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Ian D. Allen
Personal blog · ncf.idallen.comwritingculture
Ian D. Allen writes Old NCF Home Page for Ian! D. Allen - www.idallen.com, a personal blog at ncf.idallen.com about writing and culture. Since 2014, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “The Chaos (1922)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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38mentions?
35HN people?
2014–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- The Chaos (1922)19 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2014-07-30
- The Chaos (1922)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2021-07-26
What Hacker News says?
Any time this general topic comes up, I like to drop the Chaos Poem as an example, for anyone who hasn't yet encountered it: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “Text Rendering Hates You”Submitted The Chaos (1922) as a story · 79 points
HN discussionLove it. It also reminds me of the poem The Chaos, by Gerard Nolst Trenité: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “How to Write a Spelling Corrector”Submitted The Chaos (1922) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThere is no sense in which English pronunciation can be described as "consistent." As supporting evidence, may I introduce the poem "The Chaos": https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “Let's Settle This”Submitted The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSeems like a good time to link to "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite [1]... It serves to educate native English speakers on how absurd the language (written vs. spoken) is, while simultaneously striking fear into the hearts of ESL folks worldwide. Best read out loud - try too appreciate how much context and rule-of-rhyme you have to apply to read it correctly. [1] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “Learning to Read in Your 30s Profoundly Transforms the Brain”Submitted The Chaos (1922) as a story · 22 points
HN discussionReading this directly reminded me of a great poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité (or is it Trenite? ;): http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “A Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries”Submitted The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't know what conventions that would be, are you familiar with the poem 'The Chaos'? https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html Just one example" " Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak a…
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on “Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers”Submitted The Chaos (1922) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm usually the first one to jump on the English-spelling-is-atrocious bandwagon, but you're not presenting very convincing arguments here: * c being pronounced either /k/ or /s/ is a perfectly common process called assibilation [1]. Compare Italian "centro" /ch/ as in change, vs. "casa", /k/, as in can't. The general rule is /s/ before e, i, /k/ otherwise. English is relatively regular here. * x as /z/ is probably…
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on “English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)”Submitted The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité as a story · 1 points
HN discussionObligatory link to Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos": http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)”Submitted The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (expert English test) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI once lost a bet because I couldn't believe "finite" and "infinite" sounded so different. But the best examples are in the poem _The Chaos_ ( http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html ). Through, though, throw, tough... I know a trough exists but I have no idea how it's pronounced.
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on “Great Vowel Shift”A similar but longer poem ("The Chaos") can be found here: http://ncf.idallen.com/TheChaosPRETTY.pdf This version has IPA included, in case anyone knows IPA better than English and wants to try to follow along.
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on “Someone in New York is pulling emergency brakes, destroying subway commute”Now try pronouncing Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Worcester, Derby, Edinburgh, Argyll… Granted, the latter two are Gaelic in origin, but it's not like English spelling — especially of place names — is terribly phonetic. English orthograhpy is in fact widely known for having [less systematicity]( http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html ) than many of its Indo-European neighbors.
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on “If English were written like Chinese (1999)”https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “The Awful German Language (1880)”Obligatory link to a poem that shows just how weird English is: [0]. So is my mother language Dutch by the way, young kids are constant reminders of that, they learn the language and apply its rules... and then you spend years pointing out all the exceptions... (no it's not tee-shirtden, the word comes from English so it's t-shirts, yes double ee is a long e, still in "beer" (Dutch for bear) you say the "i" sound, m…
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on “English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)”As a native Dutchman, I won't pretend that our language doesn't have some of these problems as well (good luck pronouncing things like "glooiing" or "apostelen" right the first time), but English is just special. One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about p…
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on “English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)”In most languages there's no immediate, bijective mapping between graphemes and phonemes. Some Indo-European languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch come quite close in that there is a one-to-one (in some cases context-sensitive) mapping between graphemes or grapheme clusters and the sounds they signify. For English, famously, there's no such one-to-one mapping and for many cases pronunciation has to be…
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on “Life Before Unicode”But 'j' in Spanish sounds completely different from 'j' in English. Which of these languages should give up their j and add a new letter to their alphabet? At least in Spanish letters are usually pronounced the same, so presumably Spanish is closer to your ideal. Contrary to English, which seems to be designed specifically to torment its speakers. Here's a famous poem: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html Perhaps yo…
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on “Life Before Unicode”It also has words that are pronounced the same despite of context, cf. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ;) Ever-relevant poem: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html English is kind of a hot mess.
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on “The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA symbol, /ɧ/ (2016)”I've had the pleasure of speaking to people who have actually said that - or something along the lines. "Why are you studying Japanese? Don't they teach English in Japanese schools? You can just speak English with Japanese people." I enjoy introducing English-only speakers to "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It gives them a good idea of how terrible English can be - as even people who consider themselves "fluent…
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on “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump”When copying someone else's work it's generally a good idea to at least attribute it to them: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html The above comment is a copy of "The Chaos" by Gerard Noist Trenité without the line breaks and with a bunch of the verses slammed together instead of separated out.
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on ““Weird” is a weird word”The Chaos (1922) - http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.
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on “Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation”Obligatory link to The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
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on “Weird English”I have no doubt that learning to learn to read English would be a real pain. (There's a poem called "The Chaos" that makes fun of how we spell; see http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html ) Since I know it, I have no interest in learning a different system that maps graphemes onto phonemes (ex. Shavian, or the International Phonetic Alphabet). I suspect that that is part of how it is with our standard musical notation.…
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on “Show HN: Dodeka Music – piano keyboard and easy-to-read sheet music in one app”
