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”.
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
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.
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.
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
