Tag: language

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Ancient Web: Zompist Tried to Prove English Spelling Has Rules

English spelling has spent centuries earning its reputation as a practical joke, and Mark Rosenfelder’s old Zompist page responds with the deeply Internet-era reaction: fine, let’s model the damn thing.

Visit Zompist’s English spelling page

The page, dated 2000, is titled “Hou tu pranownse Inglish.” Its argument is not that English spelling is elegant. It is that the system contains far more regularity than people usually give it credit for.

Rosenfelder lays out sound values, dialect assumptions, letter combinations, vowel rules, consonant rules, exceptions, historical leftovers, and the famous troublemakers such as gh and ough.

He also takes a swing at George Bernard Shaw’s famous “ghoti” joke, arguing that the proposed pronunciation only works by ignoring where English spelling rules actually permit those letter values.

The page then does something that makes it especially interesting as an old Web artifact: it turns the argument into a computational test.

Make the computer pronounce it

Rosenfelder assembled a sample lexicon of more than 5,000 English words and a set of rules for his Sound Change Applier. According to the page, the rules generated 59 percent of pronunciations perfectly and 85 percent either perfectly or with only relatively minor errors.

That does not make English spelling sane.

It does demonstrate that “English spelling is completely random” is not a particularly useful explanation.

The page is also full of old-browser archaeology. It discusses Unicode support as something the reader’s browser may or may not handle correctly and explains notation choices partly in terms of what HTML could reliably display.

That mixture is classic early specialist Web publishing: a serious subject, a personal voice, hand-built technical notation, downloadable data, and the assumption that an interested reader will happily scroll for a very long time.

Modern search results tend to chop questions like this into isolated answers: why is ough weird, why is knight spelled that way, why does c have two sounds?

Rosenfelder tried to put the machinery in one place.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because old personal sites often preserve the full argument instead of optimizing each paragraph into a separate answer box.

English spelling is still a mess.

At least this mess comes with documentation.

Read the full spelling system

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Ancient Web: Pilish Turns the Digits of Pi Into English Prose

Some people memorize pi with a song. Others apparently decide English itself should be forced to carry the digits.

Visit the Pilish page

Pilish is a constrained form of writing where the length of each word encodes the successive digits of pi.

The classic example begins with words of lengths 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9 and so on. That works until the decimal expansion produces a zero, because ordinary prose does not contain zero-letter words.

The page’s solution is wonderfully practical: let a ten-letter word represent zero.

Writing inside a numerical cage

The site distinguishes Basic Pilish from Standard Pilish.

In Basic Pilish, words shorter than ten letters represent their literal length and ten-letter words represent zero. Standard Pilish adds a rule allowing words longer than ten letters to encode two consecutive digits. A twelve-letter word, for example, can represent 1,2.

That sounds like a tiny technical adjustment, but it gives writers much more freedom.

The page also defines how apostrophes, hyphens, punctuation, and numbers should be treated so that a text can be decoded consistently. In other words, Pilish is not merely a party trick. Somebody cared enough to write a specification.

The result is a peculiar hybrid of mathematics, mnemonics, and constrained literature.

A normal writer asks which word best fits the sentence. A Pilish writer also has to ask whether that word has exactly the right number of letters for the next digit.

That changes composition at a very low level. Syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and even subject choice bend around the constant.

The site points to longer works built under these rules, including Cadaeic Cadenza and Not A Wake, where the constraint becomes nearly invisible unless the reader starts counting.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many pages that preserve hobbies too specific to ever deserve a mainstream platform.

Pilish may be one of the purest examples.

It is what happens when a mnemonic becomes a literary genre.

Return to the Pilish page