoleonic Wars 2: Electric Waterloo.
You have to remember that most English speaking countries don't have a spelling bee either. The US is weird.
I looked up a UK version and all I could find was old competitions about learning to spell in other languages. E.g. https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/events/national-spelling-bee-competition
There are some other languages that have inconsistent spelling, but most do have some level of consistency yeah, also would character tests in Chinese/Japanese be considered similar to spelling bees?
Not really. They just have multiple pronunciation depending on which vocabulary they are part of/how they are used grammatically.
But let me tell you, learning 2000 kanji and vocab they are used in is a pain. Still love 日本語 thought.
Stupid question: Doesn't a dictionary also contain the phonetic spelling?
yes but no one gets taught to drink IPAs in school, you do that at university
Yup, it usually has a pronunciation guide with IPA rules or whatever.
Two things about English.
First, English is not one language, it's a mix of several different languages with loanwords stolen from eveey culture encoutered. Grammar and conjugation is entirely inconsistent because it is based on Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Greek.
Second, English is descriptive, not proscriptive. In other words, there are no rules to pronunciation or spelling. English words are spelled and pronounced the way English speakers spell and pronounce them. That's how England and America can end up with such disparate spellings and pronunciations. If you are understood, you have spoken English. When new pronunciations and spellings become commonly used, they are added to the dictionary. When speaking and writing styles change, so do the rules of grammar.
Aren't most languages a mix of several languages?
Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words...
Yeah, pretty much every single language. I think it's funny when someone (usually americans) says their language has words from a bunch of languages because it shows they never really learned a second language. Word 'clima' in Portuguese or 'Klima' in German is from Greek for example, many languages have english words too, portuguese takes 'playground' and 'check in' to cite two but it has many more.
The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.
For example German imported the word 'cakes', but it is now spelled 'Keks' inline with it's pronunciation.
I think it's funny how the slang word 'biz' fixes the spelling of 'business'
Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don't seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written "chrome" as "krohm" or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with "ch". It's actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.
and english is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from the worst, thai is afaik basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, to the point that people can read old texts quite easily.
English is descriptive, not proscriptive.
Surely there are no languages that base their rules on forbidding certain pronunciations?
(Proscriptive means forbidding; I assume you meant prescriptive)
Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.
I seriously never got the concept of a spelling bee competition until I learned English.
I just learnt about the existence of "spelling bee competitions" through this post. But in English it makes sense that this exists.
Eat mayks cense that this eczysts
Eye hait that aye cen wreed this
I’m really awful at spelling, or pronouncing words I’ve read but haven’t heard before. I’m not dyslexic so I thought I was just weirdly bad at spelling. Then I started learning Spanish and it turns out I can spell just fine - English is the problem, not me.
Always has been.
I remember being in second grade and being taught all sorts of rules about pronunciation and then a few minutes later, be given edge cases.
It was the moment when I gave up saying things correctly. Herb with a hard H, phone with a hard P. City with a k noise. English is stupid.
I treat English spelling like Chinese characters. How you pronounce is at best a hint on how to write.
People will really say shit about the silent letters in French and then completely ignore the unbelievably inconsistent pronunciation of "gh" in English.
And the french silent letters are pretty consistent
I, for one, love my Ghoughphtheightteeaus with some ghoti 🥔🐟
Imagine living in a country where spelling bees cannot exist
I'm there. I asked how to pronounce a word from a newspaper once, and was told,"like it's written...?"
Don't most dictionaries have IPA next to the word?
too often it's some proprietary phonetic spelling which barely makes sense even in the target dialect. yet they have the audacity to use square brackets for it.
Worcestershire (noun)
[ wurs - teir - sheh ]
These I totally hate. As a non native speaker, I have no intuition or at least IPA would be much easier for me. It's called international for a reason. Good to know that native speakers have problems too, or maybe not good, you decide.
Listen pal, you spend several centuries invading others and looting their vocabulary and see how much sense your language makes!
people who speak a language with a decent spelling system
So not the fuckin' French then 🧐 😂🤣😂 🏴🏴🏴🇮🇪🇬🇧 🫖🎩 laughs in Her Majesty's English
(On a related note, does anyone else have this much fun lampooning British nationalism?)
Edit: Only Parisians are downvoting this, glory to Britannia
Playing Rule Britannia (bass boosted) over voice chat when you declare war on your friends with a huge navy in Civ is great
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