Is there a word for fake words?

[An Enemy Spy]

We've all heard people say things like irregardless or misunderestimate. But is there a word to describe these nonexistant words? I was thinking about this today and I made up a word that could fill this blind spot in the english language. Malanym.

[golentan]

Depending on context it might be a Mondegreen (a word misheard for something similar sounding and repeated incorrectly), or it might be a neologism (a new word without real recognition yet).

Granted, some of them are painful to hear, but unless a word has serious issues with redundancy or parsing... Just let it slide.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/period_speech.png

[A.A.King]

I'm not sure if there is, all I know is that fake words are part of your fauxcabulary.

[Razade]

We've all heard people say things like irregardless or misunderestimate. But is there a word to describe these nonexistant words? I was thinking about this today and I made up a word that could fill this blind spot in the english language. Malanym.

Irregardless doesn't count. It's a real word. It's in the dictionary and has existed since the 1700s.

[Eldariel]

In linguistics and psychology we simply use the term "nonword" or "non-word". Though that term tends to require a number of defining clauses; are these nonwords well-formed? Are they logical? Thus, it's not that convenient a term but it's what we use at the present. There's no word in use based on scientific Latin or French though coining one would be simple enough.

Do note that one has to be careful with regards to requiring linguistic purity; new terms and new meanings are constantly created and gradually accepted into mainstream language and this is the very heart of language evolution. There is little enough ground to argue in favour of specifically the present iteration of high standard British English as opposed to one from yesteryear or the future.

[Aedilred]

Irregardless doesn't count. It's a real word. It's in the dictionary and has existed since the 1700s.

It's noted in most dictionaries as nonstandard; some even note it as an error. Just beause an error has existed for a long time doesn't make it less of an error.

[A.A.King]

Just beause an error has existed for a long time doesn't make it less of an error.

That is debatable, just ask the Americans who spell colour without the u whether or not they think they are making an error. Afterall, when we say that language evolves aren't we just reffering to errors that become so common place that we start to accept them. I realise that here there are still many people who can give a passionate rant about people missusing the word "literary" but the dictionairy has moved on. Similarly if irregardless was in the dictionairy in 1700 (and not mentioned as a common error) then I would find it difficult to not call it a proper word.

[Bohandas]

The situation described by the OP seems to be a relative of the malapropism, but I'm not sure what the precise term would be

[Scarlet Knight]

Sniglets: any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.

[Aedilred]

That is debatable, just ask the Americans who spell colour without the u whether or not they think they are making an error. Afterall, when we say that language evolves aren't we just reffering to errors that become so common place that we start to accept them. I realise that here there are still many people who can give a passionate rant about people missusing the word "literary" but the dictionairy has moved on. Similarly if irregardless was in the dictionairy in 1700 (and not mentioned as a common error) then I would find it difficult to not call it a proper word.

Blame Webster for "color" and its ilk. It was a deliberate effort to rationalise and simplify American English and to distinguish it from British English. There was, if I remember rightly, even an attempt to mould the American accent around the same time. As part of what he saw as his patriotic duty, Webster deliberately chose versions of spellings which were nonstandard-British, including purging "u"s from his textbooks, which were used as the basis for primary language education throughout the US - and then in his dictionary, which was adopted as the standard American one in the way that Johnson's had been in Britain.

Ultimately one has to remember that Standard English in the US and UK are different dialects: very similar and almost entirely mutually intelligible, but that there are differences and one isn't more "correct" than the other, even if both of them have elements of artificiality in their past.

I'm still angry about "literally" and I'm not going to let that pass without a fight :smalltongue: I have a feeling that the apparent acceptance of that was a bit of a stunt by the OED anyway.

[BannedInSchool]

I'm still angry about "literally" and I'm not going to let that pass without a fight :smalltongue: I have a feeling that the apparent acceptance of that was a bit of a stunt by the OED anyway.

"Massive" also got corrupted by being used for generic emphasis. Now a vacuum can be "literally massive".

[Aedilred]

"Massive" also got corrupted by being used for generic emphasis. Now a vacuum can be "literally massive".

"There's that word again - 'heavy'. Why is everything so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?"

[Bohandas]

Blame Webster for "color" and its ilk. It was a deliberate effort to rationalise and simplify American English and to distinguish it from British English. There was, if I remember rightly, even an attempt to mould the American accent around the same time. As part of what he saw as his patriotic duty, Webster deliberately chose versions of spellings which were nonstandard-British, including purging "u"s from his textbooks, which were used as the basis for primary language education throughout the US - and then in his dictionary, which was adopted as the standard American one in the way that Johnson's had been in Britain.

Ultimately one has to remember that Standard English in the US and UK are different dialects: very similar and almost entirely mutually intelligible, but that there are differences and one isn't more "correct" than the other, even if both of them have elements of artificiality in their past.

I'm still angry about "literally" and I'm not going to let that pass without a fight :smalltongue: I have a feeling that the apparent acceptance of that was a bit of a stunt by the OED anyway.
The purging of the superfluous "u"s was a brilliant idea

[Aedilred]

The purging of the superfluous "u"s was a brilliant idea

I disagree, both with the premise that they're superfluous and the assertion that getting rid of them was a good idea, but I don't want to get into a debate about whether Commonwealth or American spellings are better, because such debates are inevitably pointless and pretty stupid.

[Vinyadan]

I think English should use a spelling closer to pronunciation:P
How much > haw mac?
Do you need help? > Du yu niid help?
I'm so tired! > Ay'm so taỳd!
I hate this idea > Ay heyt dhis aydì.
Don't you have anything better to do than trying to ruin English spelling? > Down'c iu hev enithin bett´r cu du dhen crayin cu ruuin Inglish spellin?
This is actually funnier than it seems. > Dhis is ecùli fannìr dhen it siims.
One last sentence. > Wan last sent´ns.

The largest problems I see:
the vowels in much and last are actually different, although quite close (ʌ vs ɑ).
there are different sounds to be shown as e (æ and e, for example).
Accents for ə aren't really handy.
The difference between n and ng isn't shown.


Anyway, concerning fake words, there are many different kinds of words which may be called fake by one or another.
Neologisms aren't actually fake words, they are newly formed words. Motherboard is a neologism (the word is pretty young: first written in 1965). One could say that it isn't a neologism right now, but it sure was when it was invented. There are many reasons for neologisms to be born: they can depend on new things or concepts becoming available, or from an old word changing its meaning and needing a substitute. They could also simply sound cooler.
There are words in texts that don't mean anything. Some of them are jokes that attempt to reproduce a sound. You could say they are onomatopoeic. Iartamanexarxanapissonasatra is a famous example of pseudo Persian gibberish in Aristophanes (which was supposed to mean "Don't take the money, you broken *** Ionian!). Brekekekex koax koax is instead how he rendered frogs croaking.
Mondegreens are built from different words. The typical example is "lady Mondegreen" which actually was "laid him on the green". It happens constantly to me, when listening to music. I wouldn't say the words you named were Mondegreens.

Words like those you named I call non-standard. You can then divide non-standard words by categories (which may or may not exclude each other) like vulgarism, euphemism, dysphemism (opposite of euphemism), technicism, malapropism (word that is used instead of another which sounds similar), regionalism, jargon, archaism, colloquialism, informalism, hypercorrection... All things you often don't want to say to your English teacher, but have their own place to exist.

The two examples you make, I would call contaminations. "Irregarding" contaminates "regardless" and generates "irregardless", "misestimate" contaminates "underestimates" and gives "misunderestimate". There's also a category of double negatives and redundancies that English doesn't really seem to tolerate but seem to pop up anyway (ain't nobody got time for that, or that time V corrected Bandana).

[Bohandas]

I disagree, both with the premise that they're superfluous and the assertion that getting rid of them was a good idea, but I don't want to get into a debate about whether Commonwealth or American spellings are better, because such debates are inevitably pointless and pretty stupid.

How are they not superfluous? They're silent and they don't serve to differentiate it from another word.

[georgie_leech]

I'm still angry about "literally" and I'm not going to let that pass without a fight :smalltongue: I have a feeling that the apparent acceptance of that was a bit of a stunt by the OED anyway.

"He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies." -The History of Emily Montague, Frances Brooke, 1769

As much as I disliked it at first, you're fighting a losing battle here. The word has been used that way for literally hundreds of years. :smalltongue:

[Bohandas]

And it has literally the same meaning as "really"

[Aedilred]

I think English should use a spelling closer to pronunciation:P

I hear this a lot, but I think it's a good idea neither in principle nor in practice. Trying to replicate phonetics with a 26-letter alphabetic system, especially in a language as irregular as English, is always going to create problems and exceptions, so any such new system would have enough holes in it not to make it worth the change.

Moreover it assumes that there's a single, correct, standard for pronunciation in the first place, which there isn't. The range of accents in England alone - to say nothing of Scotland, Wales or Ireland, let alone other Commonwealth countries or the US, would be enough to blow any phonetic spelling system out of the water.

Pronunciations also shift over time. Most, or at least many, of our current English spellings were once phonetic, but pronunciations have shifted so far many of them are no longer recognisable. This can happen even over the course of a single lifetime: check out audio recordings from the 1920s or even as late as the 1950s: the RP accent from that era has altered almost completely, and that's in the presence of such audio recordings which should logically help to stall such changes. Rewiring the written system to reflect current pronunciation would be a temporary fix at best.

And any benefit gained from doing so would be more than offset by the difficulties and expense of retraining people to use the new spellings, to say nothing of the problems it would cause when learning foreign languages (it's a great boon to those learning Romance languages in particular that many spellings and words are familiar from English). Unless such a system were agreed upon by all English-speaking countries (basically the entire world, one way or another) it would render English pretty much mutually incomprehensible at least in written form across borders, which would be a disaster, not to mention making the entire English corpus of modern literature, arguably the greatest in any world language, as hard to read for people trained under the new system as Chaucer is for us.

Ultimately, and while I sympathise with those who struggle with English's weird spellings, I think it's a terrible, terrible idea.


How are they not superfluous? They're silent and they don't serve to differentiate it from another word.

Like I said, I'm not interested in having this discussion :smalltongue:

US and Commonwealth English are different, and they diverged well before the lifetimes of anyone in this thread. Each has a rich linguistic and cultural heritage which is important to the country(ies) of origin. Neither is superior to the other and debates around whether one or the other is are ultimately a complete waste of everyone's time, a bit like arguing whether blue is better than orange. That doesn't mean that one can't have personal preferences, so long as one recognises that such preferences are personal, subjective and largely if not entirely influenced by upbringing.

[Vinyadan]

Moreover it assumes that there's a single, correct, standard for pronunciation in the first place, which there isn't. The range of accents in England alone - to say nothing of Scotland, Wales or Ireland, let alone other Commonwealth countries or the US, would be enough to blow any phonetic spelling system out of the water.

That's also true for any other language. You simply take a single pronunciation and call it standard (or RP). Accents will still be pronounced, like in Andalusia or anywhere else, and the writing form will be standardized. After all, there aren't many who actually consciously write down their accent, and it's not like current writing doesn't substantially diverge from local accents anyway.


Pronunciations also shift over time. Most, or at least many, of our current English spellings were once phonetic, but pronunciations have shifted so far many of them are no longer recognisable. This can happen even over the course of a single lifetime: check out audio recordings from the 1920s or even as late as the 1950s: the RP accent from that era has altered almost completely, and that's in the presence of such audio recordings which should logically help to stall such changes. Rewiring the written system to reflect current pronunciation would be a temporary fix at best.

While this is true, a system based on actual pronunciation has a chance to update itself automatically which a merely symbolic writing doesn't have. If I stop saying "simmetray" and start saying "simmetrii", which has actually happened, I can simply write the new pronunciation. You will find this kind of evolution in many languages: consonants and vowels disappear from writing when they disappear from pronunciation (fenestre > fenêtre vs e.g. knight, giuoco > gioco vs answer).


And any benefit gained from doing so would be more than offset by the difficulties and expense of retraining people to use the new spellings, to say nothing of the problems it would cause when learning foreign languages (it's a great boon to those learning Romance languages in particular that many spellings and words are familiar from English).

It has advantages and disadvantages. It can mean great difficulty in reading e.g. the French word usurpation. In other words, the current situation helps when silently dealing with the written language, but it is a pain when it's time to make the link between the written and the spoken language.


Unless such a system were agreed upon by all English-speaking countries (basically the entire world, one way or another) it would render English pretty much mutually incomprehensible at least in written form across borders, which would be a disaster, not to mention making the entire English corpus of modern literature, arguably the greatest in any world language, as hard to read for people trained under the new system as Chaucer is for us.

Currently, you have instead the chance to read not-so-old literary texts with the wrong pronunciation (see symmetry). Look to the future, it would mean that, in 2700, you would be easily able to read today's texts! :P Also, knowing multiple systems at the same time isn't that hard.
You can have an actual example of this kind of adaptation in Ancient Greek literature, where almost all works which reached us were originally written using local spelling conventions and were then rewritten by the philologists in Alexandria using the Athenian system.


Ultimately, and while I sympathise with those who struggle with English's weird spellings, I think it's a terrible, terrible idea.


I actually agree that it is impracticable and it would be a diplomatic mess because of reasons that aren't fully related to language. These are things that can be done with a language like German or Chinese, where pretty much all of the "important" speakers live under the same authority or in adjacent areas (the various German speaking countries followed the opinion of an international committee in 1996, but just followed Germany back in 1902). It's almost impossible with strongly and lively pluricentric languages (Arabic and English being the largest examples). In the end mine was a tongue-in-cheek proposal, although it can be the starting point for a discussion.

[SlyGuyMcFly]

I'm still angry about "literally" and I'm not going to let that pass without a fight :smalltongue: I have a feeling that the apparent acceptance of that was a bit of a stunt by the OED anyway.

Alas poor literally, another victim of overuse. It joins the ranks of the fallen alongside the likes of epic, awesome or nice (http://www.pemberley.com/etext/NA/chapter14.htm).

[Aedilred]

I'm glad it wasn't entirely serious :smalltongue:


That's also true for any other language. You simply take a single pronunciation and call it standard (or RP). Accents will still be pronounced, like in Andalusia or anywhere else, and the writing form will be standardized. After all, there aren't many who actually consciously write down their accent, and it's not like current writing doesn't substantially diverge from local accents anyway.
People don't transcribe their accents, but that in itself gives the lie to the idea that a phonetic spelling system is particularly useful. Either everybody transcribes their own accents, in which case the written language becomes a nightmare to decipher, or one accent is taken as the standard one for transcription, which means anyone with a nonstandard accent (the majority of speakers) gains no benefit from the phonetic spelling.

I'm aware that a couple of countries have attempted to impose phonetic spelling using a Latin-based alphabetic system, but the two examples that spring to mind also come with nasty conotations of monolithic centralised cultural imperialism and quashing of minorities, which I shan't get into because of the politics rule - politics and language do intersect rather a bit, as it happens.


While this is true, a system based on actual pronunciation has a chance to update itself automatically which a merely symbolic writing doesn't have. If I stop saying "simmetray" and start saying "simmetrii", which has actually happened, I can simply write the new pronunciation. You will find this kind of evolution in many languages: consonants and vowels disappear from writing when they disappear from pronunciation (fenestre > fenêtre vs e.g. knight, giuoco > gioco vs answer).
That assumes that change happens at a uniform rate across all spoken areas, though, which is never really the case.

It's also predicated on the assumption, I think, that people read phonetically. While letter groupings and phonetic principles can help one to determine the pronunciation of a word one hasn't heard but has read, most of the time people read through pattern recognition of whole words (or large chunks of them). Once you've learned to read, consistency of spelling is much more important than the phonetic relationship of what's written to what's spoken. This is why badly spelled prose is often slightly disconcerting to read, rising to "really quite difficult" if the spellings get bad enough. Even if the phonetic relationship to the words remains in place, the reader has to slow down and try to read the words one letter or letter-group at a time, rather than being able to take in the whole word, or whole phrase, at once. I mean, I can read Scots, but it takes a while and isn't much fun.

So constantly updating spelling to reflect current pronunciation would be a nightmare for the people who end up reading it.

I find that most proposals along these lines are intended to make English easier to write. But of course that's a two-way process, and it's no good making it easier to write if it simultaneously makes it harder to read. Especially since, for the majority of people, learning to write English is really just a matter of application (I'm aware some people have disabilities which make it harder, but I'm not convinced that they would benefit from a change in spelling anyway). I don't think the difficulty in switching between the written and spoken language is actually all that great for most people, and is often overstated. It's harder for foreign speakers, certainly, but the same could be said for any language and writing system.

I must query who such initiatives are really intended to benefit. I think there's often an implicit assumption that if you make English "easier" to spell, it will attract whole new hordes of people to the cause of written English and rectify whatever educational crisis we're worried about this week. But I'm not convinced. I suspect that people who don't engage with written English (save for those with disabilities, see above) don't do so simply because they're not interested. Especially since reading and writing tend to be mutually-reinforcing: children who read more are better spellers: the more time you spend reading, the more familiar with written English you become.

Even if it succeeds, one has to question what the cost will be. Since we're on a roleplaying forum, I'll raise the spectre of D&D4: a radical revisiting of the principles of the game in an attempt to capture new audiences (or retain those put off by the complexity of previous editions). It was in many ways a success, but it also alienated large numbers (perhaps even the majority) of existing players and divided the community in a way which will probably prove impossible to repair. I think something very similar would happen were a wholesale written-language change to be imposed (even assuming it could be, in the absence of a central governing linguistic authority): people who are already proficient in written English would be those who suffered most, and would have either to relearn their entire written language (hard enough, even when you don't resent the imposition) or refuse to update and become ghettoised from the new way of doing things. At best you end up with a horrible mish-mash like the UK currently has regarding the Imperial/Metric systems, where both are sort of in use but not really and nobody is really fully familiar with either as a matter of course. At worst, you end up with mass disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, cultural divides, and so on.

It's just not worth it, in my opinon at least.

There's an argument to be made, really, that written and spoken English are essentially two different languages, and really the written form of English is a somewhat arbitrary system. We could write English using Greek characters - not without difficulty, but it could be done (after all, the Latin alphabet is also imperfect for English pronunciations). I don't see the merit in changing that system - one in which millions of people are already fluent - in exchange for one which is in its own way equally arbitrary.

It has advantages and disadvantages. It can mean great difficulty in reading e.g. the French word usurpation. In other words, the current situation helps when silently dealing with the written language, but it is a pain when it's time to make the link between the written and the spoken language.



Currently, you have instead the chance to read not-so-old literary texts with the wrong pronunciation (see symmetry). Look to the future, it would mean that, in 2700, you would be easily able to read today's texts! :P Also, knowing multiple systems at the same time isn't that hard.
It's not that hard, but it's hard enough. Otherwise though I must admit I don't really understand your point here.

I mean, in 2700 people will likely still be able to read today's texts if we don't alter our spellings, because our spellings will still be taught. 700-year-old English texts are admittedly pretty tough these days, but that was before spelling standardisation, before English became the language of record, and before the invention of the printing press. 400-year-old texts are no problem, even though pronunciation has likely changed almost beyond recognition in that time (indeed, that's post GVS - pace linguistic historians who deny the existence of the GVS - and some of these odd spellings were already in place even then). I don't see why people 700 years in the future would have a problem reading today's texts or even 400-year-old texts as it is... unless we do something crazy like reform our writing system completely in the meantime.

[Spojaz]

Phonetic spelling is there to make a language easier to learn to read. Once you have seen and understood a word a few times, that shape=that idea automatically, but when you first encounter a new word, among the tools you have for determining what it means is to sound it out and compare to a word you know from speaking. Then, if none of the possible pronunciations match, you figure it out from context or look it up. If a word breaks conventions, is uncommon, or doesn't fit the most common pronunciation when it is expected, it leads to misunderstanding. That's how I thought for years as a child that WWII involved both the "Nay-ziss" and the "Naught-zee's", one, I failed to notice, only found in books, another in speech. I'm sure pretty a lot of people have similar stories.

In regards to not spelling out accents, maybe knowing the way a word is "supposed" to be pronounced makes it a lot easier to understand someone with a different accent that yours.

A fairly good video on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiVs05yq9-o)

[Seto]

This kind of "fake word" is called a barbarism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarism_(linguistics)). But if you're famous/respected/a writer, people will call it a neologism.

[No brains]

Couldn't "malapropism" count? A fake word is *literally* a word that is used erroneously.

As for British v. American English, I am in favour of spelling maneuvers/ manoeuvers with even more vowels. I give you, "manaeiouyvers".

[Lethologica]

This kind of "fake word" is called a barbarism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarism_(linguistics)). But if you're famous/respected/a writer, people will call it a neologism.
Not to be confused with a Babarism, which is a word used to describe children's books that are actually about colonialism. Your avatar made this joke irresistible.


Couldn't "malapropism" count? A fake word is *literally* a word that is used erroneously.

As for British v. American English, I am in favour of spelling maneuvers/ manoeuvers with even more vowels. I give you, "manaeiouyvers".
Malapropism denotes a real word that is improperly used in place of another real word.

[Bohandas]

I know that the opposite of what the OP is looking for is "cromulent"

[SlyGuyMcFly]

I know that the opposite of what the OP is looking for is "cromulent"

Which suggests we should just go with "discromulent" or "uncromulent" and call it a day.

[Lethologica]

Which suggests we should just go with "discromulent" or "uncromulent" and call it a day.
Cromunot...

[BannedInSchool]

Fauxcabulary.

[Brother Oni]

People don't transcribe their accents, but that in itself gives the lie to the idea that a phonetic spelling system is particularly useful. Either everybody transcribes their own accents, in which case the written language becomes a nightmare to decipher, or one accent is taken as the standard one for transcription, which means anyone with a nonstandard accent (the majority of speakers) gains no benefit from the phonetic spelling.

Depends on the dialect. Most of the Malaysian Chinese I know, stick a 'lah' at the end of their English sentences as an import from Cantonese where it's either an emphasis or an additional sound to make the sentence sound smoother. It doesn't actually mean anything in and of itself, much like 'huh' or 'er' in English (a quick google check indicates they're called interjections).

Even straight romanisation has its issues - originally Mandarin Chinese was translated via Wade Giles which was more focused on aiding the pronunciation for Western readers. For the aforementioned political reasons, this has now been largely supplanted by the 'official' Chinese transliteration system Pinyin, so the Three Kingdoms ruler Ts'ao Ts'ao, becomes the more recognisable to modern eyes Cao Cao, even though the Chinese pronunciation hasn't changed.

Due to the significant lack of similarities between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese (I believe Russian and English are more similar), it's unsurprising that Cantonese has its own transliteration system, Jyutping. I'm sure all the other major dialects have their own Romanisation.


I'm aware that a couple of countries have attempted to impose phonetic spelling using a Latin-based alphabetic system, but the two examples that spring to mind also come with nasty conotations of monolithic centralised cultural imperialism and quashing of minorities, which I shan't get into because of the politics rule - politics and language do intersect rather a bit, as it happens.

As an example of the politics and language intersection, the rebranding exercise that Standard Mandarin has undergone, being renamed 普通話 'putonghua' or 'common language/tongue'.

[Heliomance]

To submit yet another answer to the original query, do eggcorns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn) fit?

[Vinyadan]

To submit yet another answer to the original query, do eggcorns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn) fit?

That looks to me like the effect of folk etymology, like the goshawk akupter (fast wings) turning into accipiter (grabber) and then avipiter (avis = bird > aoutour) because the speaker tries to make the word make sense. I mean, I don't see the difference from folk etymology, even though Wikipedia wants there to be one.

EDIT: "It's not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community." So I guess this excludes it from irregardless at least. But I find this definition faulty, given that there are idiolects and so on. It seems like saying that a flower isn't red because there aren't enough flowers.

[georgie_leech]

That looks to me like the effect of folk etymology, like the goshawk akupter (fast wings) turning into accipiter (grabber) and then avipiter (avis = bird > aoutour) because the speaker tries to make the word make sense. I mean, I don't see the difference from folk etymology, even though Wikipedia wants there to be one.

EDIT: "It's not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community." So I guess this excludes it from irregardless at least. But I find this definition faulty, given that there are idiolects and so on. It seems like saying that a flower isn't red because there aren't enough flowers.

I think it's more the 'how much sand is there in a heap?' thing where we have a concept for a bunch of stuff that's distinct from the stuff itself. Either way it's splitting hairs, it's clearly the same sort of thing.

[Donnadogsoth]

We've all heard people say things like irregardless or misunderestimate. But is there a word to describe these nonexistant words? I was thinking about this today and I made up a word that could fill this blind spot in the english language. Malanym.

Pseudologism.

[Bohandas]

Depends on the dialect. Most of the Malaysian Chinese I know, stick a 'lah' at the end of their English sentences as an import from Cantonese where it's either an emphasis or an additional sound to make the sentence sound smoother. It doesn't actually mean anything in and of itself, much like 'huh' or 'er' in English (a quick google check indicates they're called interjections).

I'm not sure "er" is an interjection?


Even straight romanisation has its issues - originally Mandarin Chinese was translated via Wade Giles which was more focused on aiding the pronunciation for Western readers. For the aforementioned political reasons, this has now been largely supplanted by the 'official' Chinese transliteration system Pinyin, so the Three Kingdoms ruler Ts'ao Ts'ao, becomes the more recognisable to modern eyes Cao Cao, even though the Chinese pronunciation hasn't changed.


So Wade Giles is actually superior then?

[5a Violista]

"er" is an interjection; it's the British version of the American "uh", and they are both on lists of frequent interjections, specifically hesitation interjections.

[Brother Oni]

So Wade Giles is actually superior then?

For the goal of helping Westerners pronounce Chinese, yes, but unfortunately it's got a fair amount of cultural/political baggage and history that the PRC would prefer to forget.

In my opinion, it's a lot less elegant than Pinyin and it still has some trouble with some names - have a guess at who these Three Kingdom personages are:

Kuan Yü (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Yu), Hsiahou Tun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiahou_Dun), Ssŭma I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_Yi), T‘aishih Tz‘ŭ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishi_Ci)

[Fiery Diamond]

I think English should use a spelling closer to pronunciation:P
How much > haw mac?
Do you need help? > Du yu niid help?
I'm so tired! > Ay'm so taỳd!
I hate this idea > Ay heyt dhis aydì.
Don't you have anything better to do than trying to ruin English spelling? > Down'c iu hev enithin bett´r cu du dhen crayin cu ruuin Inglish spellin?
This is actually funnier than it seems. > Dhis is ecùli fannìr dhen it siims.
One last sentence. > Wan last sent´ns.

The largest problems I see:
the vowels in much and last are actually different, although quite close (ʌ vs ɑ).
there are different sounds to be shown as e (æ and e, for example).
Accents for ə aren't really handy.
The difference between n and ng isn't shown.

Gah! It BURNS!

Actually, there are even bigger problems than the ones you posit. The most important one, obviously, is that not everyone pronounces the words the same way. There are quite a few of your examples that are wildly different from how I say them. The second one is that for someone who only speaks English and doesn't know IPA, all those accent marks are simply confusing rather than clarifying. I didn't even know you could put one over a "y."

My attempt at showing how I pronounce them (without so much as guessing at IPA - this means no ""c" means the sound that starts the word "chair"" weirdness):

key for vowels (and combo letters):

ch=chair
th=thing
TH=this
ng=thing
sh=share
a=lad
ah=father
u=lute
uh=touch
i=deed
ih=lid
e=bed
ai=side
ay=say
o=so

a "-r" means the r sound gets its own syllable

How much? > Haw muhch?
Do you need help? > Du yu nid help?
I'm so tired! > Ai'm so tai-rd.
I hate this idea > Ai hayt THihs aidiuh.
Don't you have anything better to do than trying to ruin English spelling? > Don' chyu hav enithihng bed-r duh du THn chraiihng t ruihn Ihngglihsh spelihng?
This is actually funnier than it seems. > THihs ihz akshli fuhni-r THn iht simz.
One last sentence. > Wuhn last sentns



With regard to Wade-Giles: it also has the issue of requiring one to look up how every letter is supposed to be pronounced before you can use it - the Tao, anyone? No ordinary American is going to see that and think even for a second that's anything other than the "T" from "tea" followed by the vowel sound in "cow" unless they've been taught otherwise.

[Bohandas]

To me both of those read as having a comically strong southern accent

[Eldariel]

Unfortunately, while spelling reforms for English have been attempted multiple times over the last few centuries, English-speaking countries are largely very conservative on the subject and indeed, an average English-speaker doesn't really have a workable toolbox for any kind of a phonetic notation system as English spelling itself has lost much of its original phonetic equivalence over the various sound shifts in near history. Thus, such changes are very difficult to introduce in any kind of capacity. And yeah, there's the problem of standardization; I'm personally of the opinion that dialectal variation should be fully supported within both, written and spoken spheres. Otherwise the prestige problems occur and the "deviant" systems get branded inferior which influences peoples' willingness to use and develop them, and the domains of use where they can function, which ultimately leads to a loss of linguistic variety (and the cultural variety inherently tied to it). Less standardized phonetic spelling also makes learning to write and read significantly faster for children which frees up valuable temporal resources for other pursuits (such as learning foreign languages and expanding one's horizons). Of course, it makes understanding various minute differences more challenging and requires more from the receiver but on the flipside, that tends to support cognitive development.

It's not impossible of course. There are plenty of examples of switching to a more streamlined orthography or a different writing system entirely even in heavily conservative countries: one of the recent ones is Korea, where the switch to hangul (a phonetic writing system) from hanzi (a logographic system) is all but complete. It's not like it's impossible, but there needs to be a powerful will behind the movement for there to be a way. Introducing such a system takes a while anyways as it needs to be taught for a whole age cohort before there's any point in shifting from the old system to the new one, and there's always huge inertia against such changes.

[Rockphed]

"er" is an interjection; it's the British version of the American "uh", and they are both on lists of frequent interjections, specifically hesitation interjections.

Which are conversational punctuation! Bow before my trivia!

[Fiery Diamond]

To me both of those read as having a comically strong southern accent

In the case of mine, that's probably because I use letter combinations for certain vowel sounds and you're reading them as being related to the individual letter sounds rather than distinct sounds. For example, "side" in my speech I write with "ai," while I'd put it as being closer to "ah" or "a" in a southern accent, depending on speech... you're probably imagining them differently than I am.

Of course, I can also see you thinking "Don't you" ending with "chyu" rather than "t yu" is southern... so there is that. In fairness, I do live in rural Virginia, but I've been in Michigan and had people astonished that I'm from the south because they can't detect it in my voice. Let's see if I can't find some links for you to hear what I'm actually trying to convey with the vowels...

If I'm not using the very first vocal example (the featured example) on the page, I'll specify which one I'm using.

ch=chair (hopefully no link needed)
th=thing (ditto)
TH=this (ditto)
ng=thing (ditto)
sh=share (ditto)


a= lad (https://www.howtopronounce.com/lad/)
ah= father (https://www.howtopronounce.com/father/) (the third one down in the actual list not counting the featured example is the easiest one to hear, for me)
u= lute (https://www.howtopronounce.com/lute/) (interestingly, I actually pronounce the closing consonant differently from the example - I pronounce the "t" like in "bet")
uh= touch (https://www.howtopronounce.com/touch/) (I have a very subtle difference compared to this one, but the first one on here is more like mine than any of the others)
i= deed (https://www.howtopronounce.com/deed/)
ih= lid (https://www.howtopronounce.com/lid/)
e= bed (https://www.howtopronounce.com/bed/)
ai=side (using just the word "I" for the example) (https://www.howtopronounce.com/i/)
ay= say (https://www.howtopronounce.com/say/) (you can use the first or the fourth not counting the featured example; the third not counting the featured example is how I would pronounce the vowel "e" when speaking Spanish - which I know very very little of - but not how that sound gets pronounced when I speak in English)
o= so (https://www.howtopronounce.com/so/)

Does that make you think I sound less southern? ;)

[Icewraith]

Pssst....

Hey buddy, you interested in a portmanteau, spoonerism, catachresis, solecism, antiphrasis, neologism, or malapropism?

Got a whole bunch that just fell off the tack of a bruck.... dammit.

[golentan]

Unfortunately, while spelling reforms for English have been attempted multiple times over the last few centuries, English-speaking countries are largely very conservative on the subject and indeed, an average English-speaker doesn't really have a workable toolbox for any kind of a phonetic notation system as English spelling itself has lost much of its original phonetic equivalence over the various sound shifts in near history. Thus, such changes are very difficult to introduce in any kind of capacity. And yeah, there's the problem of standardization; I'm personally of the opinion that dialectal variation should be fully supported within both, written and spoken spheres. Otherwise the prestige problems occur and the "deviant" systems get branded inferior which influences peoples' willingness to use and develop them, and the domains of use where they can function, which ultimately leads to a loss of linguistic variety (and the cultural variety inherently tied to it). Less standardized phonetic spelling also makes learning to write and read significantly faster for children which frees up valuable temporal resources for other pursuits (such as learning foreign languages and expanding one's horizons). Of course, it makes understanding various minute differences more challenging and requires more from the receiver but on the flipside, that tends to support cognitive development.

It's not impossible of course. There are plenty of examples of switching to a more streamlined orthography or a different writing system entirely even in heavily conservative countries: one of the recent ones is Korea, where the switch to hangul (a phonetic writing system) from hanzi (a logographic system) is all but complete. It's not like it's impossible, but there needs to be a powerful will behind the movement for there to be a way. Introducing such a system takes a while anyways as it needs to be taught for a whole age cohort before there's any point in shifting from the old system to the new one, and there's always huge inertia against such changes.

Except even if you could convince people in one country to make a shift...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

[Vinyadan]

Thins hev kam tu a priti pess
Awr romens is growin flet
For yu layk dhis en the adh*r
wayl Ay gow for dhis end dhet

Gwdn*ss nows wat dhi end wil bii
Ow Ay down't now wer Ay'm et
It lwks es if wii tuu wil nev*r bii wan
Samthin mast bii dan

Yu sey idher end Ay sey aydher
Yu sey nidher end Ay sey naydher
Idher, ayther, nidher, naydher
Let's kal dhe howl thin af

[No brains]

I thought neologisms were those long-necked spider aberrations. They can be tricky to out manaeiouyver.

[Eldariel]

Except even if you could convince people in one country to make a shift...

Well, I think it's pretty much inevitable that eventually British English and the "Vulgar Englishes" around the world will go the way of Latin and Vulgar Latins.

[Vinyadan]

More like Arabic and national Arabics, I think. There's still a lot of communication going on, and the world media to keep people more or less in line. I can see more divergence coming from places like India, with a very strong local culture, or from people learning English as a second language. The English used by the EU for official documents has a lot of semantic shifts compared to British, because similar words exist in other languages with different meanings (actually and eventually being the most evident: "actually" meaning "now" and "eventually" meaning "in case"). I wouldn't be surprised if these shifts managed to slip inside Irish or British English, maybe after having become a standard in lingua franca English.

Some EU English: http://mentalfloss.com/article/69699/11-examples-odd-dialect-called-eu-english

[georgie_leech]

Well, I think it's pretty much inevitable that eventually British English and the "Vulgar Englishes" around the world will go the way of Latin and Vulgar Latins.

Spoken by nobody in modern day culture and only used in a few specific technical contexts? :smalltongue:

[Fiery Diamond]

Thins hev kam tu a priti pess
Awr romens is growin flet
For yu layk dhis en the adh*r
wayl Ay gow for dhis end dhet

Gwdn*ss nows wat dhi end wil bii
Ow Ay down't now wer Ay'm et
It lwks es if wii tuu wil nev*r bii wan
Samthin mast bii dan

Yu sey idher end Ay sey aydher
Yu sey nidher end Ay sey naydher
Idher, ayther, nidher, naydher
Let's kal dhe howl thin af

I have no idea if this is an actual song or not. I'm going to try to translate:

Things have come to a pretty pass(?)
Our romance is growing flat
For you like this and the other
While I go for this and that

Goodness knows what the end will be
Oh I don't know where I'm at
It looks as if we two will never be one
Something must be done

You say either ("E") and I say either ("I")
You say neither ("E") and I say neither ("I")
Either, either, neither, neither (E,I,E,I)
Let's call the whole thing off.

Did I get it right?

Seriously, though, this whole exercise is a perfect illustration of why trying to write the English language by pronunciation is a bad idea. Regardless of the issue of agreeing on how to represent specific sounds, there are such big differences in pronunciation between different speakers. Many of your words I only figured out by looking at the surrounding words for context clues. Some of this is how you represent sounds, but a lot of it is how differently the two of us pronounce words.

Actually, there's something I'm curious about and would like you to clarify for me: your use of "i" versus "ii". It SEEMS to be the difference between "lid" and "lead" (the verb). But... those are two completely different sounds, at least in my dialect of English, not something distinguished by length.

I wonder if there's a good IPA listing somewhere online where there are actual audio recordings to go with each sound rather than example words. Then IPA would actually be useful for comparing.

Edit: I tried wikipedia's audio vowel thing. Good grief. I can't even distinguish about half of them from at least one other, and I can't even locate certain sounds, probably due to similar reasons.

[Eldariel]

More like Arabic and national Arabics, I think. There's still a lot of communication going on, and the world media to keep people more or less in line. I can see more divergence coming from places like India, with a very strong local culture, or from people learning English as a second language. The English used by the EU for official documents has a lot of semantic shifts compared to British, because similar words exist in other languages with different meanings (actually and eventually being the most evident: "actually" meaning "now" and "eventually" meaning "in case"). I wouldn't be surprised if these shifts managed to slip inside Irish or British English, maybe after having become a standard in lingua franca English.

Some EU English: http://mentalfloss.com/article/69699/11-examples-odd-dialect-called-eu-english

Heh. I guess the redundancy and imprecision in meaning is inconvenient (or extremely convenient, depending on which side of the fence you stand on) for legalese. That said, I think Arabic is going the same way as Latin, just slower. And well, there's more political will to stick to the names no matter what the reality might be for obvious reasons.


Spoken by nobody in modern day culture and only used in a few specific technical contexts? :smalltongue:

More like "becoming a substrate in a large number of modern languages, lending vast amounts of its current vocabulary into a number of unrelated languages, and having the variants eventually become separate languages". :smallwink:

[Vinyadan]

Actually, there's something I'm curious about and would like you to clarify for me: your use of "i" versus "ii". It SEEMS to be the difference between "lid" and "lead" (the verb). But... those are two completely different sounds, at least in my dialect of English, not something distinguished by length.



I was actually very tired when I wrote this down and I didn't think it much through. The way in which I write vowels is grouping them together by resemblance, so you have my a representing the triangle of vowels that starts with a and includes ʌ and ɑ and everything in between. About i and ii, yes, lead I'd write liid, but it looks like I have grouped together under the letter i the sounds i (the last vowel in pretty) and ɪ (this, lid, the first vowel in pretty), which indeed are different sounds, although similar. I should just use y to write ɪ, then there would be something like pryti for pretty and dhys and lyd. I have only used y in diphthongs, I think, but that's the same sound, at least I think so.

Ah, this was the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIYS9EQWkXg

[golentan]

Well, I think it's pretty much inevitable that eventually British English and the "Vulgar Englishes" around the world will go the way of Latin and Vulgar Latins.

I'm not sure that's a given in a world where we are capable of having a simultaneous conference between 24 people equidistantly placed around the globe. I'd argue that as long as it remains the lingua franca of international communication, and the international communication network exists, you will get some regional variation but enough cross pollination to prevent true fragmentation, and english has a leg up on remaining that default language because... the british empire did a good job making it so, and many nations teach english as a second language by default because it is currently useful in a wide variety of nations which... helps keep it useful in a wide variety of nations, incentivizing teaching it.

...

I give it at least a couple hundred years before real schisms fissure their way between english speaking countries.

[Vinyadan]

My day has just been made better by someone making an assertion about what food he likes, another person saying "me too!" and a third one chiming in to say "me three!". :smallbiggrin: Analogy power!

[Wardog]

I think English should use a spelling closer to pronunciation:P
How much > haw mac?
Do you need help? > Du yu niid help?
I'm so tired! > Ay'm so taỳd!
I hate this idea > Ay heyt dhis aydì.
Don't you have anything better to do than trying to ruin English spelling? > Down'c iu hev enithin bett´r cu du dhen crayin cu ruuin Inglish spellin?
This is actually funnier than it seems. > Dhis is ecùli fannìr dhen it siims.
One last sentence. > Wan last sent´ns.


What accent is that?

Pretty much none of those spellings (or how I'd pronounce them) match how I'd pronounce the words. (Exceptions: enithin bett´r; du; sent'ns., depending on how carefully or not I'm speaking. And ruuin, although I don't see how the change would affect pronunciation).

[Vinyadan]

Now it's been some time, I think it was American accent as phonetically rendered in the Cambridge Advanced Learner Dictionary. If you have no experience with how languages like Spanish, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek and German write their vowel sounds, it isn't strange that you can't recognize the vowels. Also think that this was done very fast, so there are bound to be inconsistencies.
English renders vowel sounds through a mix of letter chosen, following consonant or number of consonants and eventual presence of a mute vowel, and probably also something more. This instead is a rather superficial attempt to approximate the vowel sound just through the letter representing the vowel.
So A represents all sounds like the first sound in aisle, the one in father, the one in palm and the one in strut. The E represents all sounds like cat, dress and bet. The y represents the vowel in kit and the second part of diphthongs like long A (fan) and long I (I am). The I represents stuff like sheet and the last sound in pretty. The O represents sounds like thought and lot. The w is the w in what, the second part in sounds like don't, and the vowel in foot. The u is the sound in loot. I wrote it double in ruin because it's long (so it would be luut, ruuyn, bwl (bull), myuuteyt (mutate), but now I see that it actually is redundant, since English doesn't have a short version of that sound, and that's probably what you noticed. I tried to render ə (the A in comma) with accents that were supposed to be pronounced after the letter on which they were written, which is something I probably copied from tengwar.
As I said, it's actually a very superficial system.

[137beth]

Making up unapproved words is pure rudisplorking!

[UserClone]

I'd say how to describe such a word depends on whether you consider it to be cromulent.