Daily Dose of English 154
Spellingg Bees
Daily Dose of English 154
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every single day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about spelling bees. Spelling bees, what's a spelling bee, huh? So, spelling bees are this kind of interesting thing that we have in English, and I think they're maybe more popular in the US, but they're not really a thing in other languages because they make use of a bit of a unique quirk, or actually a couple of unique quirks of English, which we'll go over. So a spelling bee is when kids compete, usually kids, compete to spell difficult English words. And it is a competition where you are graded on whether or not you can correctly spell obscure difficult words. That is the entire competition. They are relatively simple in what the goal is, and the general rules are also pretty simple. But they sound a lot easier than they are, right? Spelling, don't you just know how to spell the words and there you go? But the first quirk of English that makes spelling bees possible is that there are a lot, a lot of words. English has become one of sort of the biggest language in the world in a lot of different ways. because it's used in basically every industry. It is spoken by the most number of second language learners. It is used as an international language in Dozens of countries and a lot of the world that is a is the assumed second or language for external communication within a country frequently there is a Another common language between all maybe a bunch of different speakers of different languages, right? French is a common one Spanish is another common one But very often between two countries unless they speak each other's language already. So like Spanish or Portuguese or whatever Portuguese isn't that common but It's usually English is my point. And so it ends up getting used in a lot of different ways from a lot of different languages and in a lot of different industries specifically. Right, something that you might notice if you are learning another language is that there's a lot of borrowed words or it's just the same word for a certain thing in English because that industry might not really exist in that language. And sometimes those languages come up with new words for those things, but very often it'll just use what the English word is because it's easier, it already exists, it comes from a different root and that sort of thing. But it's not that these words are necessarily English words. They often come from words like Latin or Greek and they have very different roots for the words, but they're considered to be English words because English incorporates a ton of different words and has a very, very large corpus and doesn't have a formal single source. So, Basically, there ends up being a just absolute ton of words from various different sources, from various different backgrounds. Like I said, Latin and Greek are very, very common roots, but there's plenty of other ones as well that are considered real English words. And so this leads, and not and so, and then the other quirk of English is that spelling reflects history more than it reflects pronunciation. So what I mean by that is that the historical spelling of a word, the way that it used to be pronounced or where it came from, is very often maintained even if the pronunciation doesn't actually make sense for that word. So you can see this in a Every word basically. Every single word essentially sounds different than what it looks like it should sound like. And this is just how English is at this point. It has become a language where that is the default, the normal, the accepted thing. When you see a new word you kind of assume that you won't know how to pronounce it. Even me, like a native English speaker, so even people that are native English speakers, are usually just guessing when they come across new words based on other patterns that they've learned basically subconsciously. So if I come across a new word that looks similar to another word, then I might say that same rhythm or same pronunciation, but changing one or two things based on my knowledge of other things. But there's so many exceptions that this just isn't true. It's very common for native English speakers to think that words are pronounced differently or to learn them differently or just to guess differently. And so this also leads way to words not being spelled in a way that is logical. So, spelling bees arise from these two sort of different things. There's a lot of words that are spelled in a little bit of obscure ways. and people's goal who compete in spelling bees is to properly spell words. There's a pretty famous clip of a boy trying to spell iridocyclitis because that is the word that he's given and it's just him saying iridocyclitis because there's also some rules in spelling bees on how you're supposed to do it and yada, yada, yada. So let's get into that a little bit. So they're fairly simple. The idea is that you just need to spell the word, but there's some formality to it. So everybody's on the stage, everybody's at the same place. You can't look at a book or anything like that. You have to know the word. And so you usually come up to the microphone and you're given a word. The announcer, whoever's doing it, I think they might be called the spell master, they give you a word. Your word is iridocyclitis, they might say. And then you have many options you can do, which can help you to figure out the spelling. And so a contestant can say things like, what is the part of speech? Is it a noun? Is it an adjective? Is it an adverb? What part of speech is it? That can help. What is the language of origin? So where did the word come from originally? That can also help. You can also ask for it to be used in a sentence where the spell master has to use the word in a sentence where it makes sense. And there might be other things that you can ask about, but those are, I think, are the main ones. Oh, the definition. You can also ask for what it means, the definition. And then the formal way to spell a word is to say the word and then dispel it. Now, I don't know how to spell iridocyclitis. I have no idea. But the word that we did yesterday was conventions. So I'll spell that one. Your word is conventions. Part of speech, noun. Can you use it in a sentence? He went to three conventions last year. Right, that's the sort of thing. And then I might go, conventions, C-O-N-V-E-N-T-I-O-N-S, conventions. And you say it at the beginning and the end. That's the general gist. It probably changes depending on what spelling bee there is and that sort of thing. But that's the general one, that's what you learn. Now, spelling bees are not very common. Most people do not like them or do them or watch them or anything like that. They're a very niche thing, but they do exist and everybody knows about them, usually because you are forced to compete in some way as a child. they so that they happen in schools in schools and that sort of thing. Um, and it's usually an elementary school thing and that sort of thing. Um, and people also end up having bad, um, bad memories with them because they're, they're sort of, they're difficult cause you have to stand up in front of a crowd of people and all your friends behind you or all other kids behind you and say, if you can spell words or not be, and it's like seen as a, as a thing to make you smarter if you can spell words. They're not very common in other languages, like I said, because there aren't these different quirks. They happen in other English-speaking countries for sure, and even in some other countries that learn English, they use spelling bees as part of it. And there's some versions that happen in other languages. I've heard of similar things in Chinese where kids have to find where the character is in a dictionary since you can't look up the first letter because it's a character. and things like that, but there just aren't a ton of spelling bees held in other languages. There are some, like I'm looking here at the spelling bee Wikipedia page, and it says that there were a couple of decades where there was one for Dutch and Flemish, which is a dialect of Dutch, but it was on a dictation and grammar test, which is not a spelling bee, it's not about spelling, There looks like there was one for Hindi, and there's no more information about it, but that's sort of it. There's similar things, but there's just not the same thing as a spelling bee, which I think is a very interesting thing, which is why I wanted to talk about it. Um, that is pretty much everything about spelling bees that I know. I'm sure there's more facts. I don't know why it's called a bee, for example. Why is it called a bee? I don't know. Um, but yeah, that's all that I have about spelling bees. I hope that this was vaguely interesting to you. Have you ever had to compete? Have you ever had to compete in a spelling bee? Yeah, that's right. Um, in your home country, maybe when you were growing up learning English or something like that. Do you find them interesting? I'd be curious to know. Oh, and if you want to see a bit of about sort of what a Spelling Bee might look like, the first or second episode of one of my favorite TV shows, I think it's the second episode of the show Psych. It has an episode where they go into a Spelling Bee. It's not about a Spelling Bee, but you can kind of see a bit about it. The episode is actually called Spelling Bee with S-P-L-L-I-N-G-G Bee because it's spelled wrong. Yeah, it's the second episode of the entire show. Great show, definitely recommend it. And you can see a bit about sort of what a Spelling Bee kind of looks like, a fancy one rather. But that is a fun show. But yeah, that's all that I have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen and listen to me talk about spelling and B's and all these difficult words. But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of Ben's Language Ideas of English. I'll see you then. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.