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.
Okay English is weird but y’all got nothing on Japanese. I mean what the hell is this?
Multiple systems of writing at once is terrible in a different way, yes. I hear they still have page rendering issues in 2025.
I was more talking about the number of readings for one character but yeah that too.
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.
What the heck is a sun truth language, anyways? :)
I’m in the process now, and you’re definitely not wrong!
The meanings of the kanji are: sun - origin - language for 日本語
I’m sure you know this, but kanji have different meanings, and this one refers to Japan being the land of the rising sun.
Haha, yeah, I was just being silly and having a little fun. :)
Although, learning all the meanings certainly does get overwhelming at times, especially when combinations of individual kanji characters can have substantially different meanings and readings than they do on their own!
I tried to change my PC and phone language to Japanese yesterday. I did not last long. It’s seriously hard.
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 still don’t get it, and i don’t get why people are so up in arms about english in general, feels like people just enjoy having an arbitrary thing to all hate together.
the only really unique thing about english is just how many places were forced to speak it, but it’s not that much more than french…
It’s jarring if you don’t come from a language with fucked spelling however…
in the united states, everything is a sport.
you don’t get them in the UK
in many languages theres clear rules how to pronounce vowels, consonants and combination of such. in english there’s no rules at all. sure there will be always exceptions and oddballs to the rules in other languages but usually you see a word and just by looking at it you know how to pronounce it, but thats not the case in english. not hating on english, its super simple and straight forward in a lot of aspects but the pronunciation clusterfuck is at a stark contrast to being otherwise one of the easiest languages to learn.
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 treat English spelling like Chinese characters. How you pronounce is at best a hint on how to write.
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.
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”
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 ]
are you having trouble figuring out how to pronounce words because spelling rules aren’t consistent and don’t make sense? here’s how to pronounce them in a different spelling that follows the same rules.
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.
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
the more you drink the more you understand vowel shift and consonant ellision
Orthographic reform now! Our movement is dozens strong!
did you mean :
orthografik reform now! Awa moovment iz dozens strong?
go ahead, make a spelling system which works in all dialects.
Not necessary. You can “have your cake” and eat it with spoons of both Aluminum and Aluminium, too. It just has to reflect spoken sounds in some kind of reasonably-direct way.
Hmm. Do Brazilians still spell stuff the Portuguese way? Most of the European languages probably have some kind of prescribed national dialect, Arabic has classical Arabic, and Chinese has non-alphabetic characters, but I don’t know about that one.
Listen pal, you spend several centuries invading others and looting their vocabulary and see how much sense your language makes!
Spanish seems to be doing okay
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…?”
I know spelling bees from US media. We had read aloud competitions, that’s the closest thing I know from real life
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
And why is “kn” even a thing in English?
Knowledge? Knight? Knee? Knapsack? Knitting?
How does that make any sense at all?
Edit" and then there’s Gnome! Why isn’t it Knome? Or Gnowledge?
because it was literally pronounced like that not too long ago, compare “knight” to “knekt” in swedish.
I’ll be honest I’ve always found it weird that they decided to stop pronouncing those consonants at some point. Those words just sound better with the K pronounced!
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
I don’t speak French but isn’t pronunciation quite straightforward while not intuitive? There are letters that are always silent at the end and vowels go wild but once you know which is which, you’re not confused that <oi> is /wa/ anymore since it’s consistent. No <gh> that can be anything
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.
English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it’s quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it’s contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.
Sure, sometimes it is. But frequently it isn’t. But let’s conjugate two very similar words and then pronounce them. How about “go” and “do”?
I do
You go He does He goes She did She wentHow about the words “rove,” “move,” and “shove”? They are all conjugated basically the same, spelled almost the same, but each is pronounced differently.
Knowing how one word is conjugated and pronounced does not necessarily inform on any other. The phrase “sometimes it’s consistent” is self-contradictory.
I never mentioned pronunciation. I only talked about the untrue claim that english grammar was inconsistent because it was mixed with other languages. The mismatch between pronunciation and spelling is the fault of the printing press.
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.
Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.
Many languages have very specific pronunciation rules. If you can read a word, you can almost always pronounce it correctly, especially when accents are uses. You can often determine the pronunciation from the etymology by the language of origin. It’s why spelling bee contestants always ask for country of origin.
Do languages with sylabic alphabets have this problem?
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.
Also Icelandic is so archaic compared to the other Nordic nations that they can more or less just read thousand year documents like how we may read writings from the 1700s.
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)
So, if you collectively forget a word, does it disappear from the dictionary? And if you collectively do so, are there any known words that you don’t know anymore their spelling or pronunciation?
Yeah. There are a lot of words that people have stopped using and don’t remember how to pronounce. Sometimes we have clues from old writings and especially poetry, but archaic words and pronunciations are studied and recorded for posterity.
Consider the word “ye” as in “Ye Olde Shoppe.” We still see the word on signs where people want things to feel old, because it is a word we think we don’t use anymore. People reading it probably pronounce it “yee” or maybe “yeh.” Except the original word was spelled with an archaic letter called “thorn” that looks like a Y and isn’t used in English anymore. It made a “th” sound, and the sign should be pronounced “The Old Shop.” Thorn was replaced with Y when printing became popular, and people forgot it existed. We also have “yee” which is still used in some dialects (like Irish), but it considered archaic in American English. So when people saw the Ye Olde Shoppe signs, they forgot they knew how to pronounce the word already and assumed it was a different archaic word they remember they had forgotten, forgetting that they remembered the word in the first place.
Name a language without weird exceptions. I think in most this is still impressive.
balkan ones: serbian croatian, slovenian, …
you read as you write, no bogus letters(and sounds)
Now I personally don’t know those but I’m sure there are still some weird words that are spelled in an unexpected way, especially if we include words that originated from other languages.
What we usualy do is write
what re(edit: how we) read e.g.:
transit -> tranzit
scale -> skala
band -> bend
buisness -> biznis
display -> displejeins -> anjs
anlasser -> anlaser
ziegel -> cigla
ziehverschluss -> ciferslušböbrek -> bubreg
yastık-> jastukreggipetto -> ređipet
scatola -> škatola
asciugamano -> šugamanambassade -> ambasada
clochard -> klošar
directeur -> direktor
Spanish. I have a meme about it, I’ll post it in the coming days
