Ingglish False Friends Analysis
When an English word is translated to Ingglish, it sometimes produces a spelling that matches a different existing English word. These are false friends: they look like familiar English words but have different pronunciations in Ingglish. They are not collisions: each Ingglish spelling maps to exactly one pronunciation, so there is no ambiguity in the system.
Summary
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Total words analyzed | 117,493 (lowercase alphabetic words from cmudict's ~126,000 entries) |
| False friends (Ingglish matches different English word) | 1,360 |
| False friends involving common words (freq >= 20 /M) | 175 |
Is This a Problem?
Rarely. Looking at the data:
- Most false friends translate common words to obscure words (rait, wont, heer, fain, hou, uv). You'll rarely encounter these in normal text.
- Only 7 involve two common words: uh→u, yeah→ya, white→wait, ass→as, place→plays, side→said, mine→main
- Part of speech differences resolve most cases: white (adj) → wait (verb) are grammatically distinct
- Context resolves these just like English homophones (their/there/they're)
False Friends (Common Words)
Frequency shows per-million rates from the SUBTLEX-US corpus (Brysbaert & New 2009, "Moving beyond Kučera and Francis," Behavior Research Methods). The Ingglish column is also an English word.
| English | Ingglish | Freq /M |
|---|---|---|
| uh | uh (interjection) | 736 → 736 |
| of | uhv (not a word) | 11,882 → rare |
| right, write, rite | rait (soak flax) | 4,114 → rare |
| how | hou (place suffix) | 3,136 → rare |
| yeah | ya (you informal) | 3,063 → 154 |
| want | wont (habit) | 2,831 → 2 |
| here, hear | heer (yarn measure) | 4,644 → <1 |
| ass | as (preposition) | 232 → 2,274 |
| side, sighed | said (past of say) | 206 → 1,138 |
| white | wait (verb) | 176 → 852 |
| place | plays (verb/noun) | 619 → 31 |
| fine | fain (gladly/archaic) | 614 → <1 |
| while, wile | wail (cry) | 359 → 1 |
| wife | waif (homeless person) | 358 → <1 |
| since | sins (wrongdoings) | 323 → 9 |
| turn | tern (seabird) | 315 → <1 |
| case | kays (kilometers/slang) | 290 → rare |
| mine | main (primary) | 258 → 44 |
| matter | mater (mother/Latin) | 380 → 2 |
| else | els (elevated trains) | 461 → <1 |
Notable False Friends
white → wait: adjective → verb. Different parts of speech make this unambiguous: "the wait house" is grammatically odd. Note: "wait" translates to "wayt", so reverse translation works.
ass → as: noun → preposition. Grammar resolves this easily - "as" never appears where a noun would.
place → plays: noun → verb/noun. Same part of speech possible, but "plays" as noun means theater works. "In the first plays" sounds wrong.
side → said: noun → verb (past tense). Different parts of speech in most contexts, though "said" can be an adjective in legal English ("the said document"). Note: "said" translates to "sed".
mine → main: noun/pronoun → adjective. Different parts of speech. "The main entrance" vs "the mine entrance" - grammar disambiguates. Note: "main" translates to "mayn".
Homophone Groups
Ingglish merges homophones (words that sound identical). This isn't a collision problem - it's just how phonemic spelling works.
| English | Ingglish |
|---|---|
| laurey, lauri, laurie, laury, lawrie, lawry, loree, lorey, lori, lorie, lorrie, lorry, lory, lowrie (14) | loree |
| carey, carie, carrey, carrie, cary, kairey, kari, karry, kary, kerrey, kerri, kerry (12) | kairee |
| hsu, schoo, schou, schue, schuh, shew, shiu, shoe, shoo, shu, shue (11) | shoo |
| aer, air, ayre, eir, ere, err, eyre, heir, ire (9) | air |
| au, aux, eau, eaux, o, oh, ohh, owe (8) | oh |
| c, cie, sci, sea, see, si, sie, sieh (8) | see |
| ewe, u, uwe, yew, yoo, you, yu, yue (8) | yoo |
Running the Analysis
npm run analyze-collisions -w ingglish