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I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are man
by kevinios 8y ago
I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them more difficult to pronounce.
Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).
- myth2018 8y ago> A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary. Not by coincidence, in USA they have spelling challenges aired nationwide.
- __david__ 8y agoOh wow, I had never considered that spelling bees might be uniquely English (the language).
- myth2018 8y agoIt's not uniquely english
- kevinios 8y agoIndeed, and I suppose spelling bees makes sense for any language that is not written exactly as it is pronounced, French being one of them. From what I've read so far, Esperanto only has a single way to write every sound it uses, so it would be much less challenging.
- myth2018 8y agoYes. Here in Brazil there are some competitions. It's a challenge indeed (portuguese), but not such a big one. In Esperanto there is a 1-1 relationship between letters and sounds by design, so a spelling bee wouldn't be a challenge.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoWhat you are talking about isn't a problem with the language, it's a problem with the spelling. Which I agree is totally messed up.
- kevinios 8y agoLet me know what you think, but I suspect spelling is not exactly the issue, but rather the fact that there is not a single way to write each sound. There are several sounds possible for each spelling ("ough"). If there were a single way to write each sound, then the spelling in itself wouldn't really matter, as we would only learn the spelling of each sound once and be done with it; we'd always recognize it.
- currymj 8y agoAs linguists will sometimes joke, English spelling is extremely useful, you can look at an English word and tell exactly how it was pronounced 700 years ago. Even native English speakers struggle with it. This is the so-called "curse of the autodidact": when people have read quite a bit on a specialized topic but never had a spoken conversation about it, and mispronounce technical words or place the stress on the wrong syllable.
- kevinios 8y agoInteresting!