"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable."
I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").
If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.
My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.
Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.
> If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English
I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.
The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.
Seems like something that would be well received if one and exactly one guy was doing it, and annoying as hell when 35 additional jabronis started to run the same type of script, like what you see with the oh-so-helpful AI PRs on github that make random ass changes nobody asked for.
Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.
Nice idea…but this will just end up in the same bucket as “I really like your website {domain} and especially your post {link to blog post} about {topic} would you like to include a link to {our service}” SEO link building spam.
Is it otherwise that easy to confuse your writing with an LLM's? What if they deliberately start including spelling mistakes into slop pipelines, as the post points out?
> Before sending the first mails, I stopped for a moment to reassess whether this was a good idea. What ultimately helped me decide was whether I would like to get the mail as an author.
The only reason this is a reasonable thing for this person to do is this:
> since I ultimately manually check every error
Imagine these emails going out automatically, and incorrectly.
>>The recipients of the mail campaign aren't passive in this story; on the contrary, some played a reverse card, informing of issues...
Yeah, this gets me. Grammar is grating to me and I used to call out when someone would write "Me and my friend..." only to get attacked in response as if grammar matters to no one.
It doesn’t though. If you think about it, improper English and slang strongly effects cultural and social bonding. I too would feel the opposite party is pretentious if someone is correcting me for a casual conversation. If it’s a professional relationship, that’s different.
Is it kind to email people telling them they wrote 'its' and not 'it's'? Thus used to be called being a grammar Nazi and is just a different kind of asshole
It's one thing when you're correcting someone you're in conversation with and a different thing entirely when you're correcting long-form material with at least some pretense for polish.
aaaaaaahh!, yep Ive, earned it, put my feet up for a minuit, having brought the average spelling score down single fingerdly, a job well poked, ifin I say so myself.
zjp|9 days ago
I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").
If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.
My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.
Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.
theasisa|9 days ago
I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.
The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.
IsTom|9 days ago
scoot|9 days ago
"every day"
Perhaps the author should check grammar while he checks spelling :D (Not the only issue I noticed, and I didn't read the entire article...)
xnx|9 days ago
It's impressive. English language: ~500,000 words. German language: ~135,000 words.
kalterdev|9 days ago
webdevver|9 days ago
marginalia_nu|9 days ago
Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.
nottorp|9 days ago
dewey|9 days ago
londons_explore|9 days ago
Antibabelic|9 days ago
pavel_lishin|9 days ago
The only reason this is a reasonable thing for this person to do is this:
> since I ultimately manually check every error
Imagine these emails going out automatically, and incorrectly.
QuadmasterXLII|9 days ago
assimpleaspossi|9 days ago
Yeah, this gets me. Grammar is grating to me and I used to call out when someone would write "Me and my friend..." only to get attacked in response as if grammar matters to no one.
syntaxing|9 days ago
isicjsjcu|9 days ago
[deleted]
xyzsparetimexyz|9 days ago
Antibabelic|9 days ago
efilife|9 days ago
metalman|8 days ago