3 ms·

by "phonetically broken" I think he means that there is not enough consistency regarding what you write and what you pronounce. I give you some examples: door a

by "phonetically broken" I think he means that there is not enough consistency regarding what you write and what you pronounce. I give you some examples: door and tool. The same two letters 'oo' are pronounced differently. 'en' in 'broken' and 'en' in 'enough'. I suspect Italian, Romanian and Spanish inherited some consistency from Latin where AFAIK 'a' is pronounced the same everywhere and even in combination with other letters it's still very predictable and the same is valid for nearly all the vowels and consonants. I don't know Portuguese but French is definitely "broken" too ('o' = 'au' = 'eau' = 'aux' = holly cow !)

curun1r 11y ago
It's interesting that you chose the word 'enough' but didn't talk about the end of the word. Because the 'ough' construction in English is perhaps the best example of what you're talking about. There are 10 [1] ways to pronounce those 4 letters, though only 6 in American English. My Spanish teach was fond of telling us, "There are no Spanish spelling bees." It was his lighthearted way of telling us to memorize the few pronunciation rules of the language so that we could easily parse what we were hearing and pronounce what we were reading. But inherent in his comment was a reference to the lack of consistency in English. This lack of consistency means that speakers need to memorize more. If we were talking about a programming language, we'd say that the language has unnecessary cognitive load. Similarly, Spanish and the other romance languages add unnecessary cognitive load by differentiating between masculine and feminine words. Still, of the major European languages, English is probably the one with the largest unnecessary cognitive load, so I can definitely sympathize with those who have difficulty learning it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) P.S. As an aside, I always thought Antirez was much better at written English communication than he appears to be. There's something about having corresponded with people online for the past 2 decades that has leads me to turn off my inner proofreader until something like the subject matter that was being discussed brings it to the fore.
- gotchange 11y ago
  The problem with Romance languages is that they shifted the burden of complexity from orthography to grammar with all the verb conjugations that a speaker has to memorize in all tenses and moods such as the bloody subjunctive :)
reycharles 11y ago
I find that french is fairly consistent with how to pronounce written words. It's the other way, how to write pronounced words, that is broken. English is just broken either way, IMO.

curun1r 11y ago

It's interesting that you chose the word 'enough' but didn't talk about the end of the word. Because the 'ough' construction in English is perhaps the best example of what you're talking about. There are 10 [1] ways to pronounce those 4 letters, though only 6 in American English. My Spanish teach was fond of telling us, "There are no Spanish spelling bees." It was his lighthearted way of telling us to memorize the few pronunciation rules of the language so that we could easily parse what we were hearing and pronounce what we were reading. But inherent in his comment was a reference to the lack of consistency in English. This lack of consistency means that speakers need to memorize more. If we were talking about a programming language, we'd say that the language has unnecessary cognitive load. Similarly, Spanish and the other romance languages add unnecessary cognitive load by differentiating between masculine and feminine words. Still, of the major European languages, English is probably the one with the largest unnecessary cognitive load, so I can definitely sympathize with those who have difficulty learning it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) P.S. As an aside, I always thought Antirez was much better at written English communication than he appears to be. There's something about having corresponded with people online for the past 2 decades that has leads me to turn off my inner proofreader until something like the subject matter that was being discussed brings it to the fore.

gotchange 11y ago
The problem with Romance languages is that they shifted the burden of complexity from orthography to grammar with all the verb conjugations that a speaker has to memorize in all tenses and moods such as the bloody subjunctive :)

reycharles 11y ago

I find that french is fairly consistent with how to pronounce written words. It's the other way, how to write pronounced words, that is broken. English is just broken either way, IMO.