Thanks! We have so many more to investigate... I'm thinking "cirque du soleil" is my next one. I see at least 48 different spellings on it at first glance...
Enjoyed this article thoroughly. My last name is a common object and only four letters, and so you would think easy to spell. However it gets butchered quite often--perhaps because people want it differentiated from the common noun.
See also the interactive Gyllenhaal Experiment where you can try spelling different last names and see how you compare to others: https://pudding.cool/2019/02/gyllenhaal/
I thought the misspelling that contains a racial slur would show up highly, given that it's only one letter off, and the 'a' variant does rank high; but perhaps some subconscious "mental filtering" in the participants avoided that.
Yes, I know. The Yiddish is almost identical to the German, but has a significantly more negative connotation.
(Edit: for an inverse example, consider "dreck": in Yiddish it just means "garbage," but my understanding is that it's significantly more offensive in most Germanic languages.)
I disagree. Your meanings may be reasonable for Yinglish (Yiddish-derived English), but in Yiddish both the words shvartser and neger are neutral nouns. In addition drek is quite negative, meaning filth or shit.
German dialects are rarely written and if they are they are written different from Standard German. The written German language is very phonetic and if you know the rules you know exactly how a word is supposed to be pronounced.
Generally the "rule" in English is the same as the one in German: a double consonant ensure the preceding vowel is pronounced the short way rather than the long way.
The saddest sadist, the matter of maters, and the bitter biter, for example.
Fun fact, in Malay or Indonesian language "Schwarzenegger" word pronunciation sounds very similar to "susah nak eja" or literally means "hard to spell" in English
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadNot sure exactly how old this is -- the copyright date at the bottom says 2011, but the Wayback Machine has copies dating back to at least 2002.
It’s actually Black Ploughman (or Plowman if you prefer) [0]
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zYCCR0kVvs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzenegger_(surname)
Schwartzeiojaweofjaweneger
Schwartzenkangaroo
Schwarzatwizzler
https://spaceballs.fandom.com/wiki/The_Schwartz
(Edit: for an inverse example, consider "dreck": in Yiddish it just means "garbage," but my understanding is that it's significantly more offensive in most Germanic languages.)
It's mostly used for stuff that makes you angry. https://www.dreckstool.de/hitlist is a prime example.
(And you can see the effect of the home office, Microsoft Teams is new there.)
In germanic languages, they actually do. Schwarzeneger (single g) would be pronounced Schwarzen-_e_-ger, with a long and pronounced e.
Tomato, Aluminium, Chips, Craig to name a few off the top of my head.
I'd have thought the accents argument would apply to any location, Germany included.
For anyone else who wants to hear this difference:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKuPfZpzEHg
The saddest sadist, the matter of maters, and the bitter biter, for example.
The geek in me immediately thinks there’s probably more ways of spelling his name, it’s just that you’re using an 8 bit integer for the counter...
Also the second most famous Austrian-born politician.