National Spelling Bee - Wordsmith.org

Those kids sure know more words than I do!
MSN page--there will be ads

Did anyone else watch it?

We're STILL watchin' it! Don't give anything away quite yet!!

We watched about an hour of it. I hate the new format -- it's so, I don't know, prime-time, commercial TV. What struck me most was the occasional interview with one or another who missed a word: each child was thoroughly composed. That can't be the case. These kids *die when they lose. Was the program recorded and the backstage interviews done later when the kids had had time to recover?

I believe it was done live--they had to postpone the start of Diane Sawyer's special after it. I too was impressed with the kids' composure; I personally didn't care for all the commercial breaks, either, but I thought the kids might use the opportunity to, oh, relieve nervous bladders or something. I do wish they'd gotten that cranky toddler out of the room, though. [grouch e]

Father Steve: now, how could you be watchin' TV and be here at the same time?!

I watched part of it. I saw some girl spell a word that would make a grown man cry. I can only assume that these kids spend valuable time memorizing weird words. I hope they have some time left over to actually read too.

Quote:

Father Steve: now, how could you be watchin' TV and be here at the same time?!

he was probably making ketchup or something, too....

last year there was an article in the NYTimes magazine section about a family from NJ, that home schooled, and had 3 kids who were part of spelling bee (one was now in HS, the other 2 were still 'local' but not national champs.

the daughter was disqualifed in round 3 or 4, the word she missed was gneiss. (sounds like nice) this is a common rock all through out the NY/NJ/Conneticut area.
its pretty rare in manhattan (which is mostly schist, (or more, Sh*t, as we bronx girls learned to say it), while the bronx is gneiss. there are labeled specims of gneiss all over the bronx zoo, (that also labels trees and plants, so if you (compulsively) read every placque, you learn not just about fauna, but flora and terra!) I knew the bronx was gneiss by age 8 or so..
but learned
manhattan is schist,
but the bronx is gneiss,
and NY is not with out its faults!
as an adult.)

i thought it poetic justice.. the girl was home studying spelling, and so she didn't know the rocks in her own back yard.. (and that is the word that tripped her up!)

Anna, thou art transformed! A. cynically (of course) wondered if the words 'too' and 'than' would be included in the contest.

It is interesting to think that spelling bees would be well nigh impossible, or mayhaps just trivial, in many other language areas. (Finnish, Slavic, Romance (accepting French, of course), etc.)

Wondering why French would be so acceptable for bees. And is there a name for '�'?

French orthography, while it is better than the English, still leaves a lot to be desired. Most spelling systems in the world (at least for languages that use alphabets and syllabaries) have a much better mapping between phonemes and graphemes.

La c c�dille. The diacritic mark under the c has its origin in a small z.

[corrected typo]

>I hate the new format..

I didn't see it; but if they did away with some of the drone-factor: does it have any alternate pronunciations.. does it have any inflected forms.. what's the derivation..
could you spell it for me please?!

how could you be watchin' TV and be here at the same time?!

I be multi-tasking.

a much better mapping between phonemes and graphemes - interesting.. I know what phonemes and graphemes are, but how do you rank the mapping?

ough = uff | ow | oo | oh | awf

Not a particularly good mapping

ough = ookh

Good mapping

A language like Spanish nearly approaches the supposed ideal of a one to one mapping between phonemes and graphemes. For example, in most Western Hemisphere versions of Spanish {s}, {z}, and (sometimes) {c} map to a phoneme /s/. (However, in Castillian Spanish {s} is /s/ and z (and sometimes {c}) maps to /T/. It is not pronuciation of the word corazon that determines if it's spelled with {s} or {z} in the fifth letter position. /k/ is represented by either a {c} or a {q(u)}, and rarely by {k}. This one is easier on the speller as the vowel which follows determines whether to use one or the other grapheme: que vs comida.

English is much worse. Faldo's -ough example being one of the worst/funniest.

and there's this alternate spelling of fish, attributed to GB Shaw.

ROTFL! I mean, heh�