I ask because many other languages have more or less regular, phonetic spellings; that is, if you can pronounce the word correctly, you can spell it. Examples are Spanish and Italian. In those languages, spelling would seem to pose little challenge once a person learns the basic syllabary (is that the right word?)
A related question is whether there are spelling bees or the like in pictographic languages like Chinese. I can certainly envision contests to see who can remember the most obscure and complex pictographs, which is not much different from remembering obscure, irregularly spelled words in English.
Is a spelling bee a kind of spelling contest? If so, there’s a well-known one in France, broadasted yearly on TV, called “La dictée de Pivot” , Pivot being the famous presenter of a litterary show. There’s another one by the same guy, for high-school students, IIRC.
There’s by the way a famous dictation created by the writer Merimée for a contest at Napoleon III’s court, ten lines long or so. The winner was suprinsingly the Austrian ambassador to the court, with 3 spelling mistakes, while the emperor made 45 mistakes and the writer Alexandre Dumas 19.
French doesn’t have a regular, phonetic splling at all, by the way (contrarily, indeed to spanish. I couldn’t tell for Italian). On the overall, I’ve the feeling that languages with an erratic spelling are the norm rather than the exception.
A spelling bee is exactly a spelling contest. A tester will say a word out loud, and a competitor (typically a grade-school child, in the US) will then attempt to spell the word. Why we call this a spelling bee, I haven’t any idea (we also have quilting bees, parties where folks get together to sew quilts, but I don’t know the origin of that, either).
A syllabary is one type of writing system in which each character represents one syllable in the language instead of one sound. An alphabet is the writing system in which each character represents one sound. The expression you’re looking for is “sound correspondence.”
My Vietnamese language instructors drilled us students in the way they said spelling contests were held in Vietnam.
OK. If it’s a form of “entertainment” (dont kids spen enough time at school on spelling exercises?) commonly “played”, then no, it doesn’t exist in France.
By the way, it’s a hijack, but I love this game, so I think I would mention it : the “dictionnary game”. One person picks a word in a dictionnary (generally a very obscure word, though it’s not necessary but funnier) , and everybody write down a definition (generally trying to write something looking like a real definition but it’s not necessary, either) for this word. The “tester” writes down the dictionnary definition, and then collect and read aloud all definitions given. Then everybody else states to whom belongs each definition. I don’t remember the scoring exactly, but it’s something like :
-1 point if you correctly guessed the author of a definition (by his style, or something)
-2 points if you correctly guessed the definition of the dictionnary
-4 points if someone else mistakenly thought that your definition came from the dictionnary
Best played with 6+ adults who are quite litterate and enjoy writing. A significant part of the fun is making up a definition for a word you never heard of, and hearing the various definitions ranging from plain weird to dead serious made by the others before trying to guess whether xxxxx stands for a corsican arachnid, a carpenter tool or a cream-based medieval dish.
I was an assistante d’anglais at a French high school for a year. (Room and board with a small stipend to help the English teachers at the school.) I did do spelling bees with the younger classes I helped with. Neither the students nor the teachers had ever heard of them, and the students thought they were a lot of fun.
The French do use dictées to practice spelling, but this is generally an entire paragraph at a time, rather than a single word. When I took a French phonology course, the teacher used* dictées* frequently as a way to test what we could hear, more than our spelling, but in French courses, they are used as a way to test spelling and grammar. The dictée de Pivot is a much higher-brow spelling test.
French spelling is more regular than English, but only in that it is quite easy to see how a written word should be pronounced, if you know the rules. However, it can be very difficult to know how to spell a word you’ve only heard, because there are so many silent letters, and because there are many different ways to write a single sound. Many of the silent letters are things like verb agreement or adjective agreement, so the dictée also requires that you understand grammar, and that you have a good knowledge of vocabulary to be able to recognize homophones.
It’s you language but I’ve always had the idea that although French has some rather cumbersome vowel combinations, once you learn how those combinations are pronounced the spelling is pretty regular. I.e. a particular sound is pretty much always spelled the same way.
Yes, it’s massively used during all primary school. I actually assumed that it was more or less an universal thing, and not specifically a french thing (now I’m wondering how kids learn to spell in other countries). And it’s definitely not fun.
We did dictées in French class when I was at school. We also did English dictations as well, but only in primary school. I’d be surprised if schools still do English dictations now.
Cunctator: Well, I’m 16 and I’ve been to Australian and Canadian schools, and neither system did dictations. We also seemed to stop doing spelling tests after 4th grade, which is a pity since a lot of our graduating students (often “top performers”) now spell like they fell off the dyslexic train. And as a Chinese person, I can say that no, the Chinese do not have spelling bees as such, though there are academic contests for young kids that work like a large-scale spelling test. By the time kids get to high school, though, they’re expected to know all the characters that matter so there are no more spelling contests.
Dictation tests are a significant component in grades in Germany, in German as well as in all foreign languages (and English mostly begins in 1st form nowadays, so there’s a lot of dictation tests in the middle grades - in the higher grades there are less dictation tests and more essay-type tests). You do badly in dictation, you’ll have do very well elsewhere to get school results that qualify you for anything but unskilled labour (bad spelling in essays in history, biology, etc. etc. class will be bad for your grades in these subjects too).
As spelling-related tests looms large as a stressful part in a German schoolkid’s career, it’s perhaps not surprising that additional spelling competitions would definitely not be considered a fun activity…
Maybe it’s because you were in French immersion, and they wanted to make sure you were learning the language? We never had any in Vancouver. Then again, there isn’t much of anything in Vancouver.
I was read a book awhile ago, entitled Magicnet . The main character was named Schuyler “Sky” King. While it would have been amusing for him to be named after his uncle, or after the great hero, ala, it did not take place in the world of the old TV show , but instead in “the real world”. Thus, he was just like people named Stephen King, or Michael Jackson. These people have the same name as famous people, but that doesn’t make them any less entitled to their names. However, while it may happen in real life, what is the status of this in fiction? What is the legality of the book? Also, what if someone were to take a distinctive last name of a celebrity from their memories, and combine it with a different first name. It would be a different name than the original, but might still inadvertently bring up images of the original. I am assuming that while it would bring up images of the original, it would not make use of that fact in the story, or reference it in anyway, btw.
D’oh. :smack: I was trying to start a new thread, but posted in the wrong place. Sorry. I am a :wally . No need for the mods to move this post, since I started the correct thread in GQ, but if they feel like deleting the above post, feel free to erase it. Also, I am about to “report this post” as well.
Examples are Spanish and Italian. In those languages, spelling would seem to pose little challenge once a person learns the basic syllabary
I don’t know if that’s true. I used to think it was until…
I was making a small effort to learn Spanish and soon after had a walkway installed by a guy who hires Latinos - in this case Ecuadorians (if they count as Latinos).
Anyway, I was kidding around with them and spelled out a Spanish word. Then I moved to another word, spelled the first half and beckined them to finish it. They couldn’t.
It occurred to me that these kids may have had no schooling whatever.