Is there a word for fake words?

[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 fit?

[Vinyadan]

To submit yet another answer to the original query, do eggcorns 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, Hsiahou Tun, Ssŭma I, T‘aishih Tz‘ŭ

[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
ah= father (the third one down in the actual list not counting the featured example is the easiest one to hear, for me)
u= lute (interestingly, I actually pronounce the closing consonant differently from the example - I pronounce the "t" like in "bet")
uh= 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
ih= lid
e= bed
ai=side (using just the word "I" for the example)
ay= 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

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...

[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?

[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...led-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?

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".

[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!". 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.