8 ms·

The biggest problem English has in my opinion is that you can't guess what a word is pronounced like..

russellbeattie 9y ago
That's its primary strength as well, as it means that English can adopt a word from any other language and expand without causing any linguistic issues. Most languages are stunted by their formality and rules, but English is already a mongrel. We're happy to import tortilla, hors d’oeuvre, origami, sheikh, schadenfreude and hundreds of other words without a thought, as well as make up new ones on a yearly basis (vape, selfie, etc.). Not many other languages are so flexible, as frustrating as it may be. Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.
- s17n 9y ago
  Loan words are a universal phenomenon.
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    Yeah but he's saying they break pronunciation rules in other languages. They don't in English because the pronunciation is already all over the place. Also, they aren't universal - France tries really really hard to avoid them. They'll make up new French words for concepts that English would just import.
    - Doxin 9y ago
      How is being able to guess how to pronounce a word most of the time worse than never being able to guess?
    - kmm 9y ago
      Loanwords often don't break pronunciation rules in English either. Vladimir, prosciutto, croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words by everyone but the most pedantic, and they sound very different in their origin language. Even surnames arent pronounced "right", cfr. Buscemi
      - strictnein 9y ago
        > ... croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words People may not pronounce croissant like the French do, but they certainly do not pronounce it as written, which would be something like Croy-sant. People say cri-sont.
        beojan 9y ago
        > People may not pronounce croissant like the French do It's pretty close, well within the range of regional variation in English pronunciation.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - FeteCommuniste 9y ago
        Prosciutto and Buscemi are normally pronounced basically right, from what I've heard, setting aside the usual English reduction of unstressed vowels. Italian words typically suffer less deformation than French ones. "Bruschetta" being an exception.
      - russellbeattie 9y ago
        I already gave two examples (and there are many more): Tortilla and hor d’oeuvres. Neither are pronounced phonetically.
- shanghaiaway 9y ago
  There's no reason why other Romance languages can't incorporate loan words in the same way. In fact, they all do. English is nothing special.
  - cryptonector 9y ago
    Sure there is: they tend to have authoritative academies that resist foreign, and particularly English, intrusions in their languages. The French government publishes ridiculous phrase books for avoidance of convenient English loanwords. Quebec goes further, using the power of the law. The Spanish Royal Academy is the keeper of the Spanish language. English has no authorities. Therefore English is able to adapt and evolve, and it is able to more easily borrow from other languages. That's part of the success story for English, no doubt, though obviously the dominance of American soft (and hard) power has a great deal to do with it too.
    - FeteCommuniste 9y ago
      Nobody (or near enough) follows the recommendations of those governmental bodies anyway. People in France say "DJ," not "platiniste," and "hashtag," not "mot-dièse."
- flukus 9y ago
  > Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries. Not so surprising, this is a uniquely american thing~, there is no such thins as spelling bees^ in the rest of the anglosphere either. ~ It's probably bleeding out to the rest of the world now. ^ "spelling bee" itself has an interesting etymology: http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee edit - how the hell do you escape an asterix on HN?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    You don't. Most people use bracketed numbers for footnotes, or obscure characters like †. Also, it's called "asterisk". Asterix only needs to escape from the Romans. ;)
    - Freak_NL 9y ago
      > […] or obscure characters like †. The 'dagger' also called 'obelisk'¹. There's a double dagger (‡) if you need another footnote, but yeah, they're not as versatile as just using numbers. 1: Not to be confused with Obelix: Asterix' chubby friend the Romans are usually (vainly) trying to escape from.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    You can escape an asterisk by separating it with spaces like this: * . Then it won't appear as cursive, even if you use * several * of them. The HN formatting rules are really minimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- darklajid 9y ago
  I'm not sure how that applies. Granted, I have a _very_ limited knowledge of languages. I speak German. And persist/keep trying to reach some level of competency in English. German has French (and English .. and more..) loan words as well. I'd still argue that it's _a lot_ easier and more consistent to pronounce than English. (I might just be entirely blind to German issues that are basically the same, because .. I constantly stumble about English's warts and grew up with the German ones. There's a lot of bias involved, I think)
- jxub 9y ago
  Another one: in Castellano Spanish (not in Latin America though) foreign words are always spoken with their Spanish pronounciation, even the English ones. A funny cultural shock indeed.
johan_larson 9y ago
English is phonetic enough that if you know either the written or spoken form of a word you can take a pretty good guess at the other one, and will almost certainly recognize it if it is presented to you. It's just harder than it needs to be.
- darklajid 9y ago
  Well, I wrote that with the experience of someone that knows no foreign language but English and reads a lot of books. I wish I had a $currency for every time I used a word that I understand, can spell, know well - and got laughed at by people speaking English natively for the mispronunciation.. So I beg to differ: Going from the written form to the pronunciation is failing quite often, at least for me.
cryptonector 9y ago
Nothing a few diacritical marks couldn't fix. Tried, tested, failed. (Benjamin Franklin tried to get Americans to adopt a writing system with diacritics. It didn't take.) Just Spanish-style accent marks for some of the polysyllabic words would be a win, but it doesn't really matter. No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant. If we did adopt stress diacritics we'd end up with more homophones that differ only in stress, which would complicate an already complex language unnecessarily. I like English as it is.
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  > No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant would they now? remember that read rhymes with lead, and also read rhymes with lead
  - cryptonector 9y ago
    Well, whichever "read" or "lead" we're talking about, I'm certain they are pronounced differently by, say, Kiwis, than, say, New Yorkers -- each of us still has to have two prononciations, yeah, but we mostly make do. In the case of "read" and "lead" we just learn this by rote early on, shrug our shoulders, and try not to think too much about it. English has a lot of this, but really, not that much, and at the end of the day it's a pretty accessible language (as demonstrated by the many who speak it as a second or third language). Other languages are more accessible than English. E.g., Spanish. But every language has complexity buried somewhere in it. Spanish has several regular forms of verb irregularities, and also a bunch of irregularly-irregular verbs to boot, with over 4k irregular verbs altogether -- and I'm saying Spanish is more accessible than English, but maybe I'm wrong. French is rather complex, IMO. Like all Romance languages it has a ton of verb conjugations including a ton of subjunctive moods. It has as much phonetic complexity as English, and a ton of orthography rules ("all words that start with af... have a double-f except for Afrique, and some dozen other words I don't remember"). Japanese has Kanji, counters (over a thousand of those), tons of homophones, four writing systems... Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Say no more. Hangul is simple enough, I guess, since it is phonetic, but there must be complexity somewhere in Korean -- perhaps someone will tell us about it, but it's a fair guess on my part that Korean has complexity in it. Russian is famously difficult to learn. Etc..
jcranmer 9y ago
Actually, you generally can. I mean, if I were to type askrillengtauntabuler and to ask you to pronounce it, you'd probably come out with the same phonetics that I used to write it down. The problem English has with pronunciation is that we have a habit of insisting on importing foreign words with foreign pronunciations and insisting that they be spelled with their foreign spelling. Even if the source language isn't written in Latin script. (Bonus points for people who insist on using foreign case rules for converting to plurals, and double bonus points for people who do it wrong and insist that the wrong way is the most correct spelling.)
- nl 9y ago
  The great vowel shift in English meant that words aren't spelt how they sound. This also effects imported words, because sometimes their spelling is pre-vowel shift and sometimes not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  To speak English "correctly" you have to be able to pluralize the Latin, Greek, French, and Germanic way: * octopi * phenomena * tableaux * oxen Mostly this is just used for people to show off their erudition, since it would be easier to understand if everybody used the plural suffix rather than these weird declensions. * octopuses * phenomenons * tableaus * oxes Also, honorable mention for _childs_.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    > * octopi Congratulations on winning the double bonus points! Octopi is not even the correct Latin plural.

That's its primary strength as well, as it means that English can adopt a word from any other language and expand without causing any linguistic issues. Most languages are stunted by their formality and rules, but English is already a mongrel. We're happy to import tortilla, hors d’oeuvre, origami, sheikh, schadenfreude and hundreds of other words without a thought, as well as make up new ones on a yearly basis (vape, selfie, etc.). Not many other languages are so flexible, as frustrating as it may be. Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.

s17n 9y ago
Loan words are a universal phenomenon.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Yeah but he's saying they break pronunciation rules in other languages. They don't in English because the pronunciation is already all over the place. Also, they aren't universal - France tries really really hard to avoid them. They'll make up new French words for concepts that English would just import.
  - Doxin 9y ago
    How is being able to guess how to pronounce a word most of the time worse than never being able to guess?
  - kmm 9y ago
    Loanwords often don't break pronunciation rules in English either. Vladimir, prosciutto, croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words by everyone but the most pedantic, and they sound very different in their origin language. Even surnames arent pronounced "right", cfr. Buscemi
    - strictnein 9y ago
      > ... croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words People may not pronounce croissant like the French do, but they certainly do not pronounce it as written, which would be something like Croy-sant. People say cri-sont.
      - beojan 9y ago
        > People may not pronounce croissant like the French do It's pretty close, well within the range of regional variation in English pronunciation.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - FeteCommuniste 9y ago
      Prosciutto and Buscemi are normally pronounced basically right, from what I've heard, setting aside the usual English reduction of unstressed vowels. Italian words typically suffer less deformation than French ones. "Bruschetta" being an exception.
    - russellbeattie 9y ago
      I already gave two examples (and there are many more): Tortilla and hor d’oeuvres. Neither are pronounced phonetically.
shanghaiaway 9y ago
There's no reason why other Romance languages can't incorporate loan words in the same way. In fact, they all do. English is nothing special.
- cryptonector 9y ago
  Sure there is: they tend to have authoritative academies that resist foreign, and particularly English, intrusions in their languages. The French government publishes ridiculous phrase books for avoidance of convenient English loanwords. Quebec goes further, using the power of the law. The Spanish Royal Academy is the keeper of the Spanish language. English has no authorities. Therefore English is able to adapt and evolve, and it is able to more easily borrow from other languages. That's part of the success story for English, no doubt, though obviously the dominance of American soft (and hard) power has a great deal to do with it too.
  - FeteCommuniste 9y ago
    Nobody (or near enough) follows the recommendations of those governmental bodies anyway. People in France say "DJ," not "platiniste," and "hashtag," not "mot-dièse."
flukus 9y ago
> Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries. Not so surprising, this is a uniquely american thing~, there is no such thins as spelling bees^ in the rest of the anglosphere either. ~ It's probably bleeding out to the rest of the world now. ^ "spelling bee" itself has an interesting etymology: http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee edit - how the hell do you escape an asterix on HN?
- majewsky 9y ago
  You don't. Most people use bracketed numbers for footnotes, or obscure characters like †. Also, it's called "asterisk". Asterix only needs to escape from the Romans. ;)
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    > […] or obscure characters like †. The 'dagger' also called 'obelisk'¹. There's a double dagger (‡) if you need another footnote, but yeah, they're not as versatile as just using numbers. 1: Not to be confused with Obelix: Asterix' chubby friend the Romans are usually (vainly) trying to escape from.
- yorwba 9y ago
  You can escape an asterisk by separating it with spaces like this: * . Then it won't appear as cursive, even if you use * several * of them. The HN formatting rules are really minimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
darklajid 9y ago
I'm not sure how that applies. Granted, I have a _very_ limited knowledge of languages. I speak German. And persist/keep trying to reach some level of competency in English. German has French (and English .. and more..) loan words as well. I'd still argue that it's _a lot_ easier and more consistent to pronounce than English. (I might just be entirely blind to German issues that are basically the same, because .. I constantly stumble about English's warts and grew up with the German ones. There's a lot of bias involved, I think)
jxub 9y ago
Another one: in Castellano Spanish (not in Latin America though) foreign words are always spoken with their Spanish pronounciation, even the English ones. A funny cultural shock indeed.

johan_larson 9y ago

English is phonetic enough that if you know either the written or spoken form of a word you can take a pretty good guess at the other one, and will almost certainly recognize it if it is presented to you. It's just harder than it needs to be.

darklajid 9y ago
Well, I wrote that with the experience of someone that knows no foreign language but English and reads a lot of books. I wish I had a $currency for every time I used a word that I understand, can spell, know well - and got laughed at by people speaking English natively for the mispronunciation.. So I beg to differ: Going from the written form to the pronunciation is failing quite often, at least for me.

cryptonector 9y ago

Nothing a few diacritical marks couldn't fix. Tried, tested, failed. (Benjamin Franklin tried to get Americans to adopt a writing system with diacritics. It didn't take.) Just Spanish-style accent marks for some of the polysyllabic words would be a win, but it doesn't really matter. No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant. If we did adopt stress diacritics we'd end up with more homophones that differ only in stress, which would complicate an already complex language unnecessarily. I like English as it is.

TremendousJudge 9y ago
> No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant would they now? remember that read rhymes with lead, and also read rhymes with lead
- cryptonector 9y ago
  Well, whichever "read" or "lead" we're talking about, I'm certain they are pronounced differently by, say, Kiwis, than, say, New Yorkers -- each of us still has to have two prononciations, yeah, but we mostly make do. In the case of "read" and "lead" we just learn this by rote early on, shrug our shoulders, and try not to think too much about it. English has a lot of this, but really, not that much, and at the end of the day it's a pretty accessible language (as demonstrated by the many who speak it as a second or third language). Other languages are more accessible than English. E.g., Spanish. But every language has complexity buried somewhere in it. Spanish has several regular forms of verb irregularities, and also a bunch of irregularly-irregular verbs to boot, with over 4k irregular verbs altogether -- and I'm saying Spanish is more accessible than English, but maybe I'm wrong. French is rather complex, IMO. Like all Romance languages it has a ton of verb conjugations including a ton of subjunctive moods. It has as much phonetic complexity as English, and a ton of orthography rules ("all words that start with af... have a double-f except for Afrique, and some dozen other words I don't remember"). Japanese has Kanji, counters (over a thousand of those), tons of homophones, four writing systems... Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Say no more. Hangul is simple enough, I guess, since it is phonetic, but there must be complexity somewhere in Korean -- perhaps someone will tell us about it, but it's a fair guess on my part that Korean has complexity in it. Russian is famously difficult to learn. Etc..

jcranmer 9y ago

Actually, you generally can. I mean, if I were to type askrillengtauntabuler and to ask you to pronounce it, you'd probably come out with the same phonetics that I used to write it down. The problem English has with pronunciation is that we have a habit of insisting on importing foreign words with foreign pronunciations and insisting that they be spelled with their foreign spelling. Even if the source language isn't written in Latin script. (Bonus points for people who insist on using foreign case rules for converting to plurals, and double bonus points for people who do it wrong and insist that the wrong way is the most correct spelling.)

nl 9y ago
The great vowel shift in English meant that words aren't spelt how they sound. This also effects imported words, because sometimes their spelling is pre-vowel shift and sometimes not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
pc2g4d 9y ago
To speak English "correctly" you have to be able to pluralize the Latin, Greek, French, and Germanic way: * octopi * phenomena * tableaux * oxen Mostly this is just used for people to show off their erudition, since it would be easier to understand if everybody used the plural suffix rather than these weird declensions. * octopuses * phenomenons * tableaus * oxes Also, honorable mention for _childs_.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  > * octopi Congratulations on winning the double bonus points! Octopi is not even the correct Latin plural.