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Spelling bee competition
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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/30/13 9:49 PM

Spelling bee competition

There's a tiny little story on the business news about the annual Spelling bee competition. The accompanying story went like this:

Q: "In this day and age of spell checkers, does spelling still matter?"

A: "These days, you'll be sending e-mail instead of picking up the phone to call someone. Bad spelling will make bad first impression"

Hmm... but isn't that what spell checkers are for???


Sure, spell checker isn't perfect. But for the most part, it does catch most commonly misspelled words. Hell, there's not many spelling error in this post and I'm not the best in spelling.

What I found spelling a lot more critical is when doing a document search. While a google search is smart enough to catch the misspelling and suggest a correction, MS word isn't so smart. Nor are most of the plain vanilla search function build into applications such as QuickBook or Excel. Spell it wrong and you don't find what you're looking for!

Being a non-native English speaker with so-so spelling ability (I'm don't write too well in my native language either), I ran into that problem often enough. It's frustrating to not find what I was looking for and had to look up the correct spelling to do it again. But apparently, the journalists and their "experts" must spell perfectly all the time. They never mention this other critical need for accurate spelling!

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Sparky
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 19068
Location: PDX

5/30/13 10:40 PM

The spot I saw on the new also mentioned that now they can ask the definition instead of or in addition to the spelling. Sounds like a good idea to me...

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ErikS
Joined: 19 May 2005
Posts: 8337
Location: Slowing boiling over in the steamy south, Global Warming is real

5/31/13 4:21 AM

Spellcheckers are pretty dumb in some respects, they just look for words for the most part.


I really don't care what I post here, my writing here is full of grammatical errors. It really does not matter. In this thread about spelling and grammar I just wanted to point out that the machine is really stupid and for the most part just looks at the spelling as individual words instead of looking for the correct spelling in the context of the sentence.

Apple is better than other OS products but will always change "hell" to "he'll". I guess Steve did not approve of minor cussing.



quote:
Hell, there's not many spelling error in this post and I'm not the best in spelling.


There are no misspelled words in the above sentence but there are errors related to spelling.

In this case, "error" should be plural and "there's" in the sentence should be "there are".

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/there's

I never point out grammar errors here. It does not matter and as long as the point is made we should not care about them on the CTTF.

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 6:10 AM

those are grammar errors! ;)

online, I tend to make more errors, both grammar and mis-used words (correct spelling of wromg words), because I often change my mind midstream. I also don't always bother correcting misspellings even when the spell checker flags it. I feel online posting are basically like talking. We don't go back and correct word all the time, but only do it when it makes a difference in meaning.

with smart phone posting, I see enough "fat finger" typos, and I make them myself too.

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Dave B
Joined: 10 Jan 2004
Posts: 4511
Location: Pittsburgh, PA

5/31/13 7:09 AM

Spell checkers don't catch the wrong use of similar sounding words with different spellings and different meanings (homonyms) and English is full of them.

Spell checkers can't tell if you mean to use break or brake, their or they're, its or it's, so or sew or sow, pare or pair or pear, and many many, others.

I recall a lunch time discussion with a Tony, a Cuban refugee I worked with. One of our group was telling us his daughter had won a local school's spelling bee and Tony said; "There are no spelling bees in Spanish speaking countries." We all asked why not and he said; "Because in Spanish if you can say it you can spell it."

Would that English were anywhere near that straightforward.

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 7:45 AM

Try Chinese, where there's only a very vague connection between how it's said and how it's written!

And for each sound (not just similar, SAME sound), there can be many, many different words!

I think that actually helps in my case, in motivating me to get the spellings of English words right. Because if I were writing in Chinese, and used the wrong word with the same sound, my intended reader would be really confused and had a heck of a hard time figuring out what I was trying to communicate.

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

5/31/13 8:11 AM

English

My daughter used to have a quotation on her door. It said something like "Most languages borrow from each other now and then. English waits in a dark corner and mugs other languages, beating them and emptying their pockets."

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 8:59 AM

Andy!

LOL!

I'm not sure English is the king in mugging other languages. Of the 3 I (kind of) know, I think Japanese takes the crown by a big margin!

Where's Sandiway our professional linguist? He would know these things the most.

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sandiway
Joined: 15 Dec 2003
Posts: 4902
Location: back in Tucson

5/31/13 12:59 PM

school's out...

The semester is done...

Yes, the Japanese language borrowed words, called "loan words" (mainly nouns of course), from many languages throughout its history.

Principally, Chinese at different time periods and from different locations (different pronunciations). And Portuguese etc. depending on contact. So many words now come from English, French, German etc.

You can often tell the loan words because they're written using the katakana script.

Usually this process - as far as I know - is restricted to borrowing words, e.g. Japanese does not borrow grammar, i.e. it sticks to its (canonical) Subject-Object-Verb word order and other visible grammatical features.

Sandiway

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 1:30 PM

Sandiway

What percentage of kitakana vs katakana in common use? And vs Chinese characters?

(I'm aware there's been a move to get rid of all the kanzi and just spell them, in kitakana, as they're spoken. So it's not like all kitakana are "native" Japanese words to begin with)

I don't know any other European languages so I can't really tell how much English borrows & mugs French/German/Spanish. But consider how "regular" English still is, I suspect it doesn't come close to Japanese in mugging other languages!

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

5/31/13 2:00 PM

English? Regular?

Think just for a moment about how English makes things plural. Or rather, the many ways in which English makes things plural. Goose? Geese. Cow? Cows. Hippopotamus? Hippopotami. Etc.

English steals everything . It's not like German or Hebrew, where "foreign" words are just glued together with native syntax...the one rule that English has going for it (as a rule) is that objects do not have genders (there is a practice of treating vehicles/vessels as feminine, but it's not a rule).

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 2:32 PM


quote:
Think just for a moment about how English makes things plural. Or rather, the many ways in which English makes things plural. Goose? Geese. Cow? Cows. Hippopotamus? Hippopotami. Etc

Those are, as they call it, EXCEPTIONS!

And there aren't all that many of them. We easily memorized them all. (well, most manage almost all).

Granted, coming from Chinese, I (still) think these whole plural business are a total waste of brain cell. Same with the change of verb in different context, (do, does, doing), never mind the irregular ones (do/did/done)!

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Dave B
Joined: 10 Jan 2004
Posts: 4511
Location: Pittsburgh, PA

5/31/13 2:48 PM

Articles


quote:
....the one rule that English has going for it (as a rule) is that objects do not have genders.....


Well, the real simplicity of English is that articles (i.e. the) don't have gender and that makes it a lot easier. There are no, der, die, das, or the French, Italian and Spanish equivalents.

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

5/31/13 2:55 PM

Of course, there's "a" vs. "an"--something which is entirely a sound issue. That is, unless you know how the words sound together, it's hard to get it on paper (or on a screen) correctly. And the different pronunciations of "the" (essentially thuh vs. thee).

English. It's just so much fun.

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PLee
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 3712
Location: Brooklyn, NY

5/31/13 4:16 PM

Check out how many definitions Oxford's Dictionary has for the word "run."

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PLee
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 3712
Location: Brooklyn, NY

5/31/13 4:18 PM

And, along the lines of cribbing from another language, didn't one of our recent Presidents say something like "The French don't even have a word for entrepreneur . . ."???

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sandiway
Joined: 15 Dec 2003
Posts: 4902
Location: back in Tucson

5/31/13 5:48 PM


quote:
What percentage of kitakana vs katakana in common use? And vs Chinese characters?


Japanese has kanji (漢字), katakana and hiragana. The last two are phonetic. All three are in use simultaneously, and continue to be used.

The Koreans on the other hand switched more or less wholescale to a phonetic Hangul script. Chinese characters are almost not used anymore.

Turkish is another language that switched scripts.

Sandiway

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 6:10 PM


quote:
Well, the real simplicity of English is that articles (i.e. the) don't have gender and that makes it a lot easier. There are no, der, die, das, or the French, Italian and Spanish equivalents.

It just occurred to me, Chinese characters are so hard to remember and to write, there's not enough brain cells left for Chinese scholars to play all those grammar games!

Chinese is one of the very few matured languages which have no gender, no tense, no passive/active, no singular/plural... nada, zilch! You either specify those explicitly, or infer those from context. All sentences are nothing more than stacking of words! It wasn't until 4th or 5th grade that pupils were told there're actually A FEW (something like 5) rules of "grammar" which was sufficient to cover ALL of the proper "stacking" order needed!

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sandiway
Joined: 15 Dec 2003
Posts: 4902
Location: back in Tucson

5/31/13 6:45 PM


quote:
Chinese is one of the very few matured languages which have no gender, no tense, no passive/active, no singular/plural... nada, zilch!


April, you should know Chinese has passive/active using 被 or some other particles.

Chinese also can encode what English encodes using inflectional verb endings to get tense. There are aspectual markers that do much of the same job like 了 (completive).

BTW, native English speakers also pick up the rules of English without studying a grammar book.

Sandiway

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

5/31/13 7:11 PM

No, I view 被 as "be" in English. They key being there's no change to the verb. As in English, it's perfectly understandable, with zero confusion, when someone say "I'm being attack", as in the "correct" English being "I'm being attacked"!

Yes, a language must be able to express all the imporatant information. So passive/active is neccessary. Still, there's no need to do it in TWO places. Seems to me, English loses no information by giving up all the verb changes!

That, is what I call "grammar game" which Chinese don't play, because it's hard enough to just learn to read and write enough to communicate at all!

English isn't that bad, compared to many other European languages. Still, it's not particularly useful as far as I can tell.

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

5/31/13 8:20 PM

Remind me to tell you about Hebrew, in which each (and I believe every) verb can be completely conjugated in seven distinct forms. I suspect (but do not know) that the same is true of Arabic.

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ErikS
Joined: 19 May 2005
Posts: 8337
Location: Slowing boiling over in the steamy south, Global Warming is real

5/31/13 8:26 PM

This is one of the most fascinating OT threads in mant years. Much of it goes over my head but I am still garnering a lot from it. Thank you to all and keep it up.

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Nick Payne
Joined: 10 Jan 2004
Posts: 2625
Location: Canberra, Australia

6/1/13 1:07 AM

I got a wonderful spell check recommendation from Wordperfect many years ago. At the time we were running Unisys mainframes, and, in a document I'd written concerning the excessive downtime we'd been having on our mainframes, Wordperfect didn't recognise the word 'Unisys' and suggested 'Anuses' as being what I actually meant.

The errors I particularly like are those that a spell check won't find. For example, a headline I came across in a National newspaper yesterday: "New abuse claims dog ex-priest". The best example of this that I have seen is a World War 2 headline regarding the war in North Africa: "Eighth Army push bottles up Germans".

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dan emery
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 6884
Location: Maine

6/1/13 4:59 AM

I spel gud

As a former competitive speller, perhaps I should chime in (ha ha I won the Jr Hi bee one year, was 2d or 3d a few times, washed out in the Regionals). I could only spell by visualizing the word in print - if I couldn't do that, it was just guessing - phonetics is useless in English, and I didn't know Latin or anything that would allow an analytical approach.

I run spellcheck as a kind of rough draft - on anything serious, I proofread it after running spellcheck.

My favorite legal Spellcheck story is when a guy misspelled "corporate" and it was corrected to "copulate" which is how the letter went out.

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ErikS
Joined: 19 May 2005
Posts: 8337
Location: Slowing boiling over in the steamy south, Global Warming is real

6/1/13 8:26 AM

I have been exposed to many languages and I have to say the "gender" thing associated with nouns is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. Plus there are no rules you can apply to get it right.

Come on how can you tell if a chair is masculine or feminine? It is a damn chair and has no genital parts or chromosomes.

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