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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.
Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.
I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.
As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.
Thank you for this.
I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used..
In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!
How on earth were you reading 1000 pages a day of anything? Even if you read at the extremely fast rate of 45 seconds per page of a book, that's still 12.5 hours a day of actively reading to get to 1000 pages.
But when you shared that lesson out loud for the first time, did you pronounce it correctly?
Chill dude boke warm?
This feels like a gross exaggeration of the problems with English. there's a lot of patterns to English, despite a lot of weirdness and a lot of exceptions. But if you hear a new word, it will normally be easy to find in the dictionary on the first try. All that being said, yeah English is probably a mess compared to most languages, which is why it has spelling bees
Yeah, you’re right. That was a bit too harsh. Those patterns exist, and they make it easier to navigate this maze. Once you know the common ones, you don’t actually have to try every letter every time.
I think they're just an American thing
And there's a bar near me that's starting Adult Spelling Bee night, as opposed to trivia night. I think we're about to hit peak Idiocracy.
Spelling bees can be fun, and trivia can be boring. It's all a matter of how they run it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Australian_Spelling_Bee
They do exist around the world but I think they're something of a novelty. Clicking through to the wiki article for "spelling bee" in general the history is all very American.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/history-spelling-bee-180971916/#:~:text=We%20love%20bees%20because%20they%20embody%20the%20ideal,rather%20fierce%20orthographic%20version%20of%20The%20Hunger%20Games.
apparently, you're right, it's an American thing we exported, like rock and Roll and nulcear weapons.
English spelling is weird but thats not really a hard word to spell compared to many others. Epitome is either an e or an i, and I would argue a native speaker would lean heavily towards e as a first guess. There is no way that it starts with a, o, or u for example. That's hardly "every vowel". It's at most 2 vowels and most people would have better than even odds if they heard epitome pronounced correctly.