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I'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I suspect that En

I'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I suspect that English will fossilise its current orthography and turn words into logograms composed of Latin letters, similar to Chinese. [1]: https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678 https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678

yborg 8y ago
Except English pronunciation, just like the pronunciation of every other human language hasn't been stable for centuries and English has so far failed to "fossilize its current orthography". And there are plenty of other languages with local variants and unstable pronunciation with phonetic alphabets. Japanese has two.
BerislavLopac 8y ago
Every single living language out there has unstable pronunciation and a lot of local variants. A language is a living thing and is constantly in the flux, both through time and space. One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by Norman scribes. English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language, French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose decisions might be accepted by all of them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_numbe...

yborg 8y ago

Except English pronunciation, just like the pronunciation of every other human language hasn't been stable for centuries and English has so far failed to "fossilize its current orthography". And there are plenty of other languages with local variants and unstable pronunciation with phonetic alphabets. Japanese has two.

BerislavLopac 8y ago

Every single living language out there has unstable pronunciation and a lot of local variants. A language is a living thing and is constantly in the flux, both through time and space. One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by Norman scribes. English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language, French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose decisions might be accepted by all of them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_numbe...