On Fri, 20 Oct 2023 13:15:58 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

>On 2023-10-19, Tony Nance <tonynance17@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I've heard a claim that there are no spelling bees in Italy, since the spelling
>>> of any given word is obvious.
>>
>> I've heard the same about Spanish, including from three of my teachers
>> and two of my friends. From what I can recall[1], except for a few loan
>> words here and there, there are very few places for spelling ambiguity.
>
>Pfff.
>
>All speakers:
>* b ~ v
>* silent h
>* ge ~ je, gi ~ ji
>* hi- ~ y- before vowel
>* silent acute: se/sé, si/sí, el/él, ...
>
>Pronunciation distinctions maintained only in some regional variants:
>* ce ~ se, ci ~ si, z ~ s
>* ll ~ y

I gave up on Spanish when our teacher decided we should be able, by
hearing her read text, tell where the accents were needed by comparing
which syllable she stressed (correctly) to which one the rules
dictated.

I wouldn't be very interested in reading tea leaves, either.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

On Thu, 19 Oct 2023 09:46:01 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

>On 18 Oct 2023 20:16:55 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>>Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
>>>Like other languages in the Latin script, Italian has some unassimilated
>>>loanwords ("hockey") that don't conform to the native letter-sound
>>>correspondence. Also, the orthography represents the standard
>>>language, which may differ from a speaker's idiolect, but that is
>>>a universal problem.
>>
>>Italian is a relatively recent language. It was still just one of many
>>dialects in my great-grandfather's day, and my grandfather never really
>>learned standard Italian. So you would expect since the spelling was
>>standardized pretty recently and pretty aggressively that it might be
>>more consistent.
>
>When I finally managed to see (stream) Argento's /The Five Days of
>Milan/ (which is a historical film set, I think, in the unification of
>Italy period), the subtitles frequently indicated the dialect being
>used by the characters. I'm not sure why; perhaps it was to explain
>why they didn't always understand each other very well.

Sorry for the second post.

Both apparently post successfully but Agent never considered the task
finished, so I tried again after the first one appeared to fail.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

In article <slrnuj4vce.ija.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

> On 2023-10-19, Tony Nance <tonynance17@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I've heard a claim that there are no spelling bees in Italy, since the
> >> spelling
> >> of any given word is obvious.
> >
> > I've heard the same about Spanish, including from three of my teachers
> > and two of my friends. From what I can recall[1], except for a few loan
> > words here and there, there are very few places for spelling ambiguity.
>
> Pfff.
>
> All speakers:
> * b ~ v
> * silent h
> * ge ~ je, gi ~ ji
> * hi- ~ y- before vowel
> * silent acute: se/sé, si/sí, el/él, ...
>
> Pronunciation distinctions maintained only in some regional variants:
> * ce ~ se, ci ~ si, z ~ s
> * ll ~ y

Do those regional variants include Western Hemisphere dialects?

--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_.
—-----------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward robertaw@drizzle.com

On 2023-10-20, Robert Woodward <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:

[ambiguities in Spanish spelling]
>> Pronunciation distinctions maintained only in some regional variants:
>> * ce ~ se, ci ~ si, z ~ s
>> * ll ~ y
>
> Do those regional variants include Western Hemisphere dialects?

The merger of c/z ~ s ("seseo") is universal in the Americas.

The merger of ll ~ y ("yeísmo") is not:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Yeismo_en_Pa%C3%ADses_de_Habla_Hispana.png

Having such a merger in your speech of course means that correct
spelling involves so much more memorization.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On Friday, October 20, 2023 at 9:30:09 AM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2023-10-19, Tony Nance <tonyn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I've heard a claim that there are no spelling bees in Italy, since the spelling
> >> of any given word is obvious.
> >
> > I've heard the same about Spanish, including from three of my teachers
> > and two of my friends. From what I can recall[1], except for a few loan
> > words here and there, there are very few places for spelling ambiguity.
>
> Pfff.
>
> All speakers:
> * b ~ v
> * silent h
> * ge ~ je, gi ~ ji
> * hi- ~ y- before vowel
> * silent acute: se/sé, si/sí, el/él, ...
>
> Pronunciation distinctions maintained only in some regional variants:
> * ce ~ se, ci ~ si, z ~ s
> * ll ~ y
>

Ok - thanks for correcting my rusty memories.
- Tony

On 10/20/2023 1:19 AM, Default User wrote:
> Lynn McGuire wrote:
>
>> "Sweep of the Blade (Innkeeper Chronicles)" by Ilona Andrews
>
>> Dina rescued her sister Maud who had followed her exiled husband to
>> the closed planet Karhari being used as a penal colony with their
>> daughter. Any space ship shuttle landing on the closed planet without
>> permission would be shot down. And the Holy Anocracy (represented by
>> House Krahr, the space vampires) does not give landing permission to
>> any one outside their clan. So Dina got Arland, the Marshal of the
>> House Krahr who owed her a favor, to take her to the planet and help
>> rescue her sister.
>>
>> Arland is an unmarried man and Maud is a widowed woman with a half
>> vampire half human daughter. And Maud is a fighter who can hold her
>> own with any of the space vampires. So Arland invites her and her
>> daughter home to his planet to meet his family. His family occupies
>> the entire planet...
>
>>
>> My rating: 6 out of 5 stars (yup, I don't need a second read for
>> this one) Amazon rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (12,942 reviews)
>
> I didn't like this one nearly as much as the others. The whole
> semi-feudal/high-tech Vampire society was extremely uninteresting to me.
>
>
> Brian

"Sweep Of The Blade" felt very German to me. I am half German ...

Lynn

On 2023-10-18, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

> Italian is a relatively recent language. It was still just one of many
> dialects in my great-grandfather's day, and my grandfather never really
> learned standard Italian. So you would expect since the spelling was
> standardized pretty recently and pretty aggressively that it might be
> more consistent.

The starting point for the modern-day standardized Italian language
is usually taken to be the works of Dante Alighieri. In English
terms that's some eighty years before Chaucer. I don't know the
history of Italian orthography, but obviously it was reformed away
from its Latin roots at some point.

Standard languages only spread to much of the population with the
advent of compulsory schooling. If you aim for universal literacy,
you need a standard orthography (and grammar and vocabulary), and
that in turn requires a standard language. Famously, the Abbé
Grégoire reported in 1794 that only a minority of France's population
actually spoke French, with the rest using some thirty different
"patois".

Also, I would like to point out that "write as you speak" is only
one principle around which an alphabetic orthography can be based,
and for a pluricentric language, one that can be fraught with
difficulty.

Two other popular guiding principles are:

* Different words should be spelled differently. That's why, e.g.,
Italian spells the very common verb form "ha" with a silent h
to distinguish it from the very common preposition "a", although
both are pronounced exactly the same.

* Words that are alike should be spelled alike. I already gave
the example of the nominative/genitive of the Polish city
Łódź/Łodzi, which is a less surprising pairing than *Łuć/Łodzi
would be.

It should be obvious that a number of such principles are in
competition with each other, so real world orthographies end up
being compromises. A specific language's phonology and morphology
will also inform the chosen compromises.

Pretty much all European languages have a spelling system that is
either fairly new, because the language has only been written down
for a few centuries, or that has been reformed over time. Even an
orthography as arcane as the French one has undergone a series of
reforms during the last four hundred years.

English stands out in this regard because somehow no formal or
informal body was ever established with the authority to reform the
spelling: no royal academy, no committee, no monopolistic dictionary
publisher, whatever. Noah Webster tried but didn't get very far,
and it ended with English spelling fragmenting into competing
orthographies. And so English keeps ambling along with its late
medieval spelling system.

This is all very off-topic in r.a.sf.w. ...

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:38:58 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

>"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
>English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
>words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
>to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -
>James Nicoll

Not to mention THEN dividing up between the UK, US, Canada, Australia
and many other places often with different spellings.

Canadians for instance might say colour and color in the same
paragraph mostly depending and personal whim and the phases of the
moon.

Sometimes I do that just to annoy my American cousins.....

On Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:48:44 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

>On 2023-10-18, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> Italian is a relatively recent language. It was still just one of many
>> dialects in my great-grandfather's day, and my grandfather never really
>> learned standard Italian. So you would expect since the spelling was
>> standardized pretty recently and pretty aggressively that it might be
>> more consistent.
>
>The starting point for the modern-day standardized Italian language
>is usually taken to be the works of Dante Alighieri. In English
>terms that's some eighty years before Chaucer. I don't know the
>history of Italian orthography, but obviously it was reformed away
>from its Latin roots at some point.

IIRC, that was the start of literary Italian -- that is, the start of
writing the local dialect of Latin down and so treating it as if it
were a language and just a distortion.

That's basically, again IIRC, what we are dealing with in the Romance
languages -- local dialects of Latin, incredibly twisted about by
being spoken-only and that mostly by peasants for centuries, which
became recognized as /real/ languages by being written down.

>Standard languages only spread to much of the population with the
>advent of compulsory schooling. If you aim for universal literacy,
>you need a standard orthography (and grammar and vocabulary), and
>that in turn requires a standard language. Famously, the Abbé
>Grégoire reported in 1794 that only a minority of France's population
>actually spoke French, with the rest using some thirty different
>"patois".
>
>Also, I would like to point out that "write as you speak" is only
>one principle around which an alphabetic orthography can be based,
>and for a pluricentric language, one that can be fraught with
>difficulty.
>
>Two other popular guiding principles are:
>
>* Different words should be spelled differently. That's why, e.g.,
> Italian spells the very common verb form "ha" with a silent h
> to distinguish it from the very common preposition "a", although
> both are pronounced exactly the same.
>
>* Words that are alike should be spelled alike. I already gave
> the example of the nominative/genitive of the Polish city
> ?ód?/?odzi, which is a less surprising pairing than *?u?/?odzi
> would be.
>
>It should be obvious that a number of such principles are in
>competition with each other, so real world orthographies end up
>being compromises. A specific language's phonology and morphology
>will also inform the chosen compromises.
>
>Pretty much all European languages have a spelling system that is
>either fairly new, because the language has only been written down
>for a few centuries, or that has been reformed over time. Even an
>orthography as arcane as the French one has undergone a series of
>reforms during the last four hundred years.
>
>English stands out in this regard because somehow no formal or
>informal body was ever established with the authority to reform the
>spelling: no royal academy, no committee, no monopolistic dictionary
>publisher, whatever. Noah Webster tried but didn't get very far,
>and it ended with English spelling fragmenting into competing
>orthographies. And so English keeps ambling along with its late
>medieval spelling system.
>
>This is all very off-topic in r.a.sf.w. ...
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

On Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:17:52 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>"Sweep Of The Blade" felt very German to me. I am half German ...

What a horrible joke!