MM is the Malcolm Gladwell of history.
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Malcolm Gladwell can write in complete sentences at least
…and probably has better lawyers.
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French seems way more logical to me than English.
Do they have French spelling bees? I’ve never heard of such a thing? I think they have some sort of grammar competition that is similar.
I’d be very surprised if Spanish or German had them. Apparently in both the spelling is so obvious that a contest would be silly. In fact, in American spelling bees, kids supposedly crush words of German origin because they all follow very straightforward rules.
I know it’s cool to hate on Gladwell and he’s not nearly as good as most think, but comparing him to MM is like comparing a very good high school basketball player to some scrub at the Special Olympics. Neither is anywhere near Michael Jordan, but the difference between them is massive.
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The French origin words are like that too. If you’ve never studied French, you hear a word like “portefeuille” and think “omg, that’s insane!” But then after I lived in France and learned French to a reasonable level I realized that the French words in the spelling bees are all pretty basic.
Gonna get back to it. I’m 100 pages in and going strong but this is getting a little tedious. A lot of this is just regurgitated wikipedia articles followed by like 2 sentences of analysis.
There are no spelling bees in German, but German is not completely phonemic.
The most striking morphophonemic feature of German is final instrument devoicing. The final consonant in a word is always voiceless. So Rat (council) and Rad (wheel) are pronounced the same way („raht“ would be a close approximation for most English speakers), but the plural forms differ (Räte and Räder). So Rad is spelled with a „d“, because that is the sound of the plural.
Most Germans do not even notice the difference between voices and voiceless consonants in word-final position. That is the reason you might hear a Gernan say „I‘m going to bet“ even though he isn’t in a casino, but close to his bed.
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That would be a joke word at the Scripps national spelling bee. I remember while I was watching it one year, one of the commentators (who won it once I think) said that the French words were the toughest of all the big Euro languages.
Here’s and example of one I remember vividly: The kid was given the word doyen. He gave exactly what I thought was the correct answer and spelled it doyenne with little hesitation. Basically fist pumped afterwords only to hear he got it wrong.
Of course, if the bee itself were in French, he gets it 100% of the time from hearing a sentence with it (which will reveal gender).
Lol I forgot all about their SNG strategy book that doesn’t even mention ICM, which is basically 95% of SNG strategy.
https://www.amazon.com/Sit-Go-Strategy-Collin-Moshman/dp/1880685396
At the time I thought maybe it was deliberate, to not ruin the games or something. Now I realize they’re just morons.
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Nah, the winning word was “feuilleton” like 5 years ago. Which is even slightly easier than the word I posted. Granted, some are a bit tougher, but a lot are just basic French words even in the final rounds.
Edit: wtf, the winning word was “marocain” in 2017?? That’s just Moroccan in French.
He wouldn’t need the sentence if it were in French since the pronunciations of doyen and doyenne are different. Just hearing the word as it’s actually pronounced would make it obvious.
Just because it was the winning word, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a joke word. There is a lot of variance in the words they get. The main thing that separates the top kids is luck of the draw on the word they get. Once the get to the TV rounds they don’t exactly go up in difficulty in each round. That’s just not how it works. I’ve seen some ridiculous easy ones when get to sudden death. It’s just the variance of the competition.
True. I guess I should have said if he got a French sentence instead of an English one.
But doyen is a great example of the variance. Superficially it seems easier than the ones you posted, but its actually much harder. 50-50 shot if you don’t know it. It was nowhere near the final word.
Yah, its an interesting example. Would be interesting to see it on Youtube. I feel like the way an English speaker would pronounce them might give it away.
Like doyen I could see the emphasize put more on the first syllable DOY-en
And doyenne I would think more on the second syllable with an exaggerated finish doy-ENNN
EDIT: On researching it a bit more the definition they used in the bee for doyen was “the senior male member of a group”, so it can’t be doyenne.
The pronouncer is a pro. He’s been doing it for decades and won it himself. He just gives the precise dictionary pronunciation and all the acceptable alternates. He doesn’t give away shit.
It’s a hard one to watch if you already know the answer. The other tricky part, IIRC, is that the subject of the example sentence was a woman, which makes your French-thinking brain go one way.
EDIT: just saw your post about senior male member. I guess I misremembered that part. What year was it? I know they have used it more than once. I guess they could have used a different definition. I don’t think the standard dictionary definition requires male gender.
You got a link? I want to see if it is the same one I’m thinking of. It has been used more than once.
Bill Simmons did a live blog of the Bee that year, but I couldn’t find footage. Go to 1:19: