Hacker News Reader

Comment by Agingcoder | Hacker News Reader

‘English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition.´

The author has no clue - try French spelling ( there are no spelling bee competitions but grammar+ spelling ones). As a native speaker of multiple languages, I’m a bit surprised at the confidence with which the author writes things which are either wrong or obvious ( and don’t make English exceptional in any way ).

What is really odd is that the author is a professor of linguistics - maybe I’m missing something here?

View on HN

Indeed and all languages accumulate exceptions and oddities in one form or another. The larger the speaker population the more that is true.

None of them are really that much easier than any other, they just slot into patterns your brain already recognizes from languages you know (oh that feature is easy) vs ones you don't (oh that feature is difficult).

My pet theory is the human brain is willing to deal with a certain amount of complexity in speaking and in reading/writing. Some languages consume their complexity budget in number of characters and their forms, others in their spelling. For spoken language some have lots of types of forms of address or lots of grammar cases. Others have significant formal and implied word order, use lots of accessory words, etc.

When there is too much complexity in certain dimensions people naturally simplify in others. The accelerated form of this is when there is a great upheaval in society or movement of people: speakers quickly start to simplify the rules they care the least for (or convert formal spelled/spoken rules into info inferred from context).

French spelling is fairly regular though, isn't it? My understanding is that each phoneme gets spelled in its own way, and the rules are fairly consistent. Once you've learned them, you can typically read most French words aloud, and even guess at spellings of words.

In contrast, in English, pronunciation and orthography have drifted apart significantly more, which means that while there are rules to how any given phoneme might be written, there are a lot more possibilities for most phonemes, and there's a lot more overlap in terms of the spellings. All this means that it's usually much harder to correctly read aloud an English text containing words you don't know.

This is what makes spelling so difficult in English: it usually has more to do with a word's etymology than how it sounds.

Pronunciation rules for French might be quite consistent, but there are usually multiple ways to spell a given word. Which one is correct has sometimes changed over time. And in the case of homophones, different spelling variations are the only way to be distinguish them in the written language.

No, French is highly irregular.

Reading it is easier than English but writing it is very difficult because it’s irregular. A typical 13-14 year old cannot write a full page of French without making lots of mistakes ( source : my kids’ teachers in France , and my fellow pupils at school in France when I was growing up).

Just to give you a very simple example, the following words vin ( wine ), vingt ( twenty ), vain ( vain ) are pronounced exactly the same. And there are other variants for the same sound ( some kind of nasal i) spelled ein, or un. You can figure out how to read it up to a point, but writing it is very difficult.

In an ESL class I was teaching, a student (Congolese) suggested a dictée exercise. That such an exercise exists suggests to me that French orthography isn't wholly regular.

Precisely ! The dictée is a typical exercise which exists only because the language is irregular. Most people in France dread this particular exercise, since you can’t win - points get deducted for every mistake, most people will make at least one, and if you make enough mistakes you get 0 points whether you made 5 or 500 mistakes.

Dictations exist in German as well, and German is very regular. In fact, the German primary school teachers I know do far more dictations with their classes than I ever did growing up in England.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com