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I've learned a lot of languages and they all have their problems. E.g. the horribly complicated broken Kanji characters in Japanese and Chinese. E.g. the almost

I've learned a lot of languages and they all have their problems. E.g. the horribly complicated broken Kanji characters in Japanese and Chinese. E.g. the almost completely pointless genders in German, and resulting requirements for other words changing in regular and irregular ways in agreement. Similarly verb tenses are insanely over-complicated. English is reasonably easy to learn compared to many other languages. It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because in the written language different words that sound the same are spelled differently. Making the written language phonetic would create ambiguity.

adrianratnapala 9y ago
> It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because ... Of what you say and lots of things too. Much of the existing mess is caused by spelling "reform" of the ages past, such as when the Norman scribes half-replaced the conventions evolved by Anglo-Saxon scribes with French ones. It's not very different from https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
Some things about English are easier than other languages, but it’s spelling is uniquely complicated. There are roughly 55 phonemes in English and 1500 distinct spellings for them. In most languages the ratio is closer to 1:2, not 1:30. Phonetic writing could increase ambiguity but in many cases will not because: (a) Many of the weird redundant spellings only show up in multi-syllabic words that are quite distinctive, as for example ti for ʃ in caution. (b) People often can tell apart many shorter homophones, which are frequently mis-spelled by being substituted for each other: road/rode, or their/they’re/there. The fact they are frequently substituted for one another is a clue to the degree which context disambiguates them.