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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.
Exactly that; I spent essentially all of my time reading. In class, between classes, after school. I had no friends because I’d changed schools and was close enough to graduation to not be worth making new friends I wouldn’t keep contact with. So I read a lot. The librarians even gave me another card so I could inter-library-loan more stuff.
Wow. And I thought I was an avid reader
I thought it was "for all intensive purposes" until I finally came across it while reading, and I was reading a book a week for well over a decade at that point. That's just the way it's pronounced down here.
One step closer to the origin: “to all intents and purposes”. If I use that, people are definitely going to look at me weird.
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.
Respite was the epitome of your second paragraph, for me. (That sentence works on two levels in this context). Had always thought it was pronounced like re-spite until I said that out loud and was mocked for it.
Respite is one of those words. You don’t get to use or hear it very often. Come to think of it, I would probably pronounce it the logical way, just like you did. Ok, now I’m going to have to look it up.
Turns out, difference pages give a slightly different pronunciation: /rĕs′pĭt/, ri-ˈspīt, /ˈres.paɪt/, /ˈres.pət/. So, the first vowel is mostly /e/ and the last one seems to be /ı/ if some kind.
I just looked this up on Forvo because I thought it was pronounced ress-pite (I don't know IPA sorry), about half of the recordings agree, while the other half says ress-pit...
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.
The first time I heard it, was in a BBC documentary about old cars. The pronunciation was nowhere near /ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/. I think it started with something like /ə/ instead, and that sound corresponds with way too many letters and I haven’t figured out how to make any sense of that.
Fortunately, modern tools will help you find the word you’re looking for, so knowing the correct spelling isn’t that critical any more. However, I was using a paper dictionary at the time, which explains why it took so long.
English spelling is mostly consistent other than words from other languages, especially Welsh and Gaelic. There's the small hiccup with the aristocrats that latinized some words too.