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"Esperanto" is the winning word in Pittsburgh's spelling bee The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's annual sixth grade spelling bee was won by a girl who won by correctly spelling "Esperanto." Yes, a word from a language where every word is spelled as it is pronounced. Congratulations, Ellie Pierce.
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you're right -- I had
you're right -- I had thought the protocol was different in the final round (we left the bee after the first few rounds), or tiebreak, but apparently not -- though the winner has to spell one additional word correctly.
http://www.spellingbee.com/comp_rules.pdf
My son was just in the San Francisco regional spelling bee
Which was an interesting experience in many ways -- but I'll just point out that the winner of the competition said that he had been studying four hours per day for the last ten months! See
the SF Chronicle for more details.
We wouldn't have let Morris do that even had he wanted to! (incidentally, the word Morris went out on was "threshold", which isn't obscure at all, even if the spelling is a little counterintuitive).
I actually kind of like some aspects of English spelling, but this is a little overboard.
To be fair, one should note that Esperanto does have a few small opportunities for spelling ambiguities, things like "c" vs. "ts", or "ĝ" vs "dĵ" or "ĉ" vs "tŝ" -- these are only possible in a few compound words, and perhaps could be avoided with careful pronounciation, though they literally are alternate spellings for the same sound. I guess there are a few foreign words or place names with doubled letters, too (like "Pollando", "Finnlando", etc.). Still, Esperanto spelling is never really a problem -- very much unlike English.
Also, once or twice in the spelling bee, a student missed the word because he or she didn't HEAR the pronounciation correctly, despite the announcer's clear speech. Many of the contestants were not native speakers of English, by the way, which may have increased the pronounciation difficulties. Those sort of mistakes could happen in Esperanto, too, though they'd be much less likely to happen at the END of a word, as seemed to be the most common trouble spot in the bee.
I'm a little surprised that Esperanto would be the winning word -- did someone misspell it?
actually NOT the same sound
"they literally are alternate spellings for the same sound"
They actually are not; the sounds are very similar to an English speaker's ear, but they are not the same. (I also thought that "c" and "ts" were the same until this year, when I was speaking with a Polish Esperantist about it; she was surprised I couldn't hear the difference...) Similarly, "Pollando" does not sound the same as "Polando", although to someone who grew up with English the difference is subtle. Etc. The more I learn about languages and pronunciation, the more I realize how subtle and complicated they are.
E.g. to an English speaker, the Esperanto word teatr' (with the omitted final -o) seems difficult to pronounce as 2 syllables, and I've seen English speakers complain about Esperanto poetry that uses "unpronouncable" or "unnatural" or "unbeautiful" words like teatr' instead of teatro. But to a Polish speaker, teatr' is a perfectly normal pronouncable 2-syllable word (and indeed the Polish word for theater is "teatr"...)
sorry to return to this so long afterwards
but
(A) at least "c" vs "ts" and "ĉ" vs "tŝ" are listed as the same in various transliterations of Esperanto into IPA. see,
for example, wikipedia , though I first saw it elsewhere.
the other examples I mentioned are not always listed with identical transliterations (though in the wikipedia link, I see, they include alternate transliterations which do overlap.)
(B) I think I'm happier believing that esperanto has a few small redundancies in its mapping between spelling and pronounciation than believing that some of its sounds are only pronouncable or distinguishable by Eastern Europeans -- either way you're left with occasional potential ambiguities. In my admittedly limited experience, I've found Esperanto mostly intelligible with a variety of accents, though there are certainly some limits to how malleable the vowels can be
I'll point out that Zamenhof certainly knew some languages that requires these sound substitutions -- yiddish, written with hebrew characters, has no "ĝ" or "ĵ" and often resorts to substitutions when transliterating foreign names (I remember seeing the name "Jesse Jackson" in the yiddish forward spelled out as D-Z-Sh-esi D-Z-Sh-akson; Hebrew would do it differently, using the "G" letter with a sort of apostrophe to indicate the foreign sound)
(C) To me, what all this indicates is that even Esperanto spelling doesn't COMPLETELY lose the little bit of visual etymology that comes when roots are glued together. That isn't so terrible, is it?
Typically, a spelling bee is
Typically, a spelling bee is conducted in "rounds". In one round, each contestant gets a different word to spell, so that they won't benefit from another contestant's attemtps. A contestant who can't spell their word is eliminated, except in the event that no one succedes (in which case the round may be ignored, rules vary).
Evidently, this girl was the only one who correctly spelled her word while all other contestants failed during that same round. Some rules require that the winner then spell yet another word to win.
So no, it's likely that nobody misspelled "Esperanto".
I dislike spelling contests
I dislike spelling contests because they reward people simply for memorizing and regurgitating arbitrary nonsense.
Esperanto literumado-konkurso
Estas multaj studentoj en la mondo, kiuj tuj alprenus Esperanton konsciinte, ke en Esperanto literatumado-konkursoj ne havas sencon. Krome, lecionoj pri literatumado kaj gramatiko estus multe pli mallongaj...verŝajne ankaŭ multaj instrustioj subtenus Esperanton pro la samaj kialoj!
Logiko kaj Esperanto
Tim, vi tute pravus...SE ia nivelo de logiko ekzistus en nia mondo. Ne forgesu, ekzemple, ke en Usono nia registaro ankoraŭ ne akceptis la metran sistemon. Kaj globvarmiĝo? Kelkaj en la hodiaŭa administracio kredas ankoraŭ, ke la tero estas plata.