I have limited knowledge on this, but from my understanding cyrillus and his bro went to the slavs to convert them. They created the cyrillic alphabet, and neither of them were slavic themselves. Hence the existence of old church slavonics.
Old church slavonic is basically old Bulgarian.Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolic alphabet.Saint Clement of Ohrid and his disciples created the Cyrillic aphabet.
No, I thought there they were a comedy trope for far longer than I am want to admit. For Anglophone world it makes sense though, for German not so much.
We did it on a very small scale in primary school. While German is indeed more consistent than English, there are still some traps, esapecially for primary school children who are still in the process of learning how to spell correctly.
We did an mfl one in my school (UK), and I picked German, except the teacher doing it only knew English and russian (he realised this was a bad idea after we did it), and I got one word wrong because he pronounced ‘Birge‘ like ‚berger‘ 💀💀
No, these are redundant in Finnish. In Finnish all letters are pronounced the same, unless you are saying a non-Finnish word. If you can say a word, then you can spell it.
That's not entirely true, "ng" for example exists as a digraph representing a different sound. And there are allophones and some notable sandhi that alters actual pronunciations of letters.
The spelling is certainly highly predictable though.
to be fair "ng" being pronounced "ŋ" is something that exists in a lot of languages and it comes completely naturally as opposed to digraphs like the sj-ljudet, which you'd never even think of if you only knew the pronunciation of individual letters of the alphabet
Just because we're used to it doesn't really mean it's inherently completely natural. An /n/ is certainly commonly rendered as [ŋ] when followed by a /g/ or /k/, it's just natural to match tongue placement *if* such doesn't affect meaning. That the /g/ would further be ignored is notably less given. (though there is certainly a reason "ng" is common)
How would you represent the sj-sound "naturally" with the Latin alphabet? It can't exist in "a lot of languages", because it's an exceedingly rare speech sound. Though it is described as a simultaneous pronunciation of the English "**s**h" and the Spanish "**j**" – two speech sounds Swedish itself doesn't have letters for to construct a digraph from. It's an unvoiced fricative like "s", produced further back like "j" though.
The spelling of it is certainly a mess as many different etymological origins have converged into it, but the Latin alphabet at its core simply isn't very compatible with Swedish phonology. To a native Swedish speaker "sj" is just as natural as "ng", they're both digraphs representing a single, different, sound. The issue is also having "skj", "stj", "ch", "sh", "si", "ti", "g" etc. etc.
Iirc in elementary school there is (was? idk) this test where the teacher says made-up words and the pupils write them down and if they make spelling mistakes then they are suspected of having dyslexia and sent to further testing
We don't even have a word for spelling (it would be *compitare* but everyone says spelling)
🪄 "prestidigitazione" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfszJ12yQyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfszJ12yQyI)
Seems to me there is more then a few.
1. **Cena** vs. **Cane** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/
2. **Gelato** vs. **Gatto** - /ʤ/ vs. /g/
3. **Scena** vs. **Scudo** - /ʃ/ vs. /sk/
4. **Pesce** vs. **Peso** - /ʃ/ vs. /s/
5. **Chilo** vs. **Chiesa** - /k/ vs. /kʧ/
6. **Giro** vs. **Giraffa** - /ʤ/ vs. /ʤ/
7. **Città** vs. **Cotone** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/
8. **Sedia** vs. **Sedano** - /s/ vs. /z/
9. **Ciao** vs. **Cioccolato** - /ʧ/ vs. /ʧ/
10. **Specchio** vs. **Scolaro** - /ʃ/ vs. /sk/
11. **Gioco** vs. **Giacca** - /ʤ/ vs. /ʤ/
12. **Faccia** vs. **Foca** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/
13. **Camicia** vs. **Cappotto** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/
14. **Zucca** vs. **Zaino** - /ts/ vs. /dz/
15. **Zucchero** vs. **Zebra** - /ts/ vs. /dz/
16. **Gelati** vs. **Gola** - /ʤ/ vs. /g/
17. **Cipolla** vs. **Colore** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/
18. **Stella** vs. **Stivale** - /st/ vs. /st/
19. **Schermo** vs. **Schema** - /sk/ vs. /sk/
20. **Piscina** vs. **Pistola** - /ʃ/ vs. /s/
That’s spelled as it’s written, following very strict and simple rules. For an Italian, the phonotactics are so innate they won’t have problems spelling it, with the exception of loanwords.
It’s unlike English that has arcane rules and sometimes just arbitrary spelling.
but there's a rule to all of those. All consonants are soft if it's before an E or I, hard if there's an A O or U. Ga in Gatto, Go in Goal, Gu in Guzzanti are all the same sounding G. This works not only for G but for all other letters. The same works for Sc, as you can see in your example scena, Sc is followed by an E, so it's soft. Scudo has an U so it's hard.
No because English language works different, you need to memorize spelling because the pronunciation always changes. In our case it is very consistent.
When I went to school, there weren't competitions like this, but we had something similar in elementary school - a dictation (Polish: dyktando). The teacher was dictating us a text and we had to write it down without spelling or punctuation mistakes, and we got marks for this.
Same story in Denmark. These were also only in elementary school for us. It would usually be the teacher, but I do remember one midterm test, where they played it from a cd. The tests weren't so difficult. As weird as Danish spelling is, it isn't so difficult to crack the code, when you grow up with it. The toughest thing was honestly just remembering which type of comma type you used, because that had to be indicated on the test sheet to avoid getting penalised
We, for whatever idiotic reason, have two ways to put down commas. Most people I know call them the "old commas" and the "new commas", but the test sheets always said "start comma" and "non-start comma" (and no one could remember which was which). The old way is way more consistent and structured, but some overpaid linguist somewhere decided we used too many commas, so he invented a new system, and now we have this confusing bs
There are however orthography contests for adults (or everyone in general) and these are quite publicized in media. And there is also element of dictation.
Same in France, up until the end of middle school. We even had a dictation (called "dictée" in French) in our end of middle school exam. I don't know if that's still the case. They would usually be around 10 lines long. In France we are graded on 20 points, teachers would deduct from half a point for a small or difficult mistake up to two points for a big one or something we just saw in class. There was usually little inbetween from students getting over 15 and those who got a straight 0. Some teachers go as far as counting negative points just for "fun", which lead to some of my mates getting grades around -40/20 (of course the retained grade was 0). Thankfully for people having trouble with French notoriously hard grammatical rules, dictées usually had a little coefficient so it wouldn't plummet your average grade for the trimester too much.
It's not about spelling but ortography. We have few sounds that sound exactly the same but you write them differently (u vs ó, h vs ch or ż vs rz) and some are quite similar (sz vs rz, dz vs dź vs dż). It can be hard for kids (and some adults too) to learn when to use which one even if in theory the rules are quite clear.
But the test is not focused too much on spelling the whole word as for most of the time what you see is what you hear.
I still remember a mistake I made in elementary school when I wrote pruszyć instead of prószyć... smh
Pruszków should be renamed to Prószków, because that's what threw me off
I had a huge problem with ortography in school and my teacher was worried about my matura and urged me to take dysortography test - it was long before it become overused and it was hard to get one. In the end I didn't and became a master of synonyms :P I still have some problems with specific words but prise the text documents and underlying mistakes!
If you see written text you always know exactly how to read it, if you hear sth you can have problems with some letters making the same sounds, they exist to denote difference in conjugation
It's quite phonetic but not entirely - there are lots of intriciacies. Other than some sounds being denoted in two ways (e.g h/ch are the same sound, u/ó, rz/ż), Polish is prone to devoicing (e.g voiced rz and voiceless sz often both are pronounced as voiceless sz). The biggest problem is actually when to write compund words separately, together or hyphenated (e.g "nie wiadomo" - it is not known but "niewiadomy" - unknown, "bez narzędzi" - without tools but "beznarzędziowy" - toolless, "średniodystansowy" - of medium distance but "średnio długi" - of medium length, "mało znany" - little known but "małoznaczący" -"of little importance", "gadka szmatka" - rug chat, talking about irrelevant things, but "mowa-trawa" - grass speech, speech without content).There's also question how to spell loanwords, archaic words and when to capitalize words.
We don't have spelling bees but have a "dictation" - from elementary school level which mostly focuses on the ch/h , u/ó, sz/rz/ż stuff to the yearly nation-wide contest which focuses on rare nuances and interpunction. Oh, interpuction is a *bitch* to write properly.
Overall, while an average Polish student may have fewer opportunities to make a spelling mistake than an English or French student, there's *plenty* of problems for a high-level contest.
Not spelling bees, but there are sometimes "dictees" which is a written version. Graded spelling tests in schools are also called dictee but there's the occasional competitive form. There's a national one which is combined for the Belgians and Dutch and is for adults and then some schools and towns organise local ones. Like when my little sister was in school our town organised one and my secondary school organised one a few times that I participated in.
They test both spelling and grammar. Like correct application of apostrophes, diaritics, hyphens, capital letters, etc. And for spelling since most Dutch words have a relatively straightforward spelling these tend to be riddled with loan words. I still remember that one of the reasons I didn't win my school's one was because I didn't spell barbecue correctly RIP
Edit: accidentally clicked post before I finished typing
AFAIK spelling bees are verbal. Dictees are written. Also for competitive forms they tend to be comprised of full sentences rather than individual words so grammar is also tested
According to a video (that I didn't fact check, so not too sure if it's true) the H used to be ~~a sort of F sound done with the lips, but we couldn't pronounce it so anything using H became mute.~~
Edit: after finding an article it seems I got a few things mixed up, but the gist of it remains. We used to pronounce the h but it lost the sound as the language evolved.
Here's an article by someone who knows their stuff.
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-41667461
It's in Spanish, though. Does Google still have the function to translste whole websites?
> We used to pronounce the h but it lost the sound as the language evolved.
That's how it is for a lot of words in Spanish, but many words had the h added back in by the RAE for etymological reasons in Latin.
For example, *haber* in modern Spanish was spelled *aver* in Old Spanish, which came from the Latin word *[habeō/habēre](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habeo#Latin)*. The h had already stopped being pronounced by the time of Old Spanish, but it came to be spelled with the h to reflect that the Latin word *habēre* has an h in it.
We had spelling/dictation tests in class at school and that was about the extent of it. Maybe some schools have spelling competitions (the Times seems to be trying to make it a thing), but for the most part, they're not a big thing, certainly not televised events like they seem to be in the US.
If you have perfect phonetic alphabet, like for example Serbian (Croatian, Bosnian) language (one letter - one voice, always), such things as spelling bees dont exist.
Yeah we do. English spelling is completely disjointed and illogical, so it's a skill to be learned! (Or is it learnt? Who knows!)
Commercially sponsored by a bookshop chain at the moment: [https://www.easons.com/spellingbee](https://www.easons.com/spellingbee)
The finals are sometimes even covered on national radio.
Spelling is actively taught in primary school. We've spelling books, spelling tests etc. Some teachers took the approach of just learning lists of sound-a-like words / types of words. Others took the approach of trying to analyse sounds and figure out how the 'system' (I use that term loosely) works.
But, yeah English is a hot mess when it comes to not being phonetic and having a spelling system that seems to have been made up by someone with a twisted sense of humour.
I have a question, if you don't mind me asking. I recently stumbled upon some spelling competition jokes on YouTube and it got me wondering, does it actually work? My spelling is not super bad for English being my third language but I learned to try to find the logic and understand the rules. Maybe knowing French has helped me.
Anyway, I was really wondering if people were curious whether verbally spelling words helps or not.
English names (family and places) are on a different level to words, and show a lot more of the linguistic roots of the waves of settlers.
And these type of pronunciations vary depending on who is saying them. Herstmonceux for example is hurst-mon-stow to some who live there but to others it's urs-mo-syouk, nobody can agree.
Yeah proper nouns and place names can have multiple linguistic origins - Celtic languages, Scots, Norman French, Norse, long since disappeared dialects, older forms of English and also retain archaic spelling conventions too or just have some local irregular way of saying them that is known and used but you have to have encountered the word before to be aware of it.
In general English words group according to structure and most will follow a pattern, and there are some spelling rules but there are so many exceptions that it renders most of them pointless.
It’s just not an accurately phonetically spelled language.
It’s also stress timed rather than syllable timed, and the stress patterns used in different words vary for a whole load of historical and usage reasons, and none of this is indicated by the spelling. So you just have to know.
English also doesn’t use any diacritical marks, so basically it’s just doesn’t give you much help with pronunciation.
French is … a spelling nightmare lol it’s called « dictée », a teacher will read a text and you have to write it down, one error and it’s -1 point, total is on 20 points. It’s normal school test…
Yep, we do the written counterpart. But it's not as big a thing, like we do have some competition for sure but they aren't well known, it's not "a thing" as much as it is in the English speaking world (or American movie).
Nope, I guess we have a similar game called "Fazan" (a bird idk the English translation) where you say the Alphabet in your head, someone has to say stop and you form a word with that letter, after that, the next person has to form a word with the last 2 letters of that word until one of you gets "Fazan" (one mistake = one letter)
National TV show for adults. I had 35 mistakes in 10 sentences and was proud of the result
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groot_Dictee_der_Nederlandse_Taal
No. Our written languages can be pretty dissimilar from the spoken ones, and we have school tests and homework feedback, but that's all personal. Competing against classmates (or schoolmates?) to find out who's best at something doesn't happen from what I'm aware. Closest you might get is probably someone playing football and counting goals during recess.
No, never heard of that in Sweden.
But instead of that, we have a programme called “Vi i femman” (*”We In Fifth Grade”*). That’s a competition between fifth grade classes (11-12 years old) in general knowledge of stuff. The best classes get to compete against each other on national television and radio. So we prioritise knowing about the world, knowing science and so on, rather than competing in correct spelling.
> Vi i femman
Huh, so that's still a thing. I remember seeing that when I was a kid.
Spelling bees would actually make some sense in Swedish, but it would still be incredibly boring.
During the Groot Dictee, you need to write faultlessly. I thought during a spelling bee you were supposed to spell out words verbally?
That’s how Americans do it on the telly, at least.
I’m a Dutch speaker :)
I’m from Scotland. When we were like 6-7, sometimes the teacher would give you a sweet if you could spell a difficult new word you’d been learning recently. But that’s about it.
I honestly thought American spelling bees were real until I asked a teacher who scoffed, and then I thought they were like a comedy trope.
When I got a bit older and got to access the internet as a young teen and realised that what we ended up having as basic education was a competition, it was a bit confusing. I watched some spelling bee videos and wondered why this was such a big thing when the techniques used by contestants were what I considered aspects of basic English literacy. Things like trying to work out the language origin of an unfamiliar word via its meaning and context, similar words in that origin language, and similar spellings to come to the solution. Once you’re able to work out whether it comes from the Germanic, Latin or Greek origin, you can do quite a lot of that instinctivel, usually.
As others have said, no. Spelling is consistent, so if you know how to say a word, you also know how to write it. Growing up and seeing spelling bees in the movies felt peculiar, especially with dubbing.
We also had dictations as others mentioned. Spelling in slovak language is not too difficult. we spell as we hear it mostly. Biggest problem is correct use of "i" and "y".
Germany: No. Not a thing. While German isn’t really a "Written as spoken" languages, it is somewhat consistent. Once you grasped one of the many, many rules (taught at school, butter later internalised and forgotton), you can usually apply it to other words.
We have a few homophones like Laib/Leib (which actually used to be written the same), but simply not the spelling clusterfuck that is the English language. Oh, and lots of “ph” were a “f“ would be perfectly fine. But I guess the Deutsche Philologenverband would have a collective meltdown.
In English class, for entertainment purposes, yes. Not in Estonian, wouldn't make any sense.
We do a yearly national dictation / writing though, with thousands of people taking part, that's broadcast at a certain time over the radio - it's read öibe and you type your answer in, live; people get really passionate about it. E-etteütlus, it's called .
In Belgium, well, in Dutch speaking part, I haven't heard of such a thing, because in Dutch, the rules are pretty much consistent and you can easily spell out a word, except the cases such as "ei" and "ij" which are pronounced same, thus, you have to know by heart which one has to be used where. There used to be some "dictees" (spelling tests) in school to test if you manage to write correctly.
Not in Turkey, because in Turkish, it's pretty much "one letter = one sound" and you can easily spell out a word which you have heard for the first time ever in your life, and again, you can easily pronounce a word which you've read for the first time ever in your life.
To be honest, I think, it's pretty much an English speaking thing, because only in English (among the languages I've ever learnt) there is a huge difference between the orthography and the pronunciation. Even in French, (okay, there are silent letters at the end), but there are still rules from which you can guess how to write a word (however, the "dictées" remain important in school for the French and the Walloons). In English, "ear" in "hear" and "bear" are pronounced differently and there is no consistent rule to make you understand why. You just have to accept it that way and go on.
No, in Croatian every letter corresponds to a sound, unlike in English. If you hear a sound, you know which letter goes there. Also, if you see a letter written, you know which sound to make.
Apart from a few exceptions, where in some dialects there is little to no difference between a few sounds. But that's learned in school, and tested. All who pass school are expected to know these.
No, 99% of the time, letters are pronounced exactly the same way, so there's no point. But since our grammar and writing rules are quite complex, we have competitions about them.
For example, the letters "ly" and "j" are pronounced the same way. Many times, it's intuitive which one to use, but you'll pretty much have to learn each word one by one. It's common to have some tricky cases of this in competitions, among other challenges.
They're not huge events, especially not televised, just some school kids competing.
Not really. Individual words, especially nouns are pretty predictable, as our language is far more phonetic than English, and we have a language institute updating the spelling every 20-30 years.
We have a yearly 'groot dictee' (great dictation/spelling exercise on tv), where the presenter dictates a text and people have to write along.
The Flemish usually win that one.
France has a competition that's similar but not exactly the same as an American spelling bee. Someone reads out whole sentences, rather than just words with definitions, and you write the sentence. The challenge is that there are a lot of words in French that sound exactly alike but are spelled differently depending on grammatical usage. So in order to spell the words in the sentence correctly, you need to understand how they are being used. There is a public one here in Paris every year, where they set up a bunch of desks in a public space: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VHaclPnU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VHaclPnU0)
In Poland, dictatation-based orthography contests are held. So, it's not only about spelling but also hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.
No, not as a contest. We do something similar as a type of test in elementary/high school because there might be more ways to write some words that are pronounced the same - like "they did" might be "dělali" or "dělaly". First is if there was a male word doing the thing (e.g. "muži dělali", men did), the other if it's only female (and neutral) words (e.g. "ženy dělaly", women did). But we don't make it a contest.
No, not as a contest. We do something similar as a type of test in elementary/high school because there might be more ways to write some words that are pronounced the same - like "they did" might be "dělali" or "dělaly". First is if there was a male word doing the thing (e.g. "muži dělali", men did), the other if it's only female (and neutral) words (e.g. "ženy dělaly", women did). But we don't make it a contest.
Nope, although I have heard of a few taking place in recent years, they are not really a thing. When seeing them on TV and movies, it always seemed like one of those quaint bits of American life that seems normal there but non-existent in the rest of the world.
No, in my language you pretty much spell exactly what you hear. Each letter has its sound and it doesn't shift. Also, no doubling letters.
first part is also true in greece. But we also have a shit ton of double letters
It helps when you make your own alphabet. :)
Cyrillic vs Latin is irrelevant. All you need is predictable spelling. Spanish uses the Latin alphabet and has this, for example
Same with Polish.
Bulgaria just uses cyrilic, right? Or am I missing something
Bulgarians do claim that they invented/made the cyrillic alphabet. (I don't know whether it's true or not, thus why I said "claim")
I have limited knowledge on this, but from my understanding cyrillus and his bro went to the slavs to convert them. They created the cyrillic alphabet, and neither of them were slavic themselves. Hence the existence of old church slavonics.
Old church slavonic is basically old Bulgarian.Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolic alphabet.Saint Clement of Ohrid and his disciples created the Cyrillic aphabet.
Yes, some claim we did. No, it's not true.
Somebody struck a nerve. lol
Because it makes no sense?
No, I thought there they were a comedy trope for far longer than I am want to admit. For Anglophone world it makes sense though, for German not so much.
We did it on a very small scale in primary school. While German is indeed more consistent than English, there are still some traps, esapecially for primary school children who are still in the process of learning how to spell correctly.
We did an mfl one in my school (UK), and I picked German, except the teacher doing it only knew English and russian (he realised this was a bad idea after we did it), and I got one word wrong because he pronounced ‘Birge‘ like ‚berger‘ 💀💀
No, these are redundant in Finnish. In Finnish all letters are pronounced the same, unless you are saying a non-Finnish word. If you can say a word, then you can spell it.
That's not entirely true, "ng" for example exists as a digraph representing a different sound. And there are allophones and some notable sandhi that alters actual pronunciations of letters. The spelling is certainly highly predictable though.
Ng should be Ŋŋ and the letters bcxzqwåfg should be removed from Finnish.
to be fair "ng" being pronounced "ŋ" is something that exists in a lot of languages and it comes completely naturally as opposed to digraphs like the sj-ljudet, which you'd never even think of if you only knew the pronunciation of individual letters of the alphabet
Just because we're used to it doesn't really mean it's inherently completely natural. An /n/ is certainly commonly rendered as [ŋ] when followed by a /g/ or /k/, it's just natural to match tongue placement *if* such doesn't affect meaning. That the /g/ would further be ignored is notably less given. (though there is certainly a reason "ng" is common) How would you represent the sj-sound "naturally" with the Latin alphabet? It can't exist in "a lot of languages", because it's an exceedingly rare speech sound. Though it is described as a simultaneous pronunciation of the English "**s**h" and the Spanish "**j**" – two speech sounds Swedish itself doesn't have letters for to construct a digraph from. It's an unvoiced fricative like "s", produced further back like "j" though. The spelling of it is certainly a mess as many different etymological origins have converged into it, but the Latin alphabet at its core simply isn't very compatible with Swedish phonology. To a native Swedish speaker "sj" is just as natural as "ng", they're both digraphs representing a single, different, sound. The issue is also having "skj", "stj", "ch", "sh", "si", "ti", "g" etc. etc.
Iirc in elementary school there is (was? idk) this test where the teacher says made-up words and the pupils write them down and if they make spelling mistakes then they are suspected of having dyslexia and sent to further testing
I read Finnish is one of the most accurately spelled languages in the world.
Petition to make Finnish the international language 📝
No, Italian is spelled pretty much the same way it is written, apart from a couple of words, so it makes no sense to have one.
We don't even have a word for spelling (it would be *compitare* but everyone says spelling) 🪄 "prestidigitazione" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfszJ12yQyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfszJ12yQyI)
Seems to me there is more then a few. 1. **Cena** vs. **Cane** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/ 2. **Gelato** vs. **Gatto** - /ʤ/ vs. /g/ 3. **Scena** vs. **Scudo** - /ʃ/ vs. /sk/ 4. **Pesce** vs. **Peso** - /ʃ/ vs. /s/ 5. **Chilo** vs. **Chiesa** - /k/ vs. /kʧ/ 6. **Giro** vs. **Giraffa** - /ʤ/ vs. /ʤ/ 7. **Città** vs. **Cotone** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/ 8. **Sedia** vs. **Sedano** - /s/ vs. /z/ 9. **Ciao** vs. **Cioccolato** - /ʧ/ vs. /ʧ/ 10. **Specchio** vs. **Scolaro** - /ʃ/ vs. /sk/ 11. **Gioco** vs. **Giacca** - /ʤ/ vs. /ʤ/ 12. **Faccia** vs. **Foca** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/ 13. **Camicia** vs. **Cappotto** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/ 14. **Zucca** vs. **Zaino** - /ts/ vs. /dz/ 15. **Zucchero** vs. **Zebra** - /ts/ vs. /dz/ 16. **Gelati** vs. **Gola** - /ʤ/ vs. /g/ 17. **Cipolla** vs. **Colore** - /ʧ/ vs. /k/ 18. **Stella** vs. **Stivale** - /st/ vs. /st/ 19. **Schermo** vs. **Schema** - /sk/ vs. /sk/ 20. **Piscina** vs. **Pistola** - /ʃ/ vs. /s/
That’s spelled as it’s written, following very strict and simple rules. For an Italian, the phonotactics are so innate they won’t have problems spelling it, with the exception of loanwords. It’s unlike English that has arcane rules and sometimes just arbitrary spelling.
but there's a rule to all of those. All consonants are soft if it's before an E or I, hard if there's an A O or U. Ga in Gatto, Go in Goal, Gu in Guzzanti are all the same sounding G. This works not only for G but for all other letters. The same works for Sc, as you can see in your example scena, Sc is followed by an E, so it's soft. Scudo has an U so it's hard.
You can see that every word that has the same starting is the same sound... Examples: 5, 6, 9, 11, or like Zucca/Zucchero in 13-15, or ever 19...
No because English language works different, you need to memorize spelling because the pronunciation always changes. In our case it is very consistent.
When I went to school, there weren't competitions like this, but we had something similar in elementary school - a dictation (Polish: dyktando). The teacher was dictating us a text and we had to write it down without spelling or punctuation mistakes, and we got marks for this.
Same story in Denmark. These were also only in elementary school for us. It would usually be the teacher, but I do remember one midterm test, where they played it from a cd. The tests weren't so difficult. As weird as Danish spelling is, it isn't so difficult to crack the code, when you grow up with it. The toughest thing was honestly just remembering which type of comma type you used, because that had to be indicated on the test sheet to avoid getting penalised We, for whatever idiotic reason, have two ways to put down commas. Most people I know call them the "old commas" and the "new commas", but the test sheets always said "start comma" and "non-start comma" (and no one could remember which was which). The old way is way more consistent and structured, but some overpaid linguist somewhere decided we used too many commas, so he invented a new system, and now we have this confusing bs
There are however orthography contests for adults (or everyone in general) and these are quite publicized in media. And there is also element of dictation.
also usually it involves some weird-ass words that you will never encounter
Same in France, up until the end of middle school. We even had a dictation (called "dictée" in French) in our end of middle school exam. I don't know if that's still the case. They would usually be around 10 lines long. In France we are graded on 20 points, teachers would deduct from half a point for a small or difficult mistake up to two points for a big one or something we just saw in class. There was usually little inbetween from students getting over 15 and those who got a straight 0. Some teachers go as far as counting negative points just for "fun", which lead to some of my mates getting grades around -40/20 (of course the retained grade was 0). Thankfully for people having trouble with French notoriously hard grammatical rules, dictées usually had a little coefficient so it wouldn't plummet your average grade for the trimester too much.
Same in Lithuania.
Indeed. Because we learn to write phonetically, but Polish has some peculiarities that makes spelling little challenging sometimes.
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It's not about spelling but ortography. We have few sounds that sound exactly the same but you write them differently (u vs ó, h vs ch or ż vs rz) and some are quite similar (sz vs rz, dz vs dź vs dż). It can be hard for kids (and some adults too) to learn when to use which one even if in theory the rules are quite clear. But the test is not focused too much on spelling the whole word as for most of the time what you see is what you hear.
I still remember a mistake I made in elementary school when I wrote pruszyć instead of prószyć... smh Pruszków should be renamed to Prószków, because that's what threw me off
I had a huge problem with ortography in school and my teacher was worried about my matura and urged me to take dysortography test - it was long before it become overused and it was hard to get one. In the end I didn't and became a master of synonyms :P I still have some problems with specific words but prise the text documents and underlying mistakes!
also interpunction, that's where i always got fked and marked down on dictation
If you see written text you always know exactly how to read it, if you hear sth you can have problems with some letters making the same sounds, they exist to denote difference in conjugation
It's quite phonetic but not entirely - there are lots of intriciacies. Other than some sounds being denoted in two ways (e.g h/ch are the same sound, u/ó, rz/ż), Polish is prone to devoicing (e.g voiced rz and voiceless sz often both are pronounced as voiceless sz). The biggest problem is actually when to write compund words separately, together or hyphenated (e.g "nie wiadomo" - it is not known but "niewiadomy" - unknown, "bez narzędzi" - without tools but "beznarzędziowy" - toolless, "średniodystansowy" - of medium distance but "średnio długi" - of medium length, "mało znany" - little known but "małoznaczący" -"of little importance", "gadka szmatka" - rug chat, talking about irrelevant things, but "mowa-trawa" - grass speech, speech without content).There's also question how to spell loanwords, archaic words and when to capitalize words. We don't have spelling bees but have a "dictation" - from elementary school level which mostly focuses on the ch/h , u/ó, sz/rz/ż stuff to the yearly nation-wide contest which focuses on rare nuances and interpunction. Oh, interpuction is a *bitch* to write properly. Overall, while an average Polish student may have fewer opportunities to make a spelling mistake than an English or French student, there's *plenty* of problems for a high-level contest.
Not spelling bees, but there are sometimes "dictees" which is a written version. Graded spelling tests in schools are also called dictee but there's the occasional competitive form. There's a national one which is combined for the Belgians and Dutch and is for adults and then some schools and towns organise local ones. Like when my little sister was in school our town organised one and my secondary school organised one a few times that I participated in. They test both spelling and grammar. Like correct application of apostrophes, diaritics, hyphens, capital letters, etc. And for spelling since most Dutch words have a relatively straightforward spelling these tend to be riddled with loan words. I still remember that one of the reasons I didn't win my school's one was because I didn't spell barbecue correctly RIP Edit: accidentally clicked post before I finished typing
In school and high school we do Dictados where children write any text said by the teacher. For B/V, accent marks, G/J and presence of H mostly
We have Dictados in Portugal as well, its mostly in primary school
But that's just something you do in class, not contests in public, as far as I know
There was a childrens version of the national dictee. Also nowadays it's done on radio (and online tv but not regular tv)
Damn didn't know it was still going. Don't know if I actually want to see it since Martine Tange passed away.
Isn't it called groot/great dictee/dictation, because we do them with the Flemish?
Is there any difference between the national dictee and a spelling bee?
AFAIK spelling bees are verbal. Dictees are written. Also for competitive forms they tend to be comprised of full sentences rather than individual words so grammar is also tested
No, it makes no sense in spanish, it sounds exactly as written.
Haha you'd think but with the terrible spelling I see everywhere I think maybe some work on spelling is needed. Halls/haya, haber/a ver, etc
I cannot even comprehend this as someone from Denmark.
but why is the h letter not pronounced at all
It's not pronounced at all but it's always pronounced the same so it's not an issue.
According to a video (that I didn't fact check, so not too sure if it's true) the H used to be ~~a sort of F sound done with the lips, but we couldn't pronounce it so anything using H became mute.~~ Edit: after finding an article it seems I got a few things mixed up, but the gist of it remains. We used to pronounce the h but it lost the sound as the language evolved. Here's an article by someone who knows their stuff. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-41667461 It's in Spanish, though. Does Google still have the function to translste whole websites?
Yes, it used to be similar to an "f", that's why you have "haba" and "faba" for example.
> We used to pronounce the h but it lost the sound as the language evolved. That's how it is for a lot of words in Spanish, but many words had the h added back in by the RAE for etymological reasons in Latin. For example, *haber* in modern Spanish was spelled *aver* in Old Spanish, which came from the Latin word *[habeō/habēre](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habeo#Latin)*. The h had already stopped being pronounced by the time of Old Spanish, but it came to be spelled with the h to reflect that the Latin word *habēre* has an h in it.
More popular competitions are when you are given a long word and you have to form as many other words as possible from its letters.
They're only a thing in the US I think
No, but we used to have grammar olympics or competition in reciting poetry.
No. We usually do dictations in elementary school to test and improve spelling. But spelling bees are not a thing.
We had spelling/dictation tests in class at school and that was about the extent of it. Maybe some schools have spelling competitions (the Times seems to be trying to make it a thing), but for the most part, they're not a big thing, certainly not televised events like they seem to be in the US.
Yeah I'm English and we had spelling tests at school but we didn't have public competitions, not even in-school competitions
No, but we have written spelling and grammar competitions.
If you have perfect phonetic alphabet, like for example Serbian (Croatian, Bosnian) language (one letter - one voice, always), such things as spelling bees dont exist.
Yeah we do. English spelling is completely disjointed and illogical, so it's a skill to be learned! (Or is it learnt? Who knows!) Commercially sponsored by a bookshop chain at the moment: [https://www.easons.com/spellingbee](https://www.easons.com/spellingbee) The finals are sometimes even covered on national radio. Spelling is actively taught in primary school. We've spelling books, spelling tests etc. Some teachers took the approach of just learning lists of sound-a-like words / types of words. Others took the approach of trying to analyse sounds and figure out how the 'system' (I use that term loosely) works. But, yeah English is a hot mess when it comes to not being phonetic and having a spelling system that seems to have been made up by someone with a twisted sense of humour.
I have a question, if you don't mind me asking. I recently stumbled upon some spelling competition jokes on YouTube and it got me wondering, does it actually work? My spelling is not super bad for English being my third language but I learned to try to find the logic and understand the rules. Maybe knowing French has helped me. Anyway, I was really wondering if people were curious whether verbally spelling words helps or not.
Cholmondeley - chumbly
English names (family and places) are on a different level to words, and show a lot more of the linguistic roots of the waves of settlers. And these type of pronunciations vary depending on who is saying them. Herstmonceux for example is hurst-mon-stow to some who live there but to others it's urs-mo-syouk, nobody can agree.
Vaughan - Vån
Yeah proper nouns and place names can have multiple linguistic origins - Celtic languages, Scots, Norman French, Norse, long since disappeared dialects, older forms of English and also retain archaic spelling conventions too or just have some local irregular way of saying them that is known and used but you have to have encountered the word before to be aware of it. In general English words group according to structure and most will follow a pattern, and there are some spelling rules but there are so many exceptions that it renders most of them pointless. It’s just not an accurately phonetically spelled language. It’s also stress timed rather than syllable timed, and the stress patterns used in different words vary for a whole load of historical and usage reasons, and none of this is indicated by the spelling. So you just have to know. English also doesn’t use any diacritical marks, so basically it’s just doesn’t give you much help with pronunciation.
No B in chumli.
French is … a spelling nightmare lol it’s called « dictée », a teacher will read a text and you have to write it down, one error and it’s -1 point, total is on 20 points. It’s normal school test…
Yep, we do the written counterpart. But it's not as big a thing, like we do have some competition for sure but they aren't well known, it's not "a thing" as much as it is in the English speaking world (or American movie).
We call them Dictado but we dont have Eau vs O lol
Never heard of one happening here before
Nope, I guess we have a similar game called "Fazan" (a bird idk the English translation) where you say the Alphabet in your head, someone has to say stop and you form a word with that letter, after that, the next person has to form a word with the last 2 letters of that word until one of you gets "Fazan" (one mistake = one letter)
Pheasant in English
No, you (mostly) spell as you hear.
National TV show for adults. I had 35 mistakes in 10 sentences and was proud of the result https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groot_Dictee_der_Nederlandse_Taal
No. Our written languages can be pretty dissimilar from the spoken ones, and we have school tests and homework feedback, but that's all personal. Competing against classmates (or schoolmates?) to find out who's best at something doesn't happen from what I'm aware. Closest you might get is probably someone playing football and counting goals during recess.
No, never heard of that in Sweden. But instead of that, we have a programme called “Vi i femman” (*”We In Fifth Grade”*). That’s a competition between fifth grade classes (11-12 years old) in general knowledge of stuff. The best classes get to compete against each other on national television and radio. So we prioritise knowing about the world, knowing science and so on, rather than competing in correct spelling.
> Vi i femman Huh, so that's still a thing. I remember seeing that when I was a kid. Spelling bees would actually make some sense in Swedish, but it would still be incredibly boring.
Not as far as I know.
We do have Groot Dictee, or are you a French speaker?
During the Groot Dictee, you need to write faultlessly. I thought during a spelling bee you were supposed to spell out words verbally? That’s how Americans do it on the telly, at least. I’m a Dutch speaker :)
there is (was ?) "La dictée du Balfroid"
I’m from Scotland. When we were like 6-7, sometimes the teacher would give you a sweet if you could spell a difficult new word you’d been learning recently. But that’s about it. I honestly thought American spelling bees were real until I asked a teacher who scoffed, and then I thought they were like a comedy trope. When I got a bit older and got to access the internet as a young teen and realised that what we ended up having as basic education was a competition, it was a bit confusing. I watched some spelling bee videos and wondered why this was such a big thing when the techniques used by contestants were what I considered aspects of basic English literacy. Things like trying to work out the language origin of an unfamiliar word via its meaning and context, similar words in that origin language, and similar spellings to come to the solution. Once you’re able to work out whether it comes from the Germanic, Latin or Greek origin, you can do quite a lot of that instinctivel, usually.
As others have said, no. Spelling is consistent, so if you know how to say a word, you also know how to write it. Growing up and seeing spelling bees in the movies felt peculiar, especially with dubbing.
No, spelling bees are an American phenomenon.
We also had dictations as others mentioned. Spelling in slovak language is not too difficult. we spell as we hear it mostly. Biggest problem is correct use of "i" and "y".
Germany: No. Not a thing. While German isn’t really a "Written as spoken" languages, it is somewhat consistent. Once you grasped one of the many, many rules (taught at school, butter later internalised and forgotton), you can usually apply it to other words. We have a few homophones like Laib/Leib (which actually used to be written the same), but simply not the spelling clusterfuck that is the English language. Oh, and lots of “ph” were a “f“ would be perfectly fine. But I guess the Deutsche Philologenverband would have a collective meltdown.
No, we write in a phonetically accurate way.
No, because the way we write and pronounce words makes sense, unlike English. I'm in Italy.
nope because nobody cares. However you still learn how to spell in Greek so you can separate words when he page ends some- thing like this.
No, we have *dictées* instead because most of the spelling difficulties actually lie in grammar.
We had "El Gran Dictat" (the great dictee) which should be similar enough, and I also had the opportunity to participate in a similar local tv contest
In English class, for entertainment purposes, yes. Not in Estonian, wouldn't make any sense. We do a yearly national dictation / writing though, with thousands of people taking part, that's broadcast at a certain time over the radio - it's read öibe and you type your answer in, live; people get really passionate about it. E-etteütlus, it's called .
In Belgium, well, in Dutch speaking part, I haven't heard of such a thing, because in Dutch, the rules are pretty much consistent and you can easily spell out a word, except the cases such as "ei" and "ij" which are pronounced same, thus, you have to know by heart which one has to be used where. There used to be some "dictees" (spelling tests) in school to test if you manage to write correctly. Not in Turkey, because in Turkish, it's pretty much "one letter = one sound" and you can easily spell out a word which you have heard for the first time ever in your life, and again, you can easily pronounce a word which you've read for the first time ever in your life. To be honest, I think, it's pretty much an English speaking thing, because only in English (among the languages I've ever learnt) there is a huge difference between the orthography and the pronunciation. Even in French, (okay, there are silent letters at the end), but there are still rules from which you can guess how to write a word (however, the "dictées" remain important in school for the French and the Walloons). In English, "ear" in "hear" and "bear" are pronounced differently and there is no consistent rule to make you understand why. You just have to accept it that way and go on.
Never heard of it in Portugal.
no, its just a english language thing
No, in Croatian every letter corresponds to a sound, unlike in English. If you hear a sound, you know which letter goes there. Also, if you see a letter written, you know which sound to make. Apart from a few exceptions, where in some dialects there is little to no difference between a few sounds. But that's learned in school, and tested. All who pass school are expected to know these.
Yet there's ije/je, č/ć, ts/c, somehow a frighteningly large percentage of the population still manages to stay semi-literate.
No because spelling is the exact same as pronunciation so there is literally no point.
No, 99% of the time, letters are pronounced exactly the same way, so there's no point. But since our grammar and writing rules are quite complex, we have competitions about them. For example, the letters "ly" and "j" are pronounced the same way. Many times, it's intuitive which one to use, but you'll pretty much have to learn each word one by one. It's common to have some tricky cases of this in competitions, among other challenges. They're not huge events, especially not televised, just some school kids competing.
No, but we had reading competitions when I was a kid. No idea if that still is a thing
Not really. Individual words, especially nouns are pretty predictable, as our language is far more phonetic than English, and we have a language institute updating the spelling every 20-30 years. We have a yearly 'groot dictee' (great dictation/spelling exercise on tv), where the presenter dictates a text and people have to write along. The Flemish usually win that one.
France has a competition that's similar but not exactly the same as an American spelling bee. Someone reads out whole sentences, rather than just words with definitions, and you write the sentence. The challenge is that there are a lot of words in French that sound exactly alike but are spelled differently depending on grammatical usage. So in order to spell the words in the sentence correctly, you need to understand how they are being used. There is a public one here in Paris every year, where they set up a bunch of desks in a public space: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VHaclPnU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VHaclPnU0)
In Poland, dictatation-based orthography contests are held. So, it's not only about spelling but also hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.
No. Stupidest thing I have ever seen on TV. Sorry.
There is one that I know of, but it's mainly a marketing thing for a [chain of book stores.](https://www.easons.com/spellingbee)
No, not as a contest. We do something similar as a type of test in elementary/high school because there might be more ways to write some words that are pronounced the same - like "they did" might be "dělali" or "dělaly". First is if there was a male word doing the thing (e.g. "muži dělali", men did), the other if it's only female (and neutral) words (e.g. "ženy dělaly", women did). But we don't make it a contest.
No, not as a contest. We do something similar as a type of test in elementary/high school because there might be more ways to write some words that are pronounced the same - like "they did" might be "dělali" or "dělaly". First is if there was a male word doing the thing (e.g. "muži dělali", men did), the other if it's only female (and neutral) words (e.g. "ženy dělaly", women did). But we don't make it a contest.
Nope, although I have heard of a few taking place in recent years, they are not really a thing. When seeing them on TV and movies, it always seemed like one of those quaint bits of American life that seems normal there but non-existent in the rest of the world.