# Is spelling important in your country?



## Joelline

When I was in school, we were always taught that spelling was one of the most important language skills. As a youngster, I had a spelling quiz almost every day and our school had monthly "spelling bees" where the best speller would get a small prize. 

However, I recently received an email (text below) suggesting that, in fact, spelling is not all that important in terms of communicating. What do you think? Is spelling thought of as important in your educational system?  Do you think that spelling an over-rated skill in your country?  If the paragraph below were translated and "reworked" in your language, could native speakers still read it?

*Cna yuo raed tihs? *

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
slpeling was ipmorantt!


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## LaReinita

Well, just because our brain can process words that we already recognize when they're spelled wrong, doesn't mean that spelling isn't important.  I know this will sound horrible, but I've always thought it seems uneducated to spell a whole bunch of things wrong.  I know this isn't true, but these days when one can use a spell check or simply go to Dictionary.com to verify the spelling of one word or another, it's seems lazy to spell words wrong when the alternative is that easy to achieve.  However, I always won or at least was a finalist in Spelling Bees in school, so maybe I would feel differently if spelling was difficult for me.


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## Musical Chairs

I can read that, but it's about as hard on the eyes as text that lOoKs lyKe tHiZz. Can non-natives read it too?

It annoys me when people don't spell things the right way, but I'd say that for the most part, people spell pretty decently (at least where I live). It's important to differentiate between spelling errors and typos though. I think typos are more forgiveable.

I think spelling is important, but I think spelling bees (like the national spelling bee) are stupid. I think it's more important to know how to use words than to know/memorize every word in the dictionary. I've always been negatively impressed by spelling bee contestants, to tell you the truth.


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## Dempsey

Joelline said:


> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *
> 
> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
> pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
> slpeling was ipmorantt!



Heh. It barely affected the way I read it.


Spelling isn't very important here. In school they are more concerned with how you express yourself in your writing and also the content. Poor spelling will barely mark a person down.


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## Musical Chairs

Dempsey said:


> Heh. It barely affected the way I read it.
> 
> 
> Spelling isn't very important here. In school they are more concerned with how you express yourself in your writing and also the content. Poor spelling will barely mark a person down.



True here too. Sometimes when people start running out of time, they will use "+" instead of "and" and they can still get the best grade if everything else is very good.


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## Athaulf

Joelline said:


> However, I recently received an email (text below) suggesting that, in fact, spelling is not all that important in terms of communicating. What do you think?



It's an artificially contrived example, in which consonants still largely follow their normal ordering. If the middle letters were really rearranged randomly in a random text, you'd hardly be able to read anything. 

Here's a differently rearranged fragment from the text that you quote:

_Andcoricg to a rraecseh at Cigbr__a__dme U__v__s__t__i__er__n__iy, it d__n__s__e__o__'t mtaetr... _

Now try reading that without having previously seen the correct version (or the nearly correct one above). 

Vowels, however, can be rearranged or even omitted while still keeping a surprising level of readability if only the first and last letters are kept intact:

_Accrdng to a rsrch at Cmbrdg Unvrsty, it dsn't mttr...


_


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## karuna

Joelline said:


> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *
> 
> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
> pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
> slpeling was ipmorantt!



I cannot browse this text at all. And reading it requires quite an effort and it is very slow as sometimes I have to stop and think, sometimes for several seconds at each word to understand what it means. I am sure that a native speaker can do it much faster but do you still feel comfortable to read such texts? 

In Latvian spelling is not very important because it is relatively simple and mostly phonetic. Therefore people are mostly splitting hairs about punctuation and word usage. But if you were spelling words incorrectly people would be correcting you without hesitation.


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## salvador_1_99

Here spelling is not important, besides spelling the vowels.



Musical Chairs said:


> I can read that, but it's about as hard on the eyes as text that lOoKs lyKe tHiZz. Can non-natives read it too?


I can without any problem. Is spellling important for no-natives? I think so




Musical Chairs said:


> I think spelling is important, but I think spelling bees (like the national spelling bee) are stupid. I think it's more important to know how to use words than to know/memorize every word in the dictionary. I've always been negatively impressed by spelling bee contestants, to tell you the truth.


mmmhhh I try to read a lot and also I try to memorize (and hear) every word that I find, I will sort it out to put the words in order, whether you don´t know the words how come you can use them.


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## raspina

In our country its very important to spell correctly  , and when we were in Elementry school every day we had an  exam .

I think spelling in a correct way is very important and shows if you are educated or not .


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## Sepia

One can read it, but it is not the best example of this phenomena that anybody who has been working with typography should know.

However, if the 1-2 first and last letters are right a lot of grave spelling errors go unnoticed because words are read from the outside to the inside and not from beginning to end. One reads till it makes sense. Once, on my job, a box with the word

ALRAMCLOCK 

went unnoticed for months, till somebody finally said, shouldn't that be

ALARMCLOCK

LARMCLOCK or ALARMCLOC would have been noticed at once.

Nevertheless, spelling is important everywhere - which does not mean it is taken seriously. Just look at the way people often write on internet message boards - not this one of course. With a lot of "there" in stead of "their" and several other errors of that type. Do you really read that? Of course you don't. After the second time you have to re-read a sentence in a post to have a slim chance to understand what the guy means, you jump to the next one. 

(And can you imagine a contract of that quality level? Would you sign it?)


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## jonquiliser

Musical Chairs said:


> I can read that, but it's about as hard on the eyes as text that lOoKs lyKe tHiZz. Can non-natives read it too?


 
Very readable, at least to this non-native, and not hard on the eyes. Athaulf's version wasn't more difficult either, although, of course, I had already read the first version.

Is spelling important? Well, I imagine in some sense it will always be, everywhere. The initial example works, because we already have a clue of how the words "normally" are spelt, thus it is possible to read. If there were no rules at all, apart from "this word contains these letters and X is first, Y last", I don't think we'd learn to read all the same...  I don't think it is "problematic" that there are spelling rules - they help us all to read and understand better. What I think is the problem is the overpreoccupation with spelling and typos - is it really fair to judge someone as "illiterate" because of not spelling to perfection according to rules that are, after all, arbitrary? What does it matter? Spelling is a medium, communication and expression are the goals.


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## Kajjo

Joelline said:


> Is spelling thought of as important in your educational system?


Yes, it is thought to be important. However, since German spelling is at least a little bit more straight-forward than English spelling, normal children have not too much difficulty.



> Do you think that spelling an over-rated skill in your country?


No, it is not. To the contrary, only young children are trained well. In higher school education it is thought to be a prerequistite, but it is not trained anymore. Personally, I believe that vocabulary, spelling, grammar, rhetorics should be trained on high-school level much more intensively. 

It is amazing what linguistic crap well-educated scientists are able to create -- a little bit more of general education would be highly desirable!



> If the paragraph below were translated and "reworked" in your language, could native speakers still read it?


It is amazing, that even I (as foreigner) could read the text almost without problems. Interestingly, scrambled words like "rset" were somewhat difficult (for a few seconds), maybe because "set" in itself is a word, too? The same was true for "lsat". Also "slpeling" was in my mind unclear for seconds (sleeping/spelling), even if the context made it very clear.

I will try do test the same thing in German!

Great topic!

Kajjo


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## Silvia B

Musical Chairs said:


> True here too. Sometimes when people start running out of time, they will use "+" instead of "and" and they can still get the best grade if everything else is very good.



That absolutely doesn't happen in Italy.
Spelling right is a basic thing that you learn when you are at the elementary school. If during high schoolo you write something wrong is like you don't know 1+1=2!!!
And our professors don't accept these kind of mistakes at all. 
We care very much about our language.


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## jonquiliser

Kajjo said:


> It is amazing what linguistic crap well-educated scientists are able to create -- a little bit more of general education would be highly desirable!


 
Hehe, and it's amazing what BS people can come up with in the most refined and sophisticated linguistic form!


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## ireney

Moderator's note: This particular "phenomenon" has been disussed before here and here. As you may see the English texts are indentical 


I agree with LaReinita (we know how they are spelt and that's why we can recognise the jumbled up words) and Athaulf (the process of jumbling up these words is important).
I've long suspected although I was always too lazy to check it, that the production of this text in the first place has something to do with cognitive psycology. At least it seems to fit right in the subject of how we recognise letters and words and things. I may be wrong of course.

Spelling was and up to a point still is quite important here. It always depends on the kinds of mistakes one makes of course (since, for instance, dyslexic people make a certain kind of mistakes) but bad spelling is still considered in general as something you should be really ashamed of. Historic spelling doesn't help people with orthography although basic etymology does.

Mind you, all these hold true only for native speakers. When it comes to people learning Greek, people may wince a bit when the endings are spelled wrong or someone has played Eeny, meeny, miny, mo with the /i/s of a word containing many different one (like ειρηνικός - irinikos for example ) but that's just about it.


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## Brioche

Dempsey said:


> Heh. It barely affected the way I read it.
> 
> 
> Spelling isn't very important here. In school they are more concerned with how you express yourself in your writing and also the content. Poor spelling will barely mark a person down.



This just shows the sorry state of some schools in Australia.

Am I making too many assumptions, or are you talking about Victorian state primary schools?


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## Kaxsp

This a really interesting question. I 've a little brother (4 years old) and he is just learning read. In spanish, we are learning him to read syllables like "LA LE LI LO LU" or "MA ME MI MO MU" because always it sound similar, and i think that in a very short time he will learn to read very well.


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## zazap

French.  French spelling.  Have you ever noticed how half the letters in French words are silent?  It certainly doesn't help!
I spent my childhood copying lists of words and doing dictations.  I'm lucky because I've always been quite good at spelling, but I know some people who just can't do it right.  Spelling is very important in France.  "La dictée de Bernard Pivot" is very famous, T.V. shows like "Des chiffres et des lettres" too.  
I am under the impression that spelling isn't quite as big an issue in Quebec, but  I could be wrong.  I studied at a school with teachers from France and books from France and French education philosophy so I don't know.  I remember that the kids who were attending normal public schools were copying less words...


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## DearPrudence

I am tired so don't pay attention to what I say but I don't really see the link between proper spelling & the example given. I had no difficulty reading it but it takes me ages to read chatspeak because I have to read it "outloud" to understand what it means while with proper spelling it instantly means something to me because I'm so used to this spelling.
I think spelling is important, especially in French when common faults can make that you write 2 opposite things:
"à noter"
"a noté" 
Pronounced exactly the same way but in a case, you have to do it, in the other, it's done (yes, it happened to me, I read something like that & it was to do, not done already ).
I think that spelling in France has always been important, as Zazap noted, & recently there has been an attempt of the government to put emphasis again on they study of grammar & spelling (& reading) in primary schools. But in general I have the impression spelling is poorer & poorer  (I know I sound so old )


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## ernest_

In Spain, we had separate marks for writing expression, grammar and spelling, and reading comprehension. I think it was fair enough. At the end, you had to be able to write Catalan and Spanish almost perfectly (in terms of spelling and grammar), as each fault would cost you 2 points out of 10. So, with 5 being a pass, if you made only two mistakes (it didn't matter if it was only one accent that you wrote the other way round) you ended up with a miserable 6. Three mistakes, that was a fail. That test was a 200 word composition, if I recall correctly. Or maybe it was 400 words. The only problem is that without constant practice your writing skills begin to degenerate almost instantaneously, so just a few months after the exams I had already forgotten how to write properly.


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## Dempsey

Brioche said:


> This just shows the sorry state of some schools in Australia.
> 
> Am I making too many assumptions, or are you talking about Victorian state primary schools?



A NSW public Highschool. No, spelling here was not important. I don't remember primary school.


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## Etcetera

Spelling is very important in Russia. 
Children are taught how to write properly (not only in terms of spelling, though) all the 10 years they spend at school. Sadly, not all school-leavers can boast faultless spelling. But those who do have far higher chances to enter a university, because writing an essay is the first exam at many faculties, and although the essay is on a given topic on Russian literature, the spelling, grammar etc will also be checked.


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## Bilma

In Mexico spelling is important when I was in high school and even college if you missed an accent or a colon you would get some points deducted from your grade.


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## semisa

It's amazing that I can read them easily.I'm not a native.As to your question,I think it's important for people to spell word right.It will show a lot of respect to the person you are writing to as well as the language itself.


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## modus.irrealis

I don't think that spelling is that important for communication, in the sense that the current spelling of a language is not the only way. You don't even need (I guess contrived) examples -- just look at how people text message each other -- clearly there are lots of ways a language can be written besides the officially correct way.

But I think spelling is important in the sense that spelling errors -- if you spell something wrong on a resume, application, report, or anything along those lines, I'm pretty sure that nine times out of ten, it will reflect badly on you. Personally, for those languages where spelling is to a large extent unpredictable, I think this is one of reasons in favour of orthographic reform, since spelling is such an artificial way of determining intelligence, etc. and if you're well-off, my guess is you're more likely to be a better speller (does any one know of any studies on that?) since you probably had more time and resources to learn (i.e. memorize) how words are spelt, so maybe spelling's important as a social justice issue too.


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## Outsider

Joelline said:


> Is spelling thought of as important in your educational system? Do you think that spelling an over-rated skill in your country?


No, I think it's underrated. Our public schools are going through an "anything goes" phase. All that matters is that students have good self-esteem (and a place to crash/trash while mom & dad are busy at work). Any learning that may take place is entirely coincidental.

Personally, while I realise that spelling is just a convention, I think that people should learn it, and learn it well. For me, that's the best way to avoid the social imbalances that Modus-Irrealis alludes to.



Joelline said:


> If the paragraph below were translated and "reworked" in your language, could native speakers still read it?
> 
> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *


Sure, you think we don't have that kind of joke in other languages, too?


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## argentina84

It depends on the language. For example, if you make a mistake in Spanish, people will understand what you have written. But if you make a  spelling mistake in English, or French, people might read another thing! I am very careful when writing in a foreign language. It's not the same case  with my own language...


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## CrazyArcher

I can do nothing but agree with Etcetera on what she's written about spelling in Russian. I studied in Russian school only up to the 6th grade, however, and I can't say anything about later education, but whatever I've learnt was enough to make my spelling almost perfect.

In Hebrew making spelling mistakes is also frowned upon, but the spelling itself is somewhat easier than in European languages. The main reason is that vowels aren't written (with an exception of [o] and _), and the rest of the language is largely phonetic. The only major source of spelling mistakes is confusion between letters that sound the same in modern Hebrew (4 pairs exist in total), and, to a lesser extent, not hearing the letter 'hey' pronounced clearly.
Anyway, any official documentation has to be written flawlessly. Without doubt, a resume written with a spelling mistake will find itself in the trash bin._


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## Earth Dragon

In American high schools, it depends on the class. 

Computer teachers expect perfect grammar and spelling because they consider using language tools to be part of the class. They will take 1 point of 20 off for each error they find. The average writing assignment would be 1 page long. 

English teachers will make students do several drafts of the same paper. The first one will have many misspelled words. Once you get the last draft, the spelling is supposed to be perfect also. 

Science teachers will mark an answer half wrong if a term is more than one letter off.


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## lettore

In Raissun: deefiinlty. It is more iamnoprtt for pelope tahn gaammrr.  Pelope make a lot of maeiksts in pacinottuun, yet tehy uallsuy selpl  eehinrtvyg rgiht. I dn'ot know why.
Sorry.

In Russian: definitely. It is more important for  people than grammar. People make a lot of mistakes in punctuation, yet  they usually spell everything right. I don't know why.



Earth Dragon said:


> Computer teachers expect perfect grammar and spelling because they consider using language tools to be part of the class. They will take 1 point of 20 off for each error they find. The average writing assignment would be 1 page long.
> 
> […]
> 
> Science teachers will mark an answer half wrong if a term is more than one letter off.


Uaeflnnorttuy, in Rissua tehre is a siptud peiioopprsstun taht sceiinstts (cemoptur sceiinstts icdelnud) dn'ot need laaggnue.
I gesus taht is one raeosn why the Raissun scceine is poor caemoprd to its paeinottl.
Sorry.

Unfortunately, in Russia there is a stupid presupposition that scientists (computer scientits included) don't need language.
I guess that is one reason why the Russian science is poor compared to its potential.


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## Peripes

Musical Chairs said:


> Can non-natives read it too?



As a non-native speaker, I can say I can indeed read that paragraph. I think that if a word is assembled in a different way, but conserving a certain structure, we can still recognise it. If it were, for example: "I tulcdno vlebiee hatt I ouldc llytacu duntandres..." It wouldn't make any sense at all. Certain structure must be kept for a word to be recognised.

Here in my country I think spelling is not really taught with a lot of depth in school. Aside from ceratin reules of spellings, the topic is mostly left aside, I think not many people here feel Spanish phonology and spelling are very difficult. You are expected to spell more or less correctly after school. People usually write incorrectly when using SMS, chatrooms and such, but I think most people can point out the mistakes, unless you didn't receive basic education. Certain universities will substract a point or two for each spelling error, but it's not always very dramatic.

For me spelling is sort of important, I always try to write the best way I can, but I don't force people to do so unless, for example, we're writing a paper or presentation. If I can understand what someone is trying to tell me, without enormous mistakes, I think it's okay for most situations.


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## london calling

Things have changed. I was educated in Australia (Melbourne and Perth) and in London (I did my primary eduction in the sixties) and at the time spelling was very important: we had spelling tests all the time. As a matter of fact, I remember in London we used to have an 'official' one every year, which they used to establish your reading age. I notice that these days, in the UK at least, the younger generations often appear to have serious problems with their spelling, which makes me think that a) schools don't put much emphasis on it any more; b) kids don't read (books, newspapers, whatever) the way we used to; c) people rely heavily on spell-check software whenever they write anything.


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## Mishe

In Slovenia spelling is EXTREMELY important. This has a lot to do with the way we perceive and experience our language and we perceive it as the main feature of our self-identification, therefore most people here are very hairsplitting about it. Not only about the spelling, but also about grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc. 

The tricky thing about Slovenian is that the standard language is quite different from the spoken everyday language/dialects, so mastering the standard is a sign of good education and sophistication. Nevertheless, just like in all other languages there are many people who don't live up to this prerogative, but the fact that bothers me the most is how such mistakes are mocked - there are dozens of Slovenian facebook groups where people post and make fun of everyday language errors. Not that I think that spelling, punctuation and grammar aren't important, it's just that I think this is humongous exaggerating. Besides, many Slovenians have begun to dislike the standard language, they feel uncomfortable using it and feel it is in a way "unnatural".


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## tonyspeed

I hate spelling nazis. People get upset about things like your/you're - their/there - weight/wieght . It's the dumbest thing ever in the history of language and people could find better things to waste time doing. This is why spelling reform is crucial.


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## Mishe

On the other hand, spelling is a convention a certain society agrees to follow, at least in some contexts and situations...


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## Sepia

tonyspeed said:


> I hate spelling nazis. People get upset about things like your/you're - their/there - weight/wieght . It's the dumbest thing ever in the history of language and people could find better things to waste time doing. This is why spelling reform is crucial.



Just go on like that if you feel like it. The point is that one has to go back and re-read several times to have an idea what somebody is trying to tell. Do we always have time for that? Do we have a reason to do so? Do we HAVE to read it at all? If the answer is "no", I assure you, my reaction will very often be not to read it at all. However, why write something when it is bound not to be read?

OK - spelling reform would be fine, but even that will not solve the problem with those people who still don't care.


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## IRAJ2000

Spelling is very important in my country. I live in Iran, and my native language is Persian. 
At school we have four lessons for linguistics:
1. Persian Literature (2 hours a week)
2. Persian Grammar (2 hours a week)
3. Persian writing (2 hours a week)
4. Persian Spelling (1.5 hours a week)
Right now, I'm at the third grade of junior high school.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all round

It may be worth remarking here that, as a general rule, accuracy in spelling is more important in inflected languages than in prepositional. In an inflected language, the aberration of a single letter may change the sense of a word or sentence entirely, whereas in my native English, in which a greater proportion of the sense of individual words is carried by context and sentence-formation, occasional spelling errors (though irritating to pedants such as myself) only seldom distort the meaning disastrously.

Σ


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## Einstein

One thing nobody has said is that misspelt words may not be so disastrous for people who know the language well, but for people who are learning from a low level I'm sure they create far more difficulty. English is an international language, so we shouldn't be too anglocentric!
This discussion may also seem strange to people whose language is practically phonetic like Spanish or Italian, with a very close correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. There are not so many mistakes Italian students can make.

From what I know of modern Greek, if you see a word you know how to pronounce it, but if you hear it you don't necessarily know how to spell it because *η*, *ι*, *υ*, *ει*, and *οι* all have the same sound.


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## Scholiast

Greetings again

Einstein (# 39) is of course right - we should not be too Anglocentric - and he is also right, that few languages have such a chaotic relationship between orthography and pronunciation as English. But how well do (say) the spoken argots of Sicily or the Italian Tyrol really conform phonetically to the Italian spoken by educated Milanese?

The same could be asked for virtually any modern language - and was also true of Latin and ancient Greek; only there, so far as the evidence seems to permit, we can pick up at least some dialectical (or even grammatical) variants from their epigraphic orthography.

Σ


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## frugnaglio

Scholiast said:


> Greetings all round
> 
> It may be worth remarking here that, as a general rule, accuracy in spelling is more important in inflected languages than in prepositional. In an inflected language, the aberration of a single letter may change the sense of a word or sentence entirely, whereas in my native English, in which a greater proportion of the sense of individual words is carried by context and sentence-formation, occasional spelling errors (though irritating to pedants such as myself) only seldom distort the meaning disastrously.
> 
> Σ



Really? This sounds like a weird statement to me. Do you have an example of what you mean? I suppose if you take a sentence in an inflected language of your choice and apply some random spelling errors, you won't get something less intelligible than if you do the same thing with English. Maybe it would be more meaningful to distinguish between more and less redundant languages: redundancy (like marking the number on both the subject and verb) allows to understand the meaning from the unadulterated term. But it can introduce ambiguity for the same reason...


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## Sempervirens

Ciao! Ai miei tempi, mezzo secolo fa, fare la scomposizione in sillabe era di prassi. Non conosco i metodi didattici odierni. 

Comunque, per aiutare anche chi ha problemi di disturbo dell'apprendimento (vedi dislessia, per esempio), io preferisco una buona ortografia ad una scrittura alla come viene viene. Esorterei i docenti affinché la buona ortografia, e con essa pure un po' di senno, prevalga sulla cattiva ortografia. D'altronde tu parli di comunicazione (in generale), ed io in quel termine includo tutto. Parlanti e/o lettori con disturbi specifici dell'apprendimento (DSA), comunicazione scritta, orale, traduttore automatico. 

P.S Grazie ad un'ortografia abbastanza fedele puoi anche fare la traduzione automatica. 

Saluti


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## Zaskaburcio

Finding concepts with Google Search would be very complicated. Also sorting words in dictionaries, spelling check in word processors, etc.

Regards


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## Radioh

For a language purist like me, yes, spelling is extremely important. Sadly, many young people nowadays in my country are abusing the language every day. They use abbrevirations every where, even in essays. They even invented some ridiculous ways of writing words, which they call "cool and teen", which I find IMPOSSIBLE to read and understand. Misspelling is inevitable in every language. But it helps improve your vocabulary. When you spell a word incorrectly, you learn how to spell it correctly ~sign~ I'm not judging anyone, just feel sad...


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## perpend

I spell, therefore I am.


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## germanbz

In Spanish spelling has importance only when you have to learn to write graphic accentuated words or words which contain either j/g or c/z (when they have the same sound) or words containing an "h" which is mute in Spanish. 

Besides that, once you have learnt the sound of the basic syllables, you shouldn't have difficulties to write any word, even though you'd never listened to it before. Because the sound of a word, sounds as the addition of the sounds of its basic syllables.


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## Packard

Joelline said:


> However, I recently received an email (text below) suggesting that, in fact, spelling is not all that important in terms of communicating. What do you think?



You communicate ideas and your personal image.  If it is OK to you that your personal image is one of an under-educated-spelling-and-grammar-challenged individual, than ignore spelling and grammar.

I had a salesman that worked for me who sounded like he was educated, however when emails became a major method of communicating it became apparent that he was not.  I insisted that he submit his emails to me for review before sending them to the customers.

Unfortunately I cannot make that demand of the new VP of our company (the owner's son) who likes to "summerize" using numbered points.  He also likes to offer a "summery view" in chart form.

And this to our largest customer: _Accoring to my calculations these prices should leav you with about a 20% margin to meet listed prices. 
_
So, sure ignore spelling and grammar and appear to the world like an ill-educated lout if that is what you are willing to present.


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## Nino83

Scholiast said:


> But how well do (say) the spoken argots of Sicily or the Italian Tyrol really conform phonetically to the Italian spoken by educated Milanese?



I don't speak about people of South Tyrol because they are German native speakers.

There is very little difference.
In Italy, what change most is intonation, the value of /e/ and /o/ (in Northern Italy and in Abruzzo, Molise and Apulia they say "sècco" and "béne" instead of "sécco" and "bène", in Sicily, Calabria and Salento we say "sècco" and "bène"), the value of some letter (in Northern Italy "lj" becomes "gli", so they say "miglioni" instead of "milioni", intervocalic "gni, gli, sci" are not geminated, and in Veneto they often degeminate also other consonants, while from Rome to Sicily intervocalic "b, d, g" can be geminated also when they souldn't be, like "aggenda" instead of "agenda" in informal speech).

Anyway, all these differences (except for the degeminated consonants in Veneto and the geminated "b, d, g" in Central and Southern Italy) are not reflected in orthography (there's no difference between "é" and "è", "ó" and "ò" and "gni, gli, sci" are written always as single consonants), so there are very few spelling mistakes and those few are not tolerated at school.

P.S.
A little example.
I'm Sicilian and some month ago I went to Rome.
The most known feature of Sicilian accent is the opening of /e/ and /o/ (when speaking Italian we always say "è" and "ò") but in Sicilian language the difference is mantained ("sécco" becomes "siccu", "sètte" > "sètti", "córto" > "curtu" and "fòrte" > "fòrti"), so in a few days I started pronouncing almost correctly both open and closed /e/ and /o/.
A student from Salento and another from Naples thought I was Roman, and some Romans didn't guess my Region (but they didn't think I was Roman).
So, with a little effort you can have a more or less neutral accent.


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## Mikeo38

In my opinion spelling is important because if, say, a job application letter contains spelling mistakes people will think that you couldn't be bothered to use a dictionary or a spellchecker. I reckon there are words like "book" that everyone knows how to spell; on the other hand, there are doubtful words - "receive" or "recieve"? If you are doubtful, then words must be checked. Also, someone may be intelligent but if h/she makes spelling mistakes, people will think the opposite.


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## franknagy

The spelling causes much less trouble to Hungarian pupils than English or French pupils.
In our language the roots of the words are spelled phonetically.
The ly sound has disappeared from the spoken standard Hungarian but it has been reserved in the written language Ly is pronounced now same as the j sound. This forces the young children to learn by heart the spelling.
The x/ksz question is less important. X is preserved in most words of Greek and Latin origin. Mainly ksz is used in words coming from German, English, Yiddis and  Russian.
...
The spelling of declined nouns and conjugated verbs is more complicate because colliding final consonants of the roots and front consonants of the suffixes melt in a third sound. The analytic spelling and the phonetic spelling are contradicting. The analytic spelling helps to recognize the root and the suffix. The phonetic spelling is easier to learn.


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## zwim

Spelling in France is quite important and there are specific courses in school (dictée) to teach that, although as DearPrudence told, it's less emphasized than in the past, ministers even regularly contemplate the possibility of removing such a teaching.

I remember the Dictée (a televised exercise of extreme difficulty spelling with awards and such), where i was happy i made only 19 mistakes (and i was quite good at that exercise at school), while my father made only 14 and i was so surprized seeing my grandmother sobbing in tears, complaining she was getting older and useless. I asked her her score, and she had made 4 mistakes. I was ashamed to tell her mine...

Yet wrong spelling is everywhere, and it's not uncommon to see some red felt-tipped correction on a poster or a note displayed in a public place.

It's also common that on forums some people (generally young) write with a lot of spelling mistakes (when not in sms language) and see an army of angry redeemers coming to castigate the infidel (which in turn are called old-timers when not nazis by the wrong spelling one).

Incorrect spelling in your cover/motivation letter can cost you a job, even if you apply for the least of unskilled labour, because it would mean that you are not serious to the job if you don't give the fuck to examine your mail with the spell-checker, even if the employer has to run the spell-checker himself to detect your mistakes. But then, when in the place, you are free to make all the mistakes you want, even in educated jobs, because most people are like you and they don't bother or wouldn't because of social conventions, i exagerate maybe a bit, but it's kind of a paradoxal situation.


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## Mikeo38

It's interesting to see the reference to dictation above. The latter has had a bad press over the years but when I was teaching at a private English language school in the UK, I used dictation every day in what I found was an effective way - not as a test; certainly not an extract from an unseen text but from something that we'd covered the previous day. At the end of each lesson, I'd say something like: "OK today we went through this piece about animal welfare. Tomorrow I'll dictate part of one of the paragraphs." This was duly dictated at the start of the lesson and each student would correct the script of a person sitting nearby. Including the correction, the whole thing would last no more than five minutes. Apart from directing attention to the spelling, this exercise helped to settle the class down. Also any latecomers would not miss the main part of the day's lesson. As far as dictation is concerned, I believe the rule should be 'brief, little and often'. It's best used to reinforce words that students have already encountered.


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## Rallino

Turkish is highly phonetic, so it's not exactly difficult to spell a word. So almost all the spelling errors are about spelling what should be written in two words as one whole word, or vice versa. Sometimes, it might cause a misunderstanding:

Ev de = The house as well
Evde = in the house

But since the context almost always makes it clear, the majority of the people simply don't care about it, so you could say that misspellings are quite common in the country.

For me,though,none of those misspellings are as annoying as missing a space after a comma,or inserting one before a fullstop .


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## franknagy

English pupils have spelling competitions. Hungarian do not have.


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## kakapadaka

In Polish it's fairly important although many people ignore correct spelling, especially in the Internet.
A blatant disregard for it is frowned upon and ridiculed, not only in school. Fellow Internet users will mock you if you misspell severely, although we are very forgiving about making simplifications when typing online in informal situations, see below.
Kids learn spelling at school, although we have no spelling competitions like those seen in some American movies. At some point (somewhere around age 14 in my case) grammar and spelling exercise end and all you're left with is literature (which, by the way, would be more than enough to ensure that we know how to spell, IF we took the trouble to actually do the reading).
As for the nature of our spelling sins, Polish has many phonemes related to more than just one grapheme (letter). For instance, both _ó _and _u _are pronunced /u/, both _h _and _ch _are pronunced /x/ etc. So if you see a graffiti saying _HWDP_ this will be an incorrect version of _CHWDP _("F**k the police") and if you don't read many books and skip your language class you won't know how the correct word looks like. To make things worse, there are lots of homophones, so many spellings can be correct depending on the context.
Diacritical marks are often omitted, especially online. A seasoned speaker will know that _zolw _is actually _żółw _and _zyznosc _is actually _żyzność. _Sometimes it's done on purpose to mimic a spoken style. Try googling _ja pierdole _which is an incorrect spelling of _ja pierdolę _("f**k me", "for f**k's sake"), you'll find plenty of internet memes all written wrong. It's so, because the -ę ending is actually pronunced as [e], and you can write it that way to make it more similar to its usual, colloquial way of being said.
There are tons of other examples, I can elaborate if you wish, but I don't think that was the idea for this thread. Anyway, Polish is pretty complex with its spelling, so books can be (and have been) written on the subject.


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## franknagy

Silvia,
What is the main difficulty in the Italian spelling for a young scholar? 
There are many dialects in Italy very different from the official Italian language?
Is the spelling of Venice dialect taught in Venice, for example?


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## Nino83

Words like "informazione" or "polizia", i.e with "zi + vowel", which are pronounced with a double [ʦʦ], [informaʦʦjoːne], the plural of words ending with unstressed "cia" and "gia", like "ciliegia" and "camicia", which are written "ciliegie", "camicie" (with "gie" and "cie"), "bolgia" and "provincia", written "bolge" and "province" (with "ge" and "ce"), because they are pronounced the same, i.e [ʧe]/[ʤe].
But, at elementary school, you are taught that the correct orthography is "zione", "gie/cie" if there is a vowel before "c/g" and "ge/ce" if there is a consonant before "c/g".
Other errors are those regarding "ne/né" (ne = some, né...né = neither...nor), "ce/c'è" (ce = of it, c'è = there is), "c/qu" in word pronounced [kw], like "cuore", "qual è" ("qual'è" is wrong), "un po'" (and not "un pò"), "accelerare" (not "accellerare"), "un amico", "un'amica", but "l'amico", "l'amica" (while "un'amico", "un amica" are wrong), "e/è", "a/ha".

For peninsular Italians (who have "raddoppiamento fonosintattico" before some prepositions and other particular words) sometimes one doesn't know if there is a single word or a preposition + word, like "a posto" (in place, ok) and "apposto" (put), which are both pronounced [appɔsto], or "a fianco" (beside) and "affianco" (I stand beside), both pronounced [affjanko].

I mentioned almost all possible mistakes and I had to search them on a website, because I can't remember them.


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## franknagy

Thank you Nino, for the detailed answer.


franknagy said:


> Is the spelling of Venice dialect taught in Venice, for example?


This question remained unanswered.


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## Nino83

I don't know (I'm from Sicily).
There is a composition written by an 8 years old kid in Ca' Tron di Roncalde, Veneto, 1954:
http://www.veja.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/monte_berico.jpg
Some mistakes: "siamo ndati a lamadona demonteberico" (siamo andati dalla madonna di Monte Berico), "grassia par miasorela" (grazia per mia sorella), "maridata" (maritata, sposata) "ani" (anni), "e no a gnanca tosatei" (e non ha figli), "siamo pregati" (abbiamo pregato), "siamo mangiati" (abbiamo mangiato), "siamo vegnuti casa" (siamo venuti a casa), "no si siamo capiti" (non ci siamo capiti), "co la" (con la), "fatostà" (fatto sta), "insinta" (incinta), "laltra sorela" (l'altra sorella), "no è gnonca maridata" (non è neanche maritata/sposata).

It was written in 1954, I guess that today there should be fewer mistakes.
In Veneto Venetian language is spoken a lot, while, for example, Piedmontese and Milanese are endangered languages (according to UNESCO).
In peninsular Italy there are fewer problems with spelling, because Italian languages below the La Spezia-Rimini (exactly Massa-Senigallia) line are very similar in phonology and grammar.


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## eno2

We all use the same words. That's very depersonalising. To compensate for that, we all write them differently. That makes us 
individuals again.


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## Mikeo38

I disagree with eno2, who appears to be praising incorrect spelling on the grounds that spelling mistakes “make us individuals again”.  There is nothing praiseworthy about an individual who writes ‘recieve’ instead of ‘receive’. Teachers who do not correct spelling mistakes do their pupils a great disservice. 
M


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## eno2

Mikeo38 said:


> I disagree with eno2, who appears to be praising incorrect spelling on the grounds that spelling mistakes “make us individuals again”.  There is nothing praiseworthy about an individual who writes ‘recieve’ instead of ‘receive’. Teachers who do not correct spelling mistakes do their pupils a great disservice.
> M


Just joking a bit. I am very very  sensible to correct spelling to thepoint of being a purist. But in my language (Dutch), it's almost impossible to reach proficiency. Even the most educated make constant errors, media are full of errors, regulators make a shambles of it- for instance by changing rules each new legislature, with sometimes outright stupid changes.


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## Mikeo38

OK and glad that you didn't take offence! It's just that I have never been a natural speller - I check and double-check rather than make a mistake in anything that I write. I don't know much about Dutch: has there been a spelling reform, as was the case in German-speaking countries some years ago? I'm now retired but when I was working (in GB) I was shocked by the sloppy English that appeared in letters inquiring about jobs. That was before the days of the spellchecker although I'm the first to admit that such devices are not always reliable. I took the view that if someone was sloppy enough not to check the spelling in an important letter, then h/she would be sloppy in other respects, too.
M


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## eno2

Mikeo38 said:


> OK and glad that you didn't take offence! It's just that I have never been a natural speller - I check and double-check rather than make a mistake in anything that I write. I don't know much about Dutch: has there been a spelling reform, as was the case in German-speaking countries some years ago? I'm now retired but when I was working (in GB) I was shocked by the sloppy English that appeared in letters inquiring about jobs. That was before the days of the spellchecker although I'm the first to admit that such devices are not always reliable. I took the view that if someone was sloppy enough not to check the spelling in an important letter, then h/she would be sloppy in other respects, too.
> M


Spell-checkers are a great help but I access a more potent package in Windows Word including a grammar program to double-check on some occasions. I would never dare to post anything entirely without checking. I learn a lot from it. Spelling standards are falling everywhere, notoriously so on general fora. On serious occasions, it gives a bad impression.


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## Einstein

Digressing a bit: the so-called grammar check in Word (English) tells me I shouldn't use the passive (!) and that I should use the strong relative pronouns (who, which) only in a non-defining relative clause. I stick to the spell-check and ignore the rest.


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## Mikeo38

Yes, Word has got a thing about the passive! What I've done is disable the box for 'Passive' in Word prefs on the basis that I know when and where the passive should or should not be used. I previously tended towards 'which' (for things) in defining relative clauses  but Word kept nudging me towards 'that'. Just shows you how one can get worn down because I probably now use 'that' most of the time! The spellcheck is good but, of course, when I wrote my post above (Today at 12:11) in Word before pasting it into the box for the forum _("an individual who writes ‘recieve’ instead of ‘receive’) _the spellchecker kept autocorrecting 'recieve'. But how was the poor thing to know? However, let's be grateful for spellcheckers because they are useful tools. 
M


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## Hulalessar

eno2 said:


> Spelling standards are falling everywhere, notoriously so on general fora.



I doubt that the number of people who can spell correctly has changed significantly. With the spread of personal computers people are writing who once rarely wrote. There is a lot more writing about that we get to see.


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## eno2

Hulalessar said:


> I doubt that the number of people who can spell correctly has changed significantly. With the spread of personal computers people are writing who once rarely wrote. There is a lot more writing about that we get to see.


It's notoriously the case on universities (falling spelling standards). In Flanders I mean, because I read articles who proved that. I don't think there are more than a few people "who can spell correctly". You have to be a specialist.


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## Nino83

I think that if only few people can spell correctly there is a problem and a spelling reform is needed. 
It's unthinkable that, for example, in public competitive exams most people, who have to write by hand, probably will make a lot of spelling mistakes.


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## Mikeo38

The spelling reform in Germany met with a lot of resistance - there would be even more in Britain! Fairly or unfairly, rightly or wrongly, if you make a spelling mistake you hold yourself up to ridicule and people may think that you are uneducated. In respect of spelling, I reckon that for most people, words fall into three categories: (1) easy words (eg book), (2) really difficult words (eg chrysanthemum) and (3) 'iffy' words (eg relevant - people are unsure whether it's 'relevant' or 'relevent'). I am not a natural speller and when I need to write words from (2) or (3) I check the spelling. In the past, this meant leafing through a dictionary but with the internet it's so easy. Of course, there still remains the problem that if you have no idea how to spell a really difficult word, you may not be able to find it! Rather than risk a spelling mistake, I choose another word or spend longer searching.
M


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## nimak

Joelline said:


> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *
> 
> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
> pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
> slpeling was ipmorantt!



  

English in not my native language, but I raed htat txet wthiuot a porbelm.


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## Xamayca

Correct English spelling is important in schools here, homes, the workplace, on street signs etc. Students do spelling test in primary schools at least 3/4 times a week or take part in Spelling Bee.
However, many people here and on some other islands in the Caribbean, spell words the way they sound. In my country, it's called "Jamaican Patois". Eg. Me doh see di mango inna bag or mi/meh doh si di mango inna bag. (I don't see the mango in a bag).
There's not really a standard way to write it, but you get the gist.
There are Jamaicans, and foreigners that correct sentences like these because, they think it's a failed attempt to write Jamaican Standard English. If a student writes this in school the teacher will surely correct him/her.
But, If it's not just an accent but a language, how do you correct a language to make it more English, if it's not English? xD. Then there are people who see it as a dialect. How do you correct a country with 2 dialects of English? If a dialect is supposed to represent speakers of a certain region, area or class.


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## Vukabular

Serbian language is fully phonetic so we dont have spelling


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## Red Arrow

Joelline said:


> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *
> 
> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
> pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
> slpeling was ipmorantt!


This is how people are able to read subtitles without having to focus on the bottom of the screen.


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## NewAmerica

Joelline said:


> When I was in school, we were always taught that spelling was one of the most important language skills.
> 
> *Cna yuo raed tihs? *
> 
> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a
> pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
> slpeling was ipmorantt!



     Yes. I read it without problem.

     But spelling is very important. Because the reading feelings are completely different. The correctly spelt text gives me a refreshing and beautiful feeling, while the misspelt text, though understandable, looks unpleasantly ugly.

  Attached the correctly spelt text (wittened. Wipe it with your mouse to show it)

  I couldn't believe that I could actually understand what I was reading. The phenomenal power of the human mind, according to a reaserch at Cambridge University, it doesnt matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole. Amazing huh? Yeah and I always taught spelling was important!


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## Penyafort

Dictations were and still are an important part of learning to spell here but mainly in early school years. Once in secondary school you are expected to spell well -something which proves to be false most of the time- and you are required to do so in examinations, otherwise points are substracted.

The main challenge, though, for children in Catalonia is not to mix the spelling rules of Catalan with those of Spanish and vice versa, as many cognates are written differently and the rules of accents and diacritic marks are somewhat different too.


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## Packard

I had a sales representative that worked for us (he was an independent rep, we only paid him commissions).  When he spoke he sounded educated.  But when he wrote emails his spelling, punctuation and grammar were so atrocious that he looked like a grade school dropout.  

I required that he send all emails to the office for editing prior to sending them to the customer.  His normal writing was so bad as to make our company seem like a third rate manufacturing plant manned by illiterate laborers.   

So, yes, I think  spelling is important.  Also  choosing the right words.  And grammar.  And punctuation.  And pronunciation.


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## dojibear

I have often thought that spelling problems were only in English. Many languages are spelled phonetically (the way words are spoken). English is spelled the way word *used to be *spoken hundreds of years ago, by *some *people in *some* places. Why else would /naɪt/ be "knight" but /baɪt/ be "bite"?

As one Chinese student of English said, "English spelling follows rules. But there are too many rules. You end up having to memorize which rule to use with each word."

This thread makes me feel better. It shows me that spelling is a problem in many other languages too.



Hulalessar said:


> With the spread of personal computers people are writing who once rarely wrote.


One linguist (Professor McWhorter) says that spoken English and written English are different languages to a linguist, and that modern "chatspeak" (used in smartphone chats and live forums online) is a new third form combining those 2 old forms. It has the real-time interaction of speech, so it uses much of the simplified grammar of speech. But it is written.

His lectures (which I saw on video) explained some common chat terms (such as LOL) as new linguistic forms, not slang or errors.


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## AutumnOwl

In Swedish there is a problem with _särskrivning_ (spacing between the words in compound words), as it can make the meaning of the word to something totally different, for example: en brunhårig sjuksköterska - en brun hårig sjuk sköterska. Is it a brown-haired nurse or is it a brown hairy sick nurse? 

There are also words that are pronounced similarly, but spelled differently, for example: järnbruk - hjärnbruk (ironworks - brain use).


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## Paulfromitaly

Spelling is not important to people who can't spell.
Why would they say that something they aren't able to do is important?


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## serbianfan

Paulfromitaly said:


> Spelling is not important to people who can't spell.
> Why would they say that something they aren't able to do is important?


Well, that depends. If you're a kid and can't spell, and your parents and teacher are always getting annoyed with you because of that, it's very important. It's not until the kid grows up that he can breathe a sigh of relief, because now he's doing manual work and hardly ever has to write anything


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## london calling

serbianfan said:


> Well, that depends. If you're a kid and can't spell, and your parents and teacher are always getting annoyed with you because of that, it's very important. It's not until the kid grows up that he can breathe a sigh of relief, because now he's doing manual work and hardly ever has to write anything


Why do you assume he'd be doing manual work? 🙁What if he's a professional and can't spell to save his life? That would reflect very badly on him. I associate people who can't spell with uneducated people (or people with dyslexia), say what you will. 

Spelling is important in English


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## serbianfan

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough. What I was trying to say it that there's a huge difference between being bad at spelling as a kid (there's so much writing in school) and being bad at spelling as an adult *if* (not *when*) you do manual work that involves little writing. You may have to fill out a form sometimes, but you probably have a relative or friend who can help you with that, or you may need to write a shopping list, but then it doesn't matter if you write 'serial' for 'cereal' because you're the only one who sees the list.


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## Linnets

In Italy we usually say: _L'ortografia è la scienza degli asini _("orthography/spelling is donkeys' science"). I don't think it's right, though.


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## Şafak

Spelling is vital in Russian. If you can't spell a word correctly, you're considered stupid.


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## london calling

Linnets said:


> In Italy we usually say: _L'ortografia è la scienza degli asini _("orthography/spelling is donkeys' science"). I don't think it's right, though.


😊😊I'm bilingual English - Italian. I just want to add, for those who don't know, that Italian is written as it's pronounced, which makes it far easier to spell correctly. English spelling is a killer. 🤣


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## Paulfromitaly

london calling said:


> I just want to add, for those who don't know, that Italian is written as it's pronounced, which makes it far easier to spell correctly.


True. People who can't spell some words are very likely to also mispronounce them.


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## Sepia

It is hard to define "important" here. I'd say fluent verbal communication is always important and it is extremely annoying when someone pretends it doesn't matter whether his spelling and grammar are correct, because he is waisting other people's time.
It doesn't all have to be correct. But several errors in combination sometimes makes it impossible to see at once which word belongs where.


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## london calling

Sepia said:


> . I'd say fluent verbal communication is always important and it is extremely annoying when someone pretends it doesn't matter whether his spelling and grammar are correct, because he is waisting other people's time.


_Wasting_ not 'waisting'. Sorry, as we were on the topic of spelling I felt obliged to point that one out.


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## london calling

Şafak said:


> Oh, you're bilingual (I assume it means you've been speaking English and Italian since the day you were born). This is cool.


No, I'm not a simultaneous bilingual ( my son is, though).


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## Şafak

london calling said:


> No, I'm not a simultaneous bilingual ( my son is, though).


Lucky people! I wish I were one!


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## Penyafort

london calling said:


> I just want to add, for those who don't know, that Italian is written as it's pronounced, which makes it far easier to spell correctly.



I'd say only Esperanto is written as it's pronounced, as each letter corresponds to a phoneme and stress falls always upon the same syllable. Italian, as said above, has some tricky spelling conventions and stress, unlike in Spanish, is far more unpredictable.


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## apmoy70

In Greek it is, because the language is not so phonemic due to *iotacization* (the long process of sound-shifting the pronunciation of the diphthongs ει/οι/υι, and η/υ, to iota /i/, hence the name, that started in late Koine and was completed in 10th c. CE). So, there's a number of words that sound the same but are spelled differently due to etymology (MoGr retains its historic orthography for etymological reasons), eg:
*«Kλίμα/κλήμα»* [ˈklima] (both neut.) = the former is _climate_, the latter is _grapevine_.
*«Ρήμα/ρίμα»* [ˈɾima] (the former neut. the latter fem.) = _verb_ (the neuter), _rime_ (the feminine).
*«Διάλειμμα/διάλυμα»* [ˈðʲalima] (both neut.) = _intermission_ (former), _liquid mixture_ (latter).
*«Τύχη/τοίχοι/τείχη»* [ˈtiçi] (the first is fem., the second is masculine nominative plural, the latter is neuter nominative plural) = _luck_ (fem.), _walls_ (masc. nom. pl.), _bulwark_ (neut. nom. pl.).
*«Κλείνω/κλίνω»* [ˈklino̞] (both are verbs) = _to close, shut, turn off_ (former), _to decline, lean, conjugate_ (latter).
Etc


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## merquiades

@apmoy70 Is there a movement in Greece to simplify the spelling of /i/ sounds?


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## Perseas

merquiades said:


> @apmoy70 Is there a movement in Greece to simplify the spelling of /i/ sounds?



No, there isn't such a movement but there are some individuals (also scholars) who have argued that there should be a simplification in orthography. This issue is not new however.

From the beginning of the 19th century (i.e. from the beginning of the newborn Greek state) there were two tendencies regarding the issue of the Greek orthography. On the one hand, there were scholars who argued that modern Greek should abandon the historical orthography and be written with a phonemic type of writing. In this context, two solutions were proposed: the first one concerned the use of the Greek alphabet and the second one -more radical- concerned even the complete regraphization of modern Greek based on the Latin alphabet. On the other side, though, most scholars supported the historical orthography, which finally prevailed. The spelling question was related to the famous Greek language question (γλωσσικό ζήτημα): which form of Greek should become the official language of the newborn Greek state: an archaic form, which nobody spoke, or the people's language. The language question, which also took on political and social dimension, beset Greece until the last decades of the 20th century.

After the brief flashback and coming back to your question, I would say that nowadays there's kind of uninamity that we keep the existing orthographical system.


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## merquiades

Linnets said:


> Very peculiar answer.


Peculiar but I think that rule does work.  To my knowledge _c'h_ is pronounced with soft c all the time, as _ch_ with no apostrophe is always hard.


Perseas said:


> After the brief flashback and coming back to your question, I would say that nowadays there's kind of uninamity that we keep the existing orthographical system.


Thanks for the history.  So do you figure that keeping the existing spelling is a compromise between respect for the linguistic history and adopting the people's language?


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## Perseas

merquiades said:


> Thanks for the history.  So do you figure that keeping the existing spelling is a compromise between respect for the linguistic history and adopting the people's language?


There's also a practical issue. If we decided now in 2021 to adopt a phonemic spelling we would have to learn two systems instead of one: the "old" one to process all texts written until 2021 plus the new one. If a change had been made 150/200 years ago things would have been easier because we would not have the incredible amount of information that we have now.
​


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## Olaszinhok

If I may put my two cents in, Greek is phonetic enough, particularly if we compare it to other languages such as English, French, Russian, let alone Celtic languages. Even Portuguese and Catalan are less phonetic than Greek. I may be mistaken, though. 
I began learning some Modern Greek a few years ago,  but then I gave up studying it because my textbook was not good enough.


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## Linnets

Perseas said:


> There's also a practical issue. If we decided now in 2021 to adopt a phonemic spelling we would have to learn two systems instead of one: the "old" one to process all texts written until 2021 plus the new one. If a change had been made 150/200 years ago things would have been easier because we would not have the incredible amount of information that we have now.


Just my curiosity: is there any advocate of a spelling reform of Modern Greek?


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## apmoy70

merquiades said:


> @apmoy70 Is there a movement in Greece to simplify the spelling of /i/ sounds?


Historically, yes, I'd say there were movements to simplify spelling. But you have to understand that the Greek language question acquired from early on a left-right orientation, leading to a language war spanning more than a century, with the Left fighting for the Lower register (the Demotic i.e. the language of the people as it had evolved naturally from Koine > Byzantine > MoGr) and the Right defending the Higher register of artificially constructed Katharevousa (the "pure language", the Greek term was influenced by the German _Reine Sprache_, a more "archaic" language considered the bridge between the Classical & MoGr).
So, you have Socialists defending a "popular language" with spelling reforms (influenced by the Soviet simplification and reforms of the Russian language) that produced the words «καθαρέβουσα» (SMG «καθαρ*εύ*ουσα»), «γλόσα» (SMG «γλ*ῶσσ*α») and included all the folksy and dialectal words, grammar and syntax (accused by the Katharevousa followers as «μαλλιαροί» < It. _scapigliati_), and Right wingers dying for Katharevousa (accused by the demoticists for elitism). One of the most serious proponents of the usage of Demotic language was Γιάννης Ψυχάρης (known in France as Jean Psychari, a French philologist of Greek origin who at his time (1920's) even the demoticists considered him too extreme), while one of the prominent Katharevousian proponents was the Professor of Linguistics at the Athens University, Γεώργιος Χατζιδάκις (Georgios Ηadzidakis, a moderate Katharevousa follower).
The "war" raged on for a long time and in the 1960's, while most of Western Europe enjoyed a liberalization, Greece experienced a resurgence of right-wing conservatism, which culminated in the 7-year military dictatorship of 1967-74. The military regime banned Demotic, claiming it was slang, the language of hippies and communists alike, while Katharevousa was the proper language "the Greeks with such a glorious past should use" (sic).
In 1976 the democratization process ended the diglossic question by formally adopting the Demotic as the official language of the Greek Republic. But the decades of conflict between the two registers, had irredeemably changed Demotic, which by then had acquired Katharevousa traits and had trimmed away all the folksy, rustic and dialectal words, forms and syntax.
Personally, I wouldn't change anything from the way Greek is spelled, I do have some reservations though about the 1982 abolition of the polytonic system, I'd have kept the spiritus asper; even if its pronunciation is long gone, it puzzles young pupils why does the word πέντε (five) in compounds becomes πενθ- (eg πεν*θ*ήμερος = _period of five days_); if we kept the spiritus asper on ἡμέρα (_day_) it would have been easier: πεν*τʰ*ημέρα > πενθήμερος


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## Perseas

Linnets said:


> Just my curiosity: is there any advocate of a spelling reform of Modern Greek?


As far as I know, there isn't, regarding at least a radical reform.


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## merquiades

Thanks @apmoy70 and @Perseas for telling me the whole story.  Who'd have thought language and politics could become intertwined?  There must be lots of spelling mistakes with i: sounds nowadays.


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## AndrasBP

Olaszinhok said:


> *Greek *is phonetic enough, particularly if we compare it to other languages such as English, French, *Russian*


The great thing about Greek is that word stress is always marked. Russians should introduce that, too.



Olaszinhok said:


> let alone Celtic languages


If you mean Gaelic (Irish and Scottish), yes, it can give you headaches (e.g. Scottish Gaelic "leabhraichean" = books).
Welsh, however, has a totally different spelling system which is quite "phonetic" and easy to learn.


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## Olaszinhok

AndrasBP said:


> Russians should introduce that, too.


Fortunately, in Russian textbooks for foreign students the word stress is almost always marked.   Apart from that, I still think Russian is not that phonetic, particularly compared to other Slavic languages such as Serbo-Croatian, for instance. Tones could be an exception here.


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## Hulalessar

Perseas said:


> There's also a practical issue. If we decided now in 2021 to adopt a phonemic spelling we would have to learn two systems instead of one: the "old" one to process all texts written until 2021 plus the new one. If a change had been made 150/200 years ago things would have been easier because we would not have the incredible amount of information that we have now.



That does of course apply to any language which is not written totally phonemically, though the problem would be more acute with some languages than others. Introducing a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme in Spanish or Italian and you would still have something that looked liked Spanish or Italian. Do it in English or French and the difference would be great. The old system would still have to be mastered to have access to the huge corpus of text in the old system. The time spent learning to read would be increased. Apart from that, a phonemic writing system can only ever represent one variety of a language - and perhaps one that no one actually speaks even if it can be uttered.

The fact remains though that, ignoring those with neurological disorders, most people faced with deep orthographies who are educated have a more than satisfactory mastery of spelling. Few write _no_, _dun _or _wot _instead of _know_, _done _or _what. _It is though the case that you only have to make the odd mistake to be thought of (and indeed for many to think of themselves as) bad spellers. If you get the spelling of _accommodation_ wrong it is not the end of the world.


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## cherine

Moderator note: The discussion about Italian spelling has been moved here. Please, everyone, remember to stay on topic and to open a new thread whenever you feel like discussing a different topic even if it's really to the one of this thread.

Thank you all 
Cherine


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## Linnets

Another possibility for Modern Greek would be to leave current spelling unaltered but introduce an official Romanization (phonetic) scheme, i.e. ISO 843:1997 Type 2. A bit like pīnyīn for Chinese.


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## Hulalessar

Olaszinhok said:


> Fortunately, in Russian textbooks for foreign students the word stress is almost always marked.   Apart from that, I still think Russian is not that phonetic.



In Russian, if you know (a) where the stress comes (b) the rules for vowel reduction and mutual consonant influences and (c) the relatively few exceptions, you can more or less pronounce any word you see. Correctly writing a word you hear is not so easy. What can be said though is that the system is nowhere near as complex as that for English.


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## Penyafort

While I have joked about it in some previous posts, I must say I'd always choose a more complicated but etymological spelling over a phonemic one, unless the language had very little variation. Otherwise you end up choosing an A variety of the language over the others.

This is why I am all for certain changes but not a radical reform in most languages, provided that their well-established spelling makes a certain sense.


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## Terio

The French spoken in Canada is pretty different from standard French, at least at a familiar level. So, when you begin school, you are taught normative French grammar and orthography.

Il a formal text, you have to respect both standard grammar and orthography. Spelling mistakes are very badly judged.

French spelling is pretty puzzling. There are many rules and many exceptions. There are rules based on prononication, ethymology, analogy (with words of the same family) and grammar.

Spelling reforms generally failed. There was one adopted in the nineties. It is not really respected. Some simplified spellings are now tolerated. To me, it just make things more difficult. I think the changes are so marginal that it is not worth the effort. (Now, we can write_ ile_ instead of _île_ and _portemonnaie_ instead of _porte-monnaie_ : big deal !).

In French any radical change is impossible. Any superficial change is useless. I think we could abolish ethymological letters (ph, th, ch, y) and many unpronounced double consonnants (_consone_ instead of _consonne, _for example). It will not happen in a predictable future. Anyway, computers make things much easier.


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## Red Arrow

If I could change *one* thing about French spelling, it would be that the "an" vowel should always be written "an" and never "en". Same with unstressed "an" and "en" in English: if it sounds like a schwa, just spell it with an a.

French and English spelling might look hard, but you just have to read it a lot and you will just get used to all irregularities. In Dutch, we have the term *woordbeeld* (word image): you learn to read by recognizing words, not by recognizing individual phonemes. So it doesn't matter that much if words have silent letters and so on, woordbeeld will help you to memorize it automatically.

However, woordbeeld doesn’t help you at all with long lists of words with -ant, -ent, -ancy, -ency etc. These endings sound the same and look almost the same.

Woordbeeld also doesn't help with grammar rules such as verb endings. Luckily grammar rules like that are mostly regular. Sometimes woordbeeld even makes grammar harder.

Dutch verb endings are very consistent and logical, but people make mistakes specificallt due to woordbeeld. You write "Het is gebeurd" (It has happened) with a D because it is a past participle that ends with a voiced consonant. You write "Het gebeurt" (I happens) with a T because 3rd person singular always gets a T. However, due to woordbeeld, many (most?) native Dutch speakers will be tempted to write "Het gebeurd" because the past participle gebeurd is much more common than present tense gebeurt. Of course, trained writers don't make mistakes like that, but the temptation is still there.


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## apmoy70

Linnets said:


> Another possibility for Modern Greek would be to leave current spelling unaltered but introduce an official Romanization (phonetic) scheme, i.e. ISO 843:1997 Type 2. A bit like pīnyīn for Chinese.


Yes, that would work, one shouldn't be forced to endure the solecisms of Gkekas for Γκέκας or Antetokounmpo for Αντετοκούνμπο


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## AquisM

Spelling is very important in Chinese, especially due to the fact that our script does not reflect pronunciation, so it might not always be clear what is originally meant. While minor mistakes (e.g., an extra stroke in the character or accidentally using another character that has the same pronunciation) may be decipherable, it's not guaranteed. Tolerance towards spelling mistakes depends on the formality of the situation; mistakes in a CV are likely to make you seem uneducated or careless, for example.

However, I do occasionally see serious spelling mistakes even in the news or on official documents, and it pains me. Also, due to there being two standards (simplified and traditional characters), it's quite common to see spelling mistakes on the Internet due to users of one standard being unfamiliar with the other and imperfect machine conversion between the two, which I personally find annoying.


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## Paulfromitaly

london calling said:


> I associate people who can't spell with uneducated people (or people with dyslexia), say what you will.


Me too. 
It's very unlikely to see well educated people who can't spell, at least in their own native language.


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## Hulalessar

Paulfromitaly said:


> Me too.
> It's very unlikely to see well educated people who can't spell, at least in their own native language.



Well-educated people will have read and written more than the less well educated and therefore have more of a chance of getting things right. Literacy is an overrated skill. Excessive education can lead to a stultified mind, a withered imagination and thinking set in tramlines.

Some years ago someone (I think he probably did not approve of IQ tests) devised a different set of tests for schoolchildren. One of the questions was: What can you use to put a house plant in? The children in expensive private schools tended to give answers like "a flower pot holder", while the children in schools on sink estates came up with all sorts of objects about the house which could be used.


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## Paulfromitaly

Hulalessar said:


> Well-educated people will have read and written more than the less well educated and therefore have more of a chance of getting things right.


Definitely.
As far as Italian is concerned, people who have good pronunciation can also spell well, because Italian orthography is considered transparent/shallow ( A shallow or transparent orthography is one that is *highly regular in its sound*-symbol correspondences). Again, well educated people speak well.


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## anahiseri

you can't give one answer to the question, it depends very much on the language. A lot of languages are spelled phonetically or almost so. Then spelling is easy and it even if it is considered important, it is treated differently. Phonetical spelling: Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Malay/Indonesian . . .   I don't mean that there is a one-to-one correspondence between pronunciatio and writing, but there are rules that solve 90% or more.


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## Terio

It is often said that French spelling, with all its subtle complications, was aimed to promote social segregation between an elite and the lower classes. It was another obstacle to social promotion. Obviously, the French revolution did not change that. The bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy as a dominant class, but did nothing to make spelling more accessible. All major reform projects failed.


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## anahiseri

I don't think that French spelling is worse (I mean more irregular or difficult) than English (though grammar definitely is). But then, in France good spelling is  held in high esteem. There are spelling competitions people watch on TV as enthusiastically (this word I had to look up) as Britons watch football.
In Spain, people who make spelling mistakes have had little schooling or don't read much. There are some spelling rules for Spanish, but you don't  need to study them because it's easy to remember the word image, as Red Arrow says. And the rules are few because Spanish is spelt almost phonetically.
German spelling underwent a reform a few years ago. I don't think it was really necessary, but well, it didn't hurt either.
As another poster said, if a language is very un-phonetic, like English, on the one hand you might wish it was simplified, but  then on the other  hand, as he/she argued, this would pose a lot of problems because it would change so radically.


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## Circunflejo

anahiseri said:


> In Spain, people who make spelling mistakes have had little schooling or don't read much.


Sadly, nowadays, that's not true anymore. There's people with universitary titles that writes awfully.


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## Hulalessar

anahiseri said:


> you can't give one answer to the question, it depends very much on the language. A lot of languages are spelled phonetically or almost so. Then spelling is easy and it even if it is considered important, it is treated differently. Phonetical spelling: Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Malay/Indonesian . . .   I don't mean that there is a one-to-one correspondence between pronunciation and writing, but there are rules that solve 90% or more.



I cannot comment on Dutch, but I would not include German with Spanish, Italian and Malay/Indonesian. It has considerably more polyvalence, though by no means as much as French. Like French, it is not a system where rules can easily be set out, but once you get into it you find that pronunciation from spelling is more predictable that spelling from pronunciation. German has evolved so that two tendencies have helped to prevent it from being more phonemic. One is that the spelling of morphemes is kept constant despite changes in pronunciation. The other is ensuring that homonyms are distinguished. Whether those are aspects which spelling should take account of is a matter of opinion


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## Olaszinhok

anahiseri said:


> Phonetical spelling: Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Malay/Indonesian


There are languages which are more "phonetic" than those above: Hungarian and even more Georgian, for instance.


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## Hulalessar

Terio said:


> It is often said that French spelling, with all its subtle complications, was aimed to promote social segregation between an elite and the lower classes. It was another obstacle to social promotion. Obviously, the French revolution did not change that. The bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy as a dominant class, but did nothing to make spelling more accessible. All major reform projects failed.



I have a bit of a problem characterising the complications of French spelling as "subtle".

Rather than a case of preserving spelling to exclude people, I think it is simply that people do not like having their orthographies messed about with. The literate start to learn to read early in life. When an orthography is complicated it is mastered slowly and children do not necessarily appreciate that it is complicated. Children consider orthography part of their language. When they grow up most of them do not appreciate that speech and writing, though connected, are two distinct things. Accordingly there is a feeling that if someone wants to change the orthography they are changing the language itself.

French orthography, like English, on the whole reflects the pronunciation of an earlier stage of the language. Other languages like Spanish and Italian have not undergone such radical changes in pronunciation since they started to be written and have a history of tweaking the orthography now and then to reflect changes.


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## dojibear

Hulalessar said:


> When they grow up most of them do not appreciate that speech and writing, though connected, are two distinct things.


I am aware that written English and spoken English are different. One linguist suggests that they are distinct languages (though closely connected), and that "chatspeak" (the language of real-time text messages) is a new language mixing them.

But I agree that many people think that written and spoken English are the same. It is a common source of mistakes in writing.


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## anahiseri

Hulalessar said:


> I cannot comment on Dutch, but I would not include German with Spanish, Italian and Malay/Indonesian. It has considerably more polyvalence, though by no means as much as French. Like French, it is not a system where rules can easily be set out, but once you get into it you find that pronunciation from spelling is more predictable that spelling from pronunciation. German has evolved so that two tendencies have helped to prevent it from being more phonemic. One is that the spelling of morphemes is kept constant despite changes in pronunciation. The other is ensuring that homonyms are distinguished. Whether those are aspects which spelling should take account of is a matter of opinion


German spelling is not 100% phonetic, but much more so than English. When you see a written word in German, you know exactly how to pronounce it. It's not like that the other way round, I mean, from hearing to spelling, but 
 you can't get as far off the mark as in English.
I have taught German to several (adult, Spanish) people, they all agree that the difficulties lie in learning vocabulary, but not in spelling or pronunciation. On the other hand, in the case of the English language,  Spanish speakers  have problems with listening and pronouncing mostly. It may seem surprising to people who are not familiar with the situation in Spain, but it's a fact: Spanish students make few spelling mistakes when they write in English.  (But then their pronunciation verges on the unintelligible, due to the fact that the language is taught in a very spelling- centred way in the first school years.


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## dojibear

I wonder if English has a pronunciation issue, and that (not class issues or reluctance to change) causes the spelling problem.

Written English is largely the same (with a few differences) in the US, in the UK, Australia, India, Singapore, etc. But spoken English is a different story. Anyone writing phonetically would spell a huge number of words differently, depending on whether they were listening to a native speaker from Texas, Georgia or Maine or a UK speaker from various regions.

In theory, English is spelled phonetically based on "the way it was spoken centuries ago", back when it was only spoken in England. But even that claim is not accurate. For a long time phonetic spelling was acceptable, even ordinary in English, but the spelling of words varied widely in different places and from different people. People didn't even agree on what letters to use (English used to have more than 26).


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## Olaszinhok

anahiseri said:


> When you see a written word in German, you know exactly how to pronounce



Sorry, but that's not completely true. In German and in  Italian, unlike Spanish, there is no accent mark, so it is harder to stress a word correctly when you read it. Besides, you don't know whether the vowels _e_ and _o_ are pronounced closed or open, for instance.

P.S. In Italian, the accent mark is mandatory only when the last syllable of a word is stressed, like in  _città_, _virtù_, etc.


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## Hulalessar

dojibear said:


> In theory, English is spelled phonetically based on "the way it was spoken centuries ago", back when it was only spoken in England. But even that claim is not accurate. For a long time phonetic spelling was acceptable, even ordinary in English, but the spelling of words varied widely in different places and from different people. People didn't even agree on what letters to use (English used to have more than 26).



We can add to the above:

French scribes introducing French spellings.

Adoption of Latin, Greek and French words with their spellings.

Avoidance in old scripts of too many successive short vertical strokes by changing "u" to "o" as in "honey" "love" and "women".

Words coming from French being "corrected" to reflect their Latin origin. An example is the <b> in <debt>.


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## Red Arrow

The most daunting European orthography to me remains Danish. Danish has 9 vowel letters and 26 vowel phonemes, and it doesn't use digraphs like English, Dutch or French. It does use silent E for long vowels, but not always. 8 vowel letters have 2 or 3 possible short pronunciations. What a nightmare. In comparison, American English has 6 vowel letters, many common digraphs, and only 16 vowel phonemes. French is even easier in this regard: the pronunciation of every vowel letter and every digraph is *completely* deductible. You will never wonder: "How do I pronounce this vowel?" like you do in English. Unless maybe in some loanwords? But many languages have that problem.

Compare that with English: ea sounds different in the words ocean, heart, ear, wear, meat, bread, steak. And then there is oo, ought, ow etc. French spelling lacks this madness.

So I would rank them like this: Danish > English > French > the other European languages


Hulalessar said:


> I have a bit of a problem characterising the complications of French spelling as "subtle".


The complications of French spelling:
-You have to add silent s for plurals, but it follows the same rules as silent e which is often pronounced, so it is not really an extra problem for learners
-Verb endings: the tu conjugation always gets an extra s and the ils/elles conjugations always get an extra nt. The je conjugation always gets an extra s except for -er verbs. The endings -er, -ez and -ai all sound like é.
-Many double consonants are useless
-C/Ç or S/SS? G or J? English has the same complications.
-tion or -ssion? English has the same complications.
-An or en? English has the same madness (part 1, part 2)
-In or ein or ain?
-È or ai or e? Ê or aî?
-Ô or (e)au?
-Eu or œu?
-Liaison: -t or -d? -s, -z or -x?

This is pretty much it. There might be extra complications depending on your accent, but those can't be helped.

You cannot make a similar post for English. Wikipedia has tried though.


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## Terio

Red Arrow said:


> French is even easier in this regard: the pronunciation of every vowel letter and every digraph is *completely* deductible. You will never wonder: "How do I pronounce this vowel?" like you do in English. Unless maybe in some loanwords?


Completely deductible is a bit exagerated. For example, the digraph <en> reprensents / ɛ̃ / in _examen_, but / ɑ̃ / in _gens _while in _agenda_ it may be prononced both ways. At the end of word, the digraph <ai> represents / ɛ / in _vrai _bue / e / in _quai_ (though the distinction tends to diseppear in many regions).



Red Arrow said:


> The complications of French spelling:
> -You have to add silent s for plurals, but it follows the same rules as silent e which is often pronounced, so it is not really an extra problem for learners
> -Verb endings: the tu conjugation always gets an extra s and the ils/elles conjugations always get an extra nt. The je conjugation always gets an extra s except for -er verbs. The endings -er, -ez and -ai all sound like é.


These are examples of grammatical spelling. I agree that they are generally coherent.




Red Arrow said:


> -Many double consonants are useless
> -C/Ç or S/SS? G or J? English has the same complications.
> -tion or -ssion? English has the same complications.
> -An or en? English has the same madness (part 1, part 2)
> -In or ein or ain?
> -È or ai or e? Ê or aî?
> -Ô or (e)au?
> -Eu or œu?
> -Liaison: -t or -d? -s, -z or -x?


These are examples of basic spelling. The "subtlety" of it that it it based on a mix of phonetics, etymology, history and analogy. Nothing easy !  Sometimes, it seems totally arbitrary : 

-  jeter : il j*ett*e
- acheter : il ach*èt*e.
- peler : il p*èl*e
- appeler : il app*ell*e.


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## Hulalessar

No meaning of the word "subtle" with which I am familiar can be applied to French spelling!

The pronunciation of French cannot be taught in one lesson. The rules have to be absorbed gradually. Someone who has spent more than a short time learning French should be able to pronounce correctly almost every word he has never seen before. Common exceptions like "monsieur" and "femme" and verbal endings such as in "aiment" are learned early on. Other oddities tend to be short words like "dot".

The complication is the extreme polyvalence. According to one source there are more 50 ways to write each of the vowels /o/,   /ɛ/ and /ɛ̃/. That is an embarras de richesse if ever there was one.


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## Red Arrow

Hulalessar said:


> The pronunciation of French cannot be taught in one lesson. The rules have to be absorbed gradually.


This is very true. I still remember how bad I was at reading French as a child. But we never learned the spelling rules, we were supposed to figure it out on our own. I would have preferred to have had some basic guidelines... After a year I still struggled with le/les and de/des until my teacher disappointed told me the difference in pronunciation after a bad reading test.

But you will get it eventually and that's what counts. Even of French orthography was literally twice as complicated, I would probably still be saying the same thing. What counts is the results. Ultimately, English speakers are somewhat functionally illiterate: they don't know how to pronounce new words. Neither do Chinese people. But Francophones do.

Dutch spelling is much simpler than French spelling, but you still have to show children how all words are spelled. Of course, they will have an easier time than Francophone children, but it probably takes more or less the same amount of time, no? I still learned in school how to write vegetariër, kapitalisme, pedagoog and pseudomonas even though there is nothing special about their spelling and I would have intuitively guessed the spelling correctly.


Hulalessar said:


> According to one source there are more 50 ways to write each of the vowels /o/,   /ɛ/ and /ɛ̃/. That is an embarras de richesse if ever there was one.


Sources like that take into account the liaison letters. So they count aud, aut, aux etc. as separate ways to write /o/, even though the final consonant marks something else, it has nothing to do with the vowel. It is dishonest to say there are 50 ways to write these vowels.

"en" sounds like "ein" in newer loanwords from Latin, Greek or sometimes English (Pentagon). It also sounds like "ein" after é, i and y (been, européen, citoyen...). But you are right, I should have added it.


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## Terio

Red Arrow said:


> Sources like that take into account the liaison letters. So they count aud, aut, aux etc. as separate ways to write /o/, even though the final consonant marks something else, it has nothing to do with the vowel. It is dishonest to say there are 50 ways to write these vowels.


Your right. At school, we learned there were 4 ways to write the sond /o/ : o, ô, au, eau. It gets easier when you become aware of "word families": ch*au*d / ch*al*eur ; b*e*au / b*e*lle ; h*ô*te / h*os*pice. (French u often comes from old diphtongs that come from velarized l ; the circunflex accent generally indicates an old letter now mute.)


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## london calling

When I was at university the most difficult dictation we had to do in French was phonetic dictation. Our lecturer was from Brittany and we had to write what he read phonetically. It was an absolute killer. It meant we had to learn the French phonetic alphabet and transcribe his Breton pronunciation. Nothing to do with spelling, of course.


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## Red Arrow

Terio said:


> Your right. At school, we learned there were 4 ways to write the sond /o/ : o, ô, au, eau. It gets easier when you become aware of "word families": ch*au*d / ch*al*eur ; b*e*au / b*e*lle ; h*ô*te / h*os*pice. (French u often comes from old diphtongs that come from velarized l ; the circunflex accent generally indicates an old letter now mute.)


 Yes. I personally think of the E in beau as silent. It's as if final au *needs* a silent letter: if not a liaison letter, then give it a silent E!


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## Terio

The spelling au used to represent a diphtong : [aw] : saltum (saut)  ['saɫt]  [sa͜w]  [so] 
The spelling eau used to represent a triphtong : [eaw] : bellos (beaux)  ['bεɫs]  ['bea͜w]  ['bo] 

Later, all that was reduced to [o], but the spelling did not change.


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## Red Arrow

Yes, I am aware, but the diphtongue and triphtongue appear in different places: au in the middle of a word or before a liason consonant, eau at the end of a word or before plural x.


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