I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons.
God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.
You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.
Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.
Coming from Spanish, with just the right diacritics to make pronunciation obvious, at first I didn't get the concept of a "Spelling Bee". Did it involve something besides spelling? Did "Bee" was a metaphor for the actual hard part of it?
I was first exposed to written English, so after trying conversational English, I learned why its pronunciation/writing is a national competition. It might as well be random.
English would have benefited a great deal from an equivalent to the Royal Spanish Academy.
Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures over the millennia.
It is far more organic and mixed from different sources than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down. Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves, such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well as deprecating a few other characters that were in common use in earlier Old English.
I think it's a mistake to view that situation as unique to English.
Spain is still a multi lingual country with several local languages each of them centuries old. But even ignoring that and focusing only on Castilian, there were invasions by goths, who left behind words like ropa or guardar, and Arabic speakers, who left behind words like almacén.
Like English having both cow and beef, there are words with historical overlap but different etymologies and divergent meaning over time. For example almacén and bodega were both words for a warehouse.
There are also tons of words where Spanish had phonetically diverged from latin, but then the same word was re-imported from latin in "educated" use.
What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.
Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are
That’s funny!
But really, these days we have Hollywood and it sorta decides what English sounds like. Even if it sounds different in your town in the USA.
This does not even account for the bizarre spelling of many (most?) English words. For example, letters that are skipped.
The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.
To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info
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Plus the Enlightenment reimported a lot of Greek for science and made a lot of greek morphology productive in the language again or for the first time, at least in scientific vernacular and jargon, but a lot of that makes it into daily use. (It's also why we still have fun debates today over plurals like octopi versus octopuses or matrices versus matrixes; do we follow the Greek morphology through to its Greek plurals or do we just use the boring English plural morphology? We use both, but which you use becomes in part a signifier of "learnedness" or rule-following. As a learnéd nonconformist, I find it more fun to use the English plural morphology here more often than not, but also sometimes silly uses of díacritics.)
Plus English still is extremely active (to this day) in borrowing words from neighboring languages, with a lot of Spanish words directly borrowed (generally from Mexican/Dominican/Puerto Rican influences in US English, then back out to UK English). There are even French words in today's English that weren't Norman Conquest imports, but American Revolution imports (the French were key US allies and neighbors in the Canadian and Louisiana Territories).
There's a lot of jokes/memes that English has always been a language willing to borrow the best words of any language in a similar way that school bullies are often looking for new sources of milk money to extort.
On the other hand an "Noun Gender Bee" would probably be more interesting in Spanish than English? ;)
A simple rule of thumb suffices most of the time, and native speakers will still understand you when you get it wrong.
But yeah, I wish Spanish omitted genders most of the time like Japanese does. It complicates things and adds very little in exchange.
The real kick in the gonads is verb conjugations. Nearly every common verb is irregular and there are something like 18 tenses, times six subjects. Even many native speakers struggle to get them right.
Sure, but saying the word would often give it away.
If anything, I'd guess that when speaking English as second language, harder than knowing the accents on words would just be keeping track of all the exceptions in pronunciation between words that you basically just have to memorize. Tough, though, taught, thought, through, thorough, throughout, etc.
My Greek teacher had trouble with early and yearly
> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.
Totally! I once heard (I think it was in an AvE video) that you shouldn't make fun of someone for wrong pronunciation - it just means they encountered the word in text first - i.e. autodidactically.
I remember a few funny examples of this from my own youth - I didn't know that "dachshund" and what I was hearing as "doxen" were the same thing. I was pronouncing it as "dash-hund" (only realizing after someone pointed this out that it's spelled "dachs - hund" and that the pronunciation makes at least "German sense".)
Also I remember talking about the Led Zeppelin song "D'yer Maker" to someone and pronouncing it like some kind of "fantasy name" - like "Die-er Mah-ker". Only to be told what should have been obvious enough from the music: It's pronounced "Jamaica".
Well both of your words just blew my mind!
It always makes me sad when a language's alphabet is different from their phonetic alphabet because it means that unless you hear how the word is pronounced there's basically no way of know how to pronounce it. Right now I'm learning Portuguese Portuguese and it just makes me so sad that it legit pushed me away from learning the language.
They pronounce 's' at the end on the word the same as how they pronounce 'x' and many many more such examples, basically no word is pronounced the way it's written.
My native language is Slovenian, the way you say the letters in the alphabet is how you pronounce them in 99% of the words and even if you miss-pronounce the 1%, the words are usually so close that people still understand you.
It just really made me appreciate my language even though it has many other things that just makes it difficult to the point that most of my writings are in English, were I don't really need to think about all the rules and can just focus on telling the story.
I'm of the opinion that all languages should use their phonetic alphabet as their alphabet, that way, once you've learned the (phonetical) alphabet you would know how to pronounce all the words. (Unlike in Portuguese where milk is written as 'leite' but it's pronounced very similarly to the word 'light' in English. (not to mention the Brazilian Portuguese)).
And to the Spanish people, your language is just slightly more aligned than Portuguese, but nowhere near as clear as I would like it to be.
I agree with the parent, Greek is much easier to pronounce, at least when compared to Spanish and Portuguese, though though the emphasis of the words not always being at the front of the word can make things a bit difficult, I'm looking at you κοτόπουλο (chicken).
> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.
This is a very popular pro-reading sentiment. The trouble is that you can also read about how to pronounce words.
You can indeed. However, if I knew all of the words I would mispronounce, I would have already looked them up! The trouble with mispronouncing words is that often you’re unaware that you’re doing so.
Respite got me recently.
This is a fun one, because no matter how you pronounce it, if someone tries to correct you, you can just say "American vs British pronunciation"
The best one I've heard was from an extremely bright and well-read friend of mine in high school who once pronounced "formaldehyde" like "formal dee-hide" with emphasis on the "dee" syllable.
Well maybe they were just from rural Texas!
As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.
Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though
I also wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a shame that English does not use diacritics, on the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that diacritics make a language more difficult.
Learning how to use them in Spanish and German takes about an afternoon, and when it comes to learning languages, that’s a negligible amount of time.
Not exactly sure what you mean (in German) but just learning about them and using them correctly are 2 completely different things.
I mean, you could maybe ignore the use of going a -> ä for plural forms, I would argue that learning all these words are part of it.
I'm not saying it's hugely complicated but I've seen enough people struggle with it.
Also agree, you can already use combinations of multiple characters to define other sounds, and that's faster to type too
Shame, though, that in English the sounds that combinations of characters make, aren't well or uniquely defined (e.g. bird, word, hurt, heard, herd, ... all sound like the same vowel)
They're faster to type largely because your keyboard is English. Other languages (French, German, etc) have diacritics right there. Even Japanese isn't that much harder to type once you actually learn it (and, on fact, is quite pleasant on a smartphone even at beginner level).
On the topic of similar word sounds, this is a big thing that hangs up English speakers on romantic languages. Their vowels are sloppy and contextual, so when they're given explicit symbols that say "use this vowel", they struggle to pick that vowel out. That "symbol to sound" wiring isn't up in the noggin'. A Spanish person learning English will see the Spanish equivalent and go "duh". But an English speaker needs those "like in bird" tables.
Luckily, we have a huge phonemic index (because of all the stealing), so we're actually at an advantage from many languages once that hurdle is crossed. Spare tonality.
But that's the point, each language has its own diacritics. There can never be a standard set..
I have French as second and English as my third language. English comes easy and natural because we're saturated by the language. That's one of the reasons my children don't mispronounce English words as often as they do French words. Both languages are equally terrible. On the other hand a few weeks ago my daughter demonstrated a nearly perfect pronunciation of Italian while reading a text without understanding a word. Looks like the Italians got their shit straight. Apart from pistacchio. Nobody pronounces it pistacchio...
Pronunciation to be honest is the least important thing in languages today. Being able to type within mobile and keyboardd is probably the most important.
2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language.
On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as complex as a romanized tonal language like Mandarin (which has to account for 46 unique glyphs once you account for 4 tones over 6 vowels + the 22 consonants). Or you know, the absolute mess that is romanization of Afro-Asiatic languages. El 3arabizi daiman byi5ali el siza yid7ako, el Latin bas nizaam kteebe mish la2e2 3a lugha hal2ad m3a2ade.
> The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about
Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft).
Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”
> Most of us still mispronounce some words
The bureaucratization of language is more problematic in my view, where things are seen as wrong and right and we try to cram the beauty of of natural language into a restricted box that can be cleanly and easily defined and worked with universally. I quite literally have nothing but detest for this conception of language, that it must bend to the whims of rigidity when it's very clearly a natural, highly chaotic dynamic system constantly undergoing evolution in unexpected ways.
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How would you account for the fact that for many words, there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all? For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic.
English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into all the different accents.
It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell the English-speaking community how to spell things or how to say things.
I think these are both advantages that outweigh the phonetic inconsistency.
Same way other dialect continuums account for it: you standardize spelling on some variant, or several variants if that is non-viable (which, yes, does mean that e.g. American and British English spellings would diverge somewhat).
To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history).
Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become incorrect english.
> For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic
Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught, G(a)vin/D(a)vid...
All those examples follow the linguistic patterns of the languages they come from. They aren't arbitrary, they just don't teach us the context when we're learning as children.
Of course there’s always reasons. Teaching it to children isn’t really a solution: you’d need to know where words come from before reading them correctly, and also many people don’t learn English as children.
Phonetic languages do borrow words from other languages too, they adapt them to their own language keeping the pronunciation (the only example coming to mind right now is the Czech for sandwich, sendvič). English could do that just fine being phonetic was a goal
You would know where words came from based on the way they're spelt. That would let you know how to pronounce them. It's the exact same thing people do now we just do it without thinking.
The systems at work in English are not nonsensical like people like to parrot. To say it's not phonetic is just wrong on every level as well.
Frankly I'm fine with the historical oddities that have led to modern English. If non native speakers have issues, that's tough luck for them!
at some point these differences would qualify as different languages...
Draught beer is a linguistic holdout. I think many USA places list it as draft beer.
Does relate to the point that English still doesn't have a central linguistics authority (and likely won't ever). Just various reformers that have been more or less successful and in how distributed their reforms have been. Draught versus draft was indeed one of Noah Webster's proposed reforms that influenced a lot of American spellings and in turn is still influencing UK spellings. It's not as obvious as color versus colour, but there is a bit of US versus UK in draft versus draught.
(Webster also went on to suggest dawter over daughter, to remove more of these vestigial augh spellings, but that one still hasn't caught on even in the US. Just as the cot/caught split is its own weird remaining reform discussion.)
Pronunciation is not mandated to be correct or wrong, as long as you're within a radius, it's good. Pronunciation has changed in languages before enmasse. Look at big vowel.shift
> It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24, or German's 25.
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but German has around 45 phonemes according to all sources I could find, depending on how you count: 17 vowels (including two different schwa sounds), 3 diphthongs, 25 consonants.
Edited for accuracy, thanks.
If Arabic had to cater to afro-asiatic dialects phonemes then the script would have been even more messier. I'm a speaker of one, and my dialect is heavily influenced by the indigenous Tamazight language. and I think this is why many of the Amazigh community were and some still disappointed with the neo-Tifinagh script. While it carries symbolic weight, it doesn’t offer practical readability, phonemic clarity and tech accessibility of a modern script that Tamazight deserves. Latin script, ironically, fits Tamazight much more naturally.
You don't have to make a perfect pronunciation system. It's OK if a vowel is pronounced slightly differently, as long as its pronunciation can be predicted from context. Even if it can only be predicted 99% of the time.
Insisting that the writing system captures every little distinction is a common mistake enterprising linguists do (often when designing an alphabet for a bible translation, or "modernizing" the spelling of a language which is not their own). They don't have to. Even if you do it, it won't last long. Letters only have to be a reasonably consistent shorthand for how things are pronounced. People don't like a ton of markers or, god forbid, digits sprinkled into their writing to specify a detailed pronunciation.
English has accumulated inconsistencies for so long, though, that it can't really be said to be consistent anymore. Usually, there are radicals who just cut through and start writing more sensibly here and there (without digits or quirky phonetical markers), cutting down on the worst excesses of inconsistency. But in English, these radicals have been soundly defeated in prestige by conservative writers.
Agreed. We don’t need an IPA level alignment between writing and pronunciation and you never have a workable single system that rejected all speakers.
I do think we could have a “lite touch” reform that cleaned up some of the more egregious cases like “…ough” and some others that trip people up all the time.
Diacritics don't need to be used the way they are in French, i.e. to preserve the original spelling. On the contrary, most languages use them to make their spelling more phonetic.
Nor is there a need for some insane kind of diacritics to handle English. Its phonemic inventory is considerable, yes, but it can be easily organized, especially when you keep in mind that many distinct sounds are allophones (and thus don't need a separate representation) - a good example is the glottal stop for "t" in words like "cat", it really doesn't need its own character since it's predictable.
Let's take General American as an example. First you have the consonant phonemes:
Nasals: m,n,ŋ
Plosives: p,b,t,d,k,g
Affricates: t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ
Fricatives: f,v,θ,ð,s,z,ʃ,ʒ,h
Approximants: l,r,j,w
Right away we can see that most are actually covered by the basic Latin alphabet. Affricates can be reasonably represented as plosive-fricative pairs since English doesn't have a contrast between tʃ/t͡ʃ or between dʒ/d͡ʒ; then we can repurpose Jj for ʒ. For ŋ one can adopt a phonemic analysis which treats it as an allophone of the sequence ng that only occurs at the end of the word (with g deleted in this context) and as allophone of n before velars.
Thus, distinct characters are only strictly needed for θ,ð,ʃ, and perhaps ʒ. All of these except for θ actually exist as extended Latin characters in their own right, with proper upper/lowercase pairs, so we could just use them as such: Ðð Ʃʃ Ʒʒ. And for θ there's the historical English thorn: Þþ. The same goes for Ŋŋ if we decide that we do want a distinct letter for it.
If one wants to hew closer to basic Latin look, we could use diacritics. Caron is the obvious candidate for Šš =ʃ and Žž=ʒ, and we could use e.g. crossbar for the other two: Đđ and Ŧŧ. If we're doing that, we might also take Čč for c. And if we really want a distinct letter for ŋ, we could use Ňň.
You can also consider which basic Latin letters are redundant in English when using phonemic spelling. These would be c (can always be replaced with k or s), q (can always be replaced with k), and x (can always be replaced with ks or gz). These can then be repurposed - e.g. if we go with two-letter affricates and then take c=ʃ x=ð q=θ we don't need any diacritics at all!
Moving on to vowels, in GA we have:
Monopthongs: ʌ,æ,ɑ,ɛ,ə,i,ɪ,o,u,ʊ
Diphthongs: aɪ,eɪ,ɔɪ,aʊ,oʊ
R-colored: ɑ˞,ɚ,ɔ˞.
Diphthongs can be reasonably represented using the combination of vowel + y/w for the glide, thus: ay,ey,oy,aw,ow.
For monophthongs, firstly, ʌ can be treated as stressed allophone of ə. If we do so, then all vowels (save for o which stands by itself) form natural pairs which can be expressed as diacritics: Aa=ɑ, Ää=æ, Ee=ɛ, Ëë=ə, Ii=i, Ïï=ɪ, Oo=o, Uu=u, Üü=ʊ.
For R-colored vowels, we can just adopt the phonemic analysis that treats them as vowel+r pairs: ar, er, or.
To sum it all up, we could have a decent phonemic American English spelling using just 4 extra vowel letters with diacritics: ä,ë,ï,ü - if we're okay with repurposing existing redundant letters and spelling affricates as two-letter sequences.
And worst case - if we don't repurpose letters, and with each affricate as well as ŋ getting its own letter - we need 10: ä,č,đ,ë,ï,ň,š,ŧ,ž,ü.
I don't think that's particularly excessive, not even the latter variant.
Now try to get close to a billion people around the world with already varied cultures to follow the "new" rules of their native language.
I'm well aware that any kind of English spelling reform is non-viable for backwards compatibility reasons.
But that is a different argument from saying that English can't use diacritic-based orthography because the phonemic inventory is too complex.
I'll just say that learning Serbian Cyrillic in two days and knowing instantly how to pronounce any word I read was amazing.
Agreed.
Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation.
In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle.
I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the ability.
Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as lowercase letters.
Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.
If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away.
Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's origin (ex: ^ means the words is greek) ; I don't get why it stopped you from learning the language.
> Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.
“Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…)
If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood
I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is more of a France french issue. You will be understood eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures
It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect?
France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).
English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…
I don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).
Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?
Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish:
"No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."
In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barato" modifies "espectáculo," meaning that the show is cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap.
It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway, but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're thinking about this super consciously, you just know the word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-native to learn than all the irregular spellings of English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English speaker.
It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.
One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.
Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.
It is my favourite language to read and write.
I am English though.
Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.
I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense.
This takes a lot of time, effort, and interest however, which is why many (most?) people think English is nonsensical.
You can also have a (maybe wrong) sense of familiarity that feels like it makes sense.
I'm ESL but after so many years of daily contact I find writing stuff in English easier than in my native German. Never lived anywhere else. I'm not claiming it's free of errors but it just feels like less work.
None of English is nonsense. But without diacritics, you need to know the historical contexts behind the different spelling or pronunciations to understand the rules.
> excessive writing marks
In English I need to find how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"? Why "though" sounds closer to "throw" than "through" or "thought"? Those differences are encoded in a unclear way that there are more exceptions than rules.
Portuguese (my native language) is not perfect in that sense, but at least it has more rules than exceptions. Part of that is because we use the diacritic marks.
Then, I prefer excessive writing marks than excessive unclear special cases
Rules exist, but most are never taught and instead only learned through exposure. It's why "ghoti" is a trick - you have to break several rules of English pronunciation to get "fish" out of that.
Here's a page where someone tried to reconstruct as many of those rules as possible: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html - obviously it can't eliminate all exceptions but it does surprisingly well.
Rules 6-8 are relevant to one of your examples, including the explanation afterwards.
The complexity of these rules, and the number of exceptions that you need to learn notwithstanding the rules, can be roughly estimated for any given language by training a language model on word <-> IPA correspondence for that language (using a subset of the vocabulary as a training set), and then seeing how well it can predict the remaining words. You can run it in either direction, too, to separately measure the difficulty of reading (word -> IPA) and writing (IPA -> word) that language.
This was actually done for a number of languages including English:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321
You can see how languages with true phonemic spellings tend to be in the >90% range on both reading and writing, with Esperanto at 99%. Spanish and German are in 60-80% range. English is dismal at ~30% for both, though, with only French and Chinese being harder to write, and all other languages tested being easier to read.
Nice!
I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going strong!
This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.
It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at English-speaking children, might help those adults learning to speak & read English if they could put up with being addressed as if they were a child.
[1] https://www.hookedonphonics.com/reading/phonemic-awareness/
> how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?
From what I could easily research, Portuguese has a pretty wide variety of vowel sounds, but it still pales in comparison to the Germanic languages that English took from; and across the spectrum of English dialects and accents you can end up hearing pretty much anything vowel-like that the human voice apparatus can generate. The strength of the difference between "men" and "man" will depend on who's speaking, but it's generally less than Portuguese phonology can accommodate. The "e" sound here should be familiar; the "a" sound not so much. Spanish (and, say, Japanese) learners of English will have much the same problem, but more so; their natural "e" is a bit off.
(From what Wikipedia is telling me, many Brazilian Portuguese dialects will use the right /ɪ/ sound for "bitch" in unstressed syllables. But then, my local accent contrasts /ɪ/ with /i/ quite strongly.)
On the flip side, I struggled with pronouncing Dutch when I made a brief attempt to pick it up; the individual sounds are all straightforward enough, but certain combinations are really unnatural.
> What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?
Those words all have completely different vowels in English; they're not irregular spellings. If you can't tell the difference, you probably just haven't listened to enough English or have said them incorrectly too much to tell the difference.
I think that's probably more because English uses etymological orthography.
So spelling rules are based on four distinct "primary" systems of phonics that can be used depending on whether the word or morpheme has a Germanic, Greek, Latin or French origin. (Yes I know French comes from Latin origin, but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French.) And then the Germanic and French origin words can get even messier because their spelling was standardized before the Great Vowel Shift. And then whenever we take loanwords from other languages that use the Latin alphabet, we preserve that language's spelling. Which creates a whole mess of special cases where the spelling doesn't follow any of the regular phonetic rules.
If you look at languages where the writing system is famously difficult to learn, a common element they all share is etymological orthography.
>but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French
In fact it can be even more complicated because in English the words can come from Norman dialects and "typical" French simultaneously. For example, warden and guardian come from the same word in Old French, the former is closer to how Normans pronounce it and the latter is closer to its modern French pronunciation.
How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.
In Portuguese, they indicate that a syllable is stressed and alternate ways to say the vowels. e.g. "país" is stressed in "i" and means "country", while "pais" is stressed in "a" and means "parents". Tilde (~) indicates that the vowel is nasal, e.g. the "ã" in "São Paulo" means that it sounds like the "u" in "sun"; the default sound of "a" in Portuguese is the same as in "car".
Accent marks give additional phonetic information.
because you know the stress syllable by looking at the word. take Desert and Dessert, do we say DES-ert or des-ERT. Also in portuguese, at least, I can know which "e" sound [1] each "e" in the word makes by knowing this (well, almost, but not completely, but much better than English.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you? I am kinda confused here, these words have distinct meanings and sounds.
> Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you?
Not exactly the same, but I differentiate them more based on the context than in the pronunciation.
Giving an example for Portuguese that has about the same difference: "roupa de lá" (clothes from there) and "roupa de lã" (wool clothes). If you write them in Google Translate or similar you'll see the difference, which is very subtle for non-Portuguese speakers but sounds completely different to us.
Portuguese has a ton of such examples.
"O meu canto" can mean "My corner" and "My singing".
"Conselho" means "advice" and "Concelho" means "council".
"Aço" means steel, and "Asso" means "I roast".
All of these pairs sound exactly the same.
Maybe Jazz Emu is onto something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0
I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the Internet's language wasn't just shaped by politics or economics, but by something as simple as which language was more convenient to type.
Tangential: Ùù has always seemed immensely silly to me. It’s given an entire key on the CSA keyboard despite only being officially used in 1 non-proper-noun word: où. It’s there solely to disambiguate with ou, the actual phonetics are not affected. Whenever I look down at my MacBook’s keyboard I think it seems a bit out of place haha
I mean that might be part of it, but also because the internet developed out of the ARPAnet which was a United States Department of Defense project, at a time when the United States was one of two superpowers (right as the other superpower stopped being a superpower or for that matter a state), in a world that already gave pretty heavy weight towards English as the lingua franca in international institutions after World War II or simply because it was the lowest-common denominator in a lot of the world post-the British Empire.
English had a lot of wind beneath its wings. Still does.
A much more simpler answer is the fact that much of the tech and ecosystem for computers was developed and commercialized in the US.
If Silicon Valley was in France, we'd all be using AZERTY and Minitel.
Well, there's this story about how printing failed Arabic. Allegedly, in Italy, they tried to print a Koran, but because the printers didn't speak Arabic, and were trained on Latin scripts, they messed it up so much that the Arab world came to believe printing is not going to work for them. Even though most scientific books of the day were written in Arabic and the best schools spoke the language, it quickly fell out of favor, being replaced by Latin in Europe.
In turn, the Caliphate made a point of standardizing the script and creating libraries which fueled research science for a good few centuries.
----
Even before Internet, languages with diacritics (eg. Russian Ё) were deprecating their use. I believe something similar is happening in German (with ß). Also, languages with long history seen incremental thinning out of the alphabet to remove duplication and rare special cases. Sometimes, the opposite happened, but it was usually brought by reactionary politics, especially inspired by local nationalism which looked for validation in ancient history. So, for example, in the 90s Ukrainians brought back the letter Ґ that was used in only a handful of words, and was happily forgotten during the Soviet times.
So, convenience and suitability for new technology can be a meaningful factor in adoption.
You don't even have to leave English to find examples of printing shifting script. The printing press killed the thorn "Þ" character which made the the "th" sound. It got replaced with either a "y" (which looked sorta-kinda like a thorn) as in "Ye Olde" or a "th", which is how a speaker not accustomed to the sound might approximate it "tuh-huh".
Yes, this is the pragmatic answer.
Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world.
A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)
Do you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there?
Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary information.
Edit: found it https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approvi...
It's just not an executive order as far as I can tell. Not an expert on US governance by any means though.
Edit 2: I mixed up Executive orders and Actions it seems?
From a quick search it seems this was a Presidential Memorandum not an Executive Action.
“Executive orders are generally more formal, require publication in the Federal Register, and must cite the President's legal authority, while memoranda are less formal, may not be published, and do not always require a justification of authority.”
These sometimes get called executive orders, like some memos that trump has signed in the last few months were called executive orders by the news and online.
They are essentially the same though. Memos carry legal weight and can direct agencies to carry out specific actions.
The 11110 thing is a myth, though. The closest that we get to that is that it is number 127 in the NARA's catalogue of the Johnson's public papers for 1968.
Thank you for the correction.
And that would have failed. Because rest of world doesn't use accents. Remember that first typewriters were actually german but English ones have succeeded.
Maybe that makes sense for french vs english, but there are plenty of languages that avoid accents in transcription (despite being just as tonal or more so than english) because they don't have the analytic diction required to discuss the abstract concepts all over programming, computer science, and even just "business".
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I think that's underselling the west's post-WW2 influence and the amount of innovation that was fueled by a booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.
I'd say English's simple, non-accented latin characters being easy to represent mathematically was a happy coincidence.
> booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.
You can't be that naive. Not every country wanted and a lot of them were forced into.
I came here to say the same, I remember the days when some systems only had upper case characters and the character set was limited.
That may have allowed for more control characters they would be allowed in other European Languages.
English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation.
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.
There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.
[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet.
And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea.
Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.
At least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.
The confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay".
The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.
Eh. Only sometimes.
Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing.
English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.
And as a British speaker of English it amuses me that we say "fillit" steak when Americans (afaik) correctly say "fillay". There are others, but I guess there are more 'correct' British English pronunciations of words with origins like this than there are American English.
Some Americans clearly must do this, but personally, I've never heard this in my life until I saw it on a YouTube video of a British person complaining how Americans pronounce words. Obviously, your experience may vary - it's a big country.
The transatlantic dispute over "aluminum/aluminium" seems minor when you consider how English is used globally. Even within Britain, there are considerable variations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Anglos...
The one that gets me, as an American is nuclear vs nucular. Both have been in use verbally and written for decades... academics have adopted the former, even if the latter was more common in most early use. And that's just one, pretty recent example.
>It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language
Which is worse, being unable to correctly pronounce a word (but still being close enough to be understandable) or being completely unable to write a word?
...we all agree that the right pronunciation of "nitch" is "neesh", though, or at least I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary. People just genuinely don't know how to pronounce it because they've only seen it written.
One that still gets me personally is "hyperbole"--I know how it's pronounced but when I read it, I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not. I don't think I've ever made the mistake while reading out loud to someone yet, but it will likely happen some day and when it does I will feel very stupid.
> I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary.
Well, here you go: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niche#did-you-kno...
> I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not.
Same. This is where diacritics would fix the problem: Hyperbolé. Although hyperbolee would also work, of course.
I'd argue that is mostly because 1) people follow audiobook or TV series pronunciations and 2) most discussions happen online and not in verbal form.
This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names.
As someone who has listened to The Stormlight Archive (and The Wheel of Time with the same two narrators), the differences are absolutely there, but they're relatively small.
Fantasy novels predate the widespread popularity of audiobooks. It used to be quite expensive to distribute a large enough volume of audio. The old "books on tape" cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.
"It's pronounced Jandalf!"
Reminiscent of a tweet about the death of the inventor of the GIF, who reportedly said it should be pronounced "jif" — the retweeter's comment was, "I guess he's with Jod."
https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818 (not there anymore; maybe the account holder ditched Twitter)
I don’t think he could be taken seriously with a name like Yandalf.
cue GIF pronunciation war.
It's not pronounced "jraphics interchange format", therefore hard G
And yet it is gif like in gin and giraffe...
And yet there's also girl, gift, gimp, gill, gibbon, and giggle.
But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right?
TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.
> But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right?
Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs.
> TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.
You learn something new every day!
> English is not a phonetic language.
Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is.
The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.
English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of words where it isn't clear what is the correct pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of letters together there are only a few possible pronunciations, often exactly one.
I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.
There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid!
We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.
> We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
We're still taught very basic phonetic rules in English. Like how vowels have a long sound and a short sound, where "ee" is the long e sound, or "<vowel> <consonant> e" triggers the long sound for that vowel. But you're also taught that many words are exceptions (e.g. bear vs beard). And you learn there are patterns to the exceptions, like how "ea," if it doesn't sound like "ee," will sound like a short e, like in "head" or "breadth," and particularly in cases like "dream - dreamt" or "leap - leapt."
And if you do a lot of reading as a kid, you vaguely recognize in the back of your mind some words that seem to follow a different set of pronunciation rules not taught in school (e.g. rouge, mirage, entourage, entrée, matinée, parfait, buffet, memoir, soirée, patois), which you learn implicitly. I remember this as a kid, only later learning those were French.
And this lets you guess pretty well how you'd pronounce a word. Just with basic rules and a lot of input to learn from, you can guess how to pronounce pretty much anything with good accuracy, because there are rules, and even a logic to the exceptions, but the rules are overlapping, so it's more like a set of rules you choose from.
I'd liken it to machine learning. You can learn the rules without even being taught the rules, like I did in the case of French loan words. And there are probably rules we follow without even realizing it, just instinctively thinking it's the natural way to pronounce the word without knowing why.
I'm not saying it's as good as being as phonetic as Italian, but it's not like we just have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of every word as though it were a structureless string of letters and a corresponding, unrelated sound.
Sorry for the long comment.
You can frequently do that in English too. Of course there are exceptions, but if anything it's typically because of words/names from other languages.
In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match its pronunciation.
Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.)
English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.
You are wrong on several levels.
1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel.
2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects.
3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it.
4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
> English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
That's not really true -- there is and was a great deal of dialect diversity within England itself. It was widespread printing that allowed languages to be standardized at the scale of nation-states in the first place: the divergences that developed after the age of sail were reversing convergence that had only begun a couple of hundred years earlier.
And although versions of English from the south and east of England became the basis for modern standard English, other dialects persisted and sometimes spread around the world, so some of the differences between English dialects globally are due to disparate influences from different dialects originating within the British Isles.
being fluent in a language makes you less likely to be interested in a second when everyone speaks the first. This plays out over generations in killing the less common languages.
There is a still a lot more linguistic diversity in Italy than across the entire English speaking world.
e.g. Northern Italian languages are technically more closely related to Gallo-Romance languages from the other side of the Alps than to standard Italian.
I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography?
I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?
> I think you're trying to to argue something like:
I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before.
Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
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Door and pool are pronounced the same where I am, with a drawn out double o sound. When spoken rapidly, the vowel contracts, especially in door.
The door vowel placed between P and L would make the word 'Paul' or 'pall' in most English accents. If I imagine 'door' with the pool vowel, I get something like a Scottish pronunciation of 'dour'.
dew-r pew-l
Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is?
This is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not.
Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet.
Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.
Spanish and Italian are.
There's also Finnish.
blood
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Counter point, anyone that claims English isn't a phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing system is. Or what a gesture language is.
I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.
That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc.
Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
We're discussing features of written language ("phonetic" -- or the etymologically related "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems by their relationship to spoken language.
> Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic
"Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language.
> They even have two fully regular alphabets
I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)
Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It quite literally is relating to spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?
> Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though?
It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language.
But it is not a feature of a spoken language.
> Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language.
But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)
It absolutely is a feature of spoken languages. It is in contrast to vocalizations, specifically because it is about speech and not just the sounds animals can make.
I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes different languages have. If you had to cover all vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit more trouble.
"phonetics" is about speech, but the noun "phonetics" is not the adjective "phonetic" as applied to a language. "phonetic" is not a modifier that applies to spoken language (with the hypothetical caveat I gave upthread), and even if it was, it would have a different definition than the one that applies to non-spoken language and is about the relation such a language has to a spoken language, so trying to redirect to it in a discussion of that use of the adjective "phonetic" would be equivocation, argumentative conflation of different definitions of the same word.
It is hard for me to read this. You seem to have given up on capital letters. And sentences. I don't like criticizing run-on sentences as being indicative of bad thinking; but I do literally feel you grasping here.
I'm largely comfortable with the idea that there is something lacking in the orthography of English. Fully comfortable, even. I'm growing frustrated with how many are pushing the idea that it is not phonetic. The system is literally to convey, in writing, the words that you would speak in English. And the word "phonetic" captures that perfectly.
If you want to argue that we are building a new use of the word "phonetic" applied to writing that supersedes "orthography" and related terms. You do you. It still seems nonsensical to me and only works if you ignore that we have an alphabet that is literally used to convey speech sounds.
The issue at the start of the conversation is not about speaking or gesturing. It is about using the Latin alphabet properly (i.e. phonetically, as it was designed) or "with some imagination" as the English does.
The alphabet is used to communicate the spoken words. Not the concepts or something else, literally the spoken words. Is a big part of why slang is so popular in fiction settings, as they would use the letter to convey pronunciation. Because the letters generally represent phonemes.
> but not regular.
There is "not being regular" and there is "not even trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from time to time".
I learned to read phonetically, sounding out the words. It worked very well. No other scheme for learning to read has worked remotely as well.
I think I was too swayed by Sold a Story; but I am heavily convinced that the non phonics based attempts to teach reading was a massive disaster. And not just for reading literature, but also for reading math. Without learning to effectively interact with symbols, people grow to think they either get the math or they don't.
No Professor or "expert" in the Education field ever advanced their own career by advocating for simple & obvious things which actually worked.
/s?
Yeah, English orthography is a hot mess, but it's still fundamentally phonetic and alphabetic. Just try to learn to read Japanese or Chinese, and you'll very quickly come to miss English's pile of nonsense.
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules
Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.
The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.
There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much.
But, french is much worse!
According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than English for the model of the study, but it's really close. Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so I am obviously biased.
Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled. The same is not true in English. Americans complain a lot about french spellings '-ioux', 'eau', etc. but they offer no gripe over the difference between '-ough' in 'enough' vs 'through'.
French is funny to me because the written language and the spoken language are in some ways quite different, with written french introducing considerable complexity. aller, allait, allais, allaient, alleé, etc. Since the spoken context for all the conjugations is almost always clear, I'm not sure why someone introduced the extra complexity.
> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.
It's far from as bad as English, but here's a Reddit thread with lots of French words which are not spelt as they are written. Not esoteric words either; along the lines of hier and monsieur
https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1269a2x/is_there_a_...
> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.
Whoa, very much not! I have spent the last 20 years trying to learn how to pronounce french words (my partner is a native french speaker, so I keep trying). The only somewhat consistent pattern I have is that the last few letters of each word are often silent, but even that is not really always consistent.
I'm fluent in 4 languages but french is an impossibly tough nut to crack for me.
I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood.
Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.
> For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before.
Because pronunciation rules exist, they're just never explicitly taught and instead learned through exposure. For example, here's someone reconstructing as many of the rules as they can: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
South Slavic languages have 1-1 mappings thanks to an engineer in disguise [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87#Linguis...
It's really not that hard. Some other examples of the same include Belarusian (albeit with Cyrillic alphabet) and Finnish.
Finnish is extremely easy, there is one sound for each letter and zero exceptions.
Spanish is also very predictable. While there are a few exceptions (like 'c' can be 'c' or 's'), they are very easy rules to follow, so never any surprises.
English and French are in the batshit crazy category. It's pretty much all random, you just have to know from memorization.
French is very hard to write correctly, but it's pretty easy to read - while rules are weird, they are also quite consistent.
English is hard to both read and write.
> But, french is much worse!
Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard. It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the time.
French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.
French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.
An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie", which I think most French natives would likely get wrong
Not nearly as bad as the English pronouncing, say, the name Cholmondeley :-)
I would expect that spelling bees would select words that are not phonetically spelled. This selection bias does not imply that English does not have productive pronunciation rules.
True, in that spelling bees will select for harder words.
But the fact that such words exist, in such large quantities that memorizing them all is so challenging that this becomes a competitive sport, is why engligh is so impossible.
Dutch, which has a pretty reasonable sound-to-orthography mapping (some exceptions of course, but not all that many) also has spelling bees. Often won by the Belgians.
> Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.
> The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.
That's two exact opposite things.
Languages for which you know how to pronounce a word just from its written form => you can have spelling bee competition there.
Languages for which you know how to write a word when you hear it pronounced => no spelling bee competition.
I'll take French as an example : if you see "o", "au", "eau" in a word you know how to pronounce it. There is one and only way. But if you hear "o" in a word then good luck knowing how to write it. So you got dictées (spelling bees) even if you can easily guess how a written word sounds like. The existence of spelling bee competition in the English world is not proof that the language written word pronunciation are a guess.
As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it.
Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
Portuguese and German are like that.
You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.
English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms.
English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well.
Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know exactly how it’s pronounced.
Or live and live, read and read (past participle), or castle (the t is mute) or bear, beard, the ea is different.
I do not want to be offensive, there are lots more , but it is an amazing sh*tshow the mapping.
If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)
At least that's often spelled "fo'c'sle" these days, which gives you a good idea of the actual pronunciation.
My personal favorite in English is "colonel" being pronounced the same as "kernel". Which is insane even from an etymological perspective because the word is a derivative of "column" (as in, a colonel is someone who commands/leads a column of soldiers).
Yes, an incredibly rare use of double apostrophes in English! More uncommonly you'll see bo's'n as well, for boatswain.
Hahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like undecipherable.
A lot of nautical terms have unusual pronunciations. English sailors primarily came from coastal regions, and were very happy to have a lingo that was incomprehensible to the landsman. All of this carried over to North America as well.
its just elision. "four-cassle" vs "fo'k'sul."
French is a lot less bad than English in this regard. In French you can usually (though not always) predict how a word is pronounced from its spelling, but not vice versa. In English, both directions are impossible.
French is not a good example. Pronunciation often deviates from spelling in French (e.g. many silent letters and inconsistent mappings).
Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written, as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and English are of type deep orthography.
Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.
The silent letters are not the point - that's why the poster you replied to said it doesn't work speech->writing in French. But writing->speech is much, much more consistent than in English, even if the orthography itself is kinda criminal with all the silent letters and whatnot.
I am inclined to agree.
I've only really been exposed to French in music, where I've sung various French pieces of the years. But from my experience, at least French is consistent? As-written is as-pronounced.
Is this not really the case, and therefore is French also guilty of having the same vowels/consonants pronounced differently for completely arb reasons?
Fritteuse.
My son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds). English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500 graphemes.
Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.
The rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?
(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.
I spent time in the "Rio de la Plata" area in the late 1970s, mainly Montevideo, and learned rioplatense Spanish, and would use the ZH sound as in "meaSure" for Y/LL letters in "playa" and "calle".
In the last 40 years I've spent mostly in the USA I rarely have heard Uruguayan/Argentinian Spanish in person or in media, but was surprised to hear Messi and others in recent interviews use SH as in "puSH" for the Y/LL, this apparent has been a generational shift in that area, first in Argentina and then Uruguay. I'd sound old-fashioned if I were to go back to Montevideo these days.
I see what you mean. I think you should stick to one form and learn by difference or you could quickly get lost.
"ll" in standard spanish is a strong english "y".
However, in spanish argentinian from the area of Buenos Aires (but not the argentinian Córdoba, which sounds more like colombian spanish) it is "sh", being that s something like a mix in-between of "j" and "s" + h as in "she" but the sound is a bit different.
Without being able to record some sound I cannot express it better but I am sure you can find something around. Javier Milei, the president, has such an accent.
AFAIK "ll" can also be the palatalized "l" sound in some dialects, i.e. in the same relationship to regular "l" as "ñ" is to "n". Indeed, this is the original pronunciation from which all others have diverged.
as has been stated many times in this thread, the rules are also very clear in English. They just aren't taught.
I think that must have been within one dialect. If you include all dialects of English (Scottish, Irish, Australian, Singaporian, Indian, American, etc. etc.) I'm sure you have a lot more than 43 phonemes.
In any case, her point wasn't to give a lecture on linguistics, but to impress upon the parents how complicated English really is to learn to read.
The dialects I can buy it but I think the x has only two ways? It is a very regular language from the point of view of the written mapping to sound.
x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, like the English “sh” in Xcaret, like s in xenofobia and like English “x” in extremo.
The first two are not productive now in normal Spanish words: they are only used in old spellings that have irregularly been retained, and in loanwords from indigenous languages. But they do exist.
Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from Spain.
Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursión is "ks" In fsct, Méjico is the traditional way to write Mexico in Spanish grom Spain until it was accepted the other form a few years ago. I still write "Méjico" myself.
Since less than 10% of Spanish speakers are from Spain, there’s no reason to assume you were specifically talking about that one country when referring to the Spanish language in general.
And anyway, as you point out, even in Spain the form México is accepted now.
I thought it is perfectly reasonable to talk about spanish from Spsin the same you talk about English from England.
After all, it is where they come from originally and have their own spelling (colour vs color, etc.)
An x in standard spanish has always been the two sounds I told you and that mexican deviation is specific to Mexico.
Yes, it is over 100 million speakers but I was still assuming the root language in its original place as the reference. Sorry if I did not express it correctly.
- [deleted]
I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples.
The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.
True, I forgot that detail. Ximenez did exist in fact and I forgot that. So it must be that.
Dialects are different since they are still internally consistent.
> phonemes (sounds the mouth makes)
This isn't entirely correct. A distinct sound that the mouth makes is a "phone". A phoneme is almost always a group of several phones - allophones - that native language speakers perceive as a single sound. Another way to phrase it is that if you change one phoneme to another one, it makes a different word (possibly a non-existing one, but regardless the native speakers would consider it distinct), but changing from one phone to another doesn't change the word.
For example, in English, the phoneme /t/ has allophones [t], [tʰ], [ɾ], or [ʔ] depending on context. OTOH [ɾ] is a distinct phoneme in Spanish, and [ʔ] is a distinct phoneme in Arabic.
Unfortunately these two are often confused, so one should be careful with such counts and comparing them - it's not uncommon when people count phonemes in their native language, but phones in other languages (when those phones sound distinct to them).
This can also vary significantly from dialect to dialect, since one very common thing in language evolution is for two similar phonemes to collapse into a single one while retaining the original distinction as allophones. For English, in particular, the number of phonemes varies a lot between American and British English (with the latter having more distinctions).
Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly 1:1
- /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and the u in qu is silent.
- /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are different for c and z.
- r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.
- At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be spelled ua or oa (e.g. Michoacan, Oaxaca) - and also the breathy sound of j can also be written with an x.
- d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)
Not an issue with /s/ in Iberian Spanish. Once you have 'distinción', most ortography errors I've read overseas plummet down there.
qu: the u is always silent and qu is followed by i or e. It is still a systematic way of reading. It is like gue and gui, you pronounce as in "singer" the "ge", the u is mute. If you want to pronounce the u, as in pingüino, you set the diaeresis.
The stress rules, to the best of my knowledge, is very systemaic (not 100% but I would say "almost" at least for the words in use). Even the stress rules are very uniform.
> r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.
This is still systematic reading. At the start of a word it is the strong one, yes. And when it is preceded by a consonant, such as in "enredar" (that is strong r). There is no exception of any kind here.
> d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)
That is some dialects in some areas. We pronounce a clean d at the end in my area (around Valencia). It is also the correct, standard way to do it for spanish. The other is a deviation existing in León, for example.
Yes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because the correct pronunciation would require the word to be written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation rules to the written words.
its just a soft c? other languages have that too. English has soft c's after i, e and y. They probably didn't teach you that rule. its true that most English speakers pronounce soft c's as a "sh" sound these days, but it wasn't always the case.
If it were just a soft C, then "ocean" would sound more like "oh-see-in" or "oce-yin". But it's also been palatalized to sound like "oshin" in typical pronunciation. People might not have understood them because they didn't know this.
> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form.
In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individual morphemes, but not necessary for words, as in written form morphemes are just concatenated (to make words), while in spoken form there may be complex interactions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)
It's not so strict, but we try most time to keep it consistent. For example, here in Buenos Aires we almost don't say the "d" at the end of the word, like in "ciudad" (city), in some pronunciation guides I saw it written with a tiny d.
If the variant get's too popular the two versions become the official spelling, for example "septiembre" and "setiembre" (September) are correct. I hate the second one and I never use it, but it's popular somewhere. After many years, sometime the old spelling disappears and is marked as archaic.
An orthography that surfaces (non-phonemic) assimilation would be phonetic rather than phonemic. For example, many languages assimilate "n" to "m" before "b", but the phoneme is still /n/, and native speakers are often not even aware that this assimilation occurs (which is what indicates that it's still the same phoneme).
Strictly speaking, spanish has the same sound for v and b, unlike other romance languages. G and j when followed by e or i also.
This is true, but Spanish orthography isn't completely phonemic (and simpler for it). It is very shallow and very consistent but it doesn't spell out things like assimilation differences, people are just wrong to describe it as completely phonemic.
as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.
This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'.
Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French.
I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.
I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long.
This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
I believe this is because England was conquered by the Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally stopped speaking French among themselves.
> in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words
Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the result of a modern reform movement, not something that happened naturally within the language.
> [English] never really adopted foreign grammar
There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from Celtic.
As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology.
The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.
> English has a relatively simple grammar
You mean "relatively simple morphology". English phonology and syntax are not simple at all (e.g. lots of information carried by word order).
Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
There's a really good podcast [1] that dives into the background of English. It starts off even further back, talking about PIE and how that affected all the earlier languages of the region. And then starts tying the pieces together on how English was formed.
At least 3:
~26% Germanic
~29% Latin
~29% French
~16% Other
RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3
That might be true if you just count up every word in the dictionary by origin. However if you weight the words by frequency, Germanic will be way higher. That is, if you take a transcript of an average conversation in English, the proportion of words inherited from Old English (i.e., Germanic) will be much higher than 26%.
Almost all the most used words in English are Germanic. Latin in particular is overrpresented because of scientific and technical terms which are rarely used.
It seems hard to measure with any kind of objectivity here, considering how much Latin is in French (and even modern German) as well.
Blame the Normans for that one...well English was already kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the Normans really sealed the deal.
> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
is there no accent variation in Spanish?
Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.
One of the problems in english (not the only one, but one of them) is that for the vowels there are 5 graphs (is this term correct? Sorry but hope it is understandable) but many more sounds. In Spanish there are 5 vowels in the latin alphabet and exactly five sounds and nothing else.
Valencian has 7 sounds though, two for e and two for o. Similarly, Catalan also (and in some circumstances the o sounds as u, when the stress is not in it and other stuff). But they still have quite strict rules.
Yeah but we represent a lot of vowel sounds by combining vowels - 5 letters (not including y), if we allow any combo of two to represent a different sound that's 25 combos, and if we remember that preceding and following consonants can modify vowels too (though, dough, caught bought vs thou, bao, sour, or; on, con, Ron vs how, cow, ow) that's quite a lot of combos.
Now, you can (and should!) accuse me of cherry-picking examples, since the rules are less consistent and/or vastly more complicated than what I represented. But I maintain that there are orders of magnitude more ways to represent vowel sounds than 5, and the clue is the context. Not, as many will suggest, memorizing each individual case (though there's certainly plenty of that going around, much like Spanish's infamous irregularly verb conjugations), but understanding categories and families and patterns.
English sounds usually are best understood with groups of three letters, rather than one letter at a time. If you looks at throuples, you'll likely find far more of that consistency we all so deeply desire.
Yes, English is VERY consistent. The problem is that there are multiple systems working inside English vocabulary, so you have to get familiar with more than one rule set.
You're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not random deviations from spelling norms.
In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or Korean.
I don't know if Korean is ultimately that good. Hangeul are a monstrous improvement over the old mixed script (which itself is better than the Japanese iteration because the Koreans only used Chinese characters for Chinese loans), but it still has a lot of sound change rules and can be a bit of a pain to read because of how letters flow to the next syllable. It's not in the same league with Finnish or Spanish, at any rate.
Yeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.
For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write:
In Argentina: "autito"
In Colombia: "autico"
In Spain: "autillo"
the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.
In Spain you'll listen the three cases at once and all of them are perfectly valid.
-ito it's almost the universal way everywhere in the Hispanic world.
-ico it's widely used in the South of Navarre and Aragón and everyone will understand you. Heck, it's the diminutive from used by the hick people, and thus, it's uber known, altough you might look like a bumfuck village redneck sheepherd with a beret by using -ico outside of Navarre/Aragón.
-illo it's more from the South, but, again, understood everywhere.
In Argentina everyone will understand you, but if you don't use "ito" then people may ask where are you from.
"ico" is used in many countries of Central America and Caribe. I asked someone from Colombia, so I'm sure about Colombia but I'm no sure about every other country.
Is "illo" used in Madrid? I think I heard it in movies or TV programs from Spain.
Yes, it's used, all over the whole country.
The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.
But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.
Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner.
But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers either.
It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.
That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
If you’re seeing a word for the first time, it is pretty useful - partly with pronunciation but definitely with meaning.
You do have to have some familiarity with the source languages, but if it’s an unfamiliar but nativized word, those are almost always ultimately Latin or Greek.
If you're seeing the word for the first time and need to figure out how to pronounce it, how would you know that “y” is acting as a vowel and not as a consonant in the first place?
If it's followed by a vowel, it's likely a Germanic word: yule, your, young, yellow (and you probably know the word, since our core vocabulary is still mostly Germanic). If it's at the end or between consonants, like syllabary or ontogeny, probably Greek.
You might also just happen to know a smattering (or even a lot) of Greek and Latin.
But if you had known it (aka, if anyone had taught it to you), it wouldn't be useless, as you would know the context and how to pronounce it...not to mention the meaning behind it
Im a materials scientist and I use etymology every day.
Knowing etymology is a an easy way to memorize things.
> But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.
Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.
Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.
Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about college level reading, but that is more about mastery of topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)
I learned how to read in six months.
My kid took two and half years.
The Chinese take 10 years.
So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?
English is not a phonetic language and it also lacks accents.
Saying it has pronunciartion rules it is an strech. You have conventions.
In languages like spanish if you read a word, is very hard to misspronounce it.
no, for the millionth time, English has rules, NOT conventions, you just need to know the historical context behind the multiple rules.
> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization
It can't be an affrication, because /