6 ms·

Japanese is one of the few languages with a worse writing system than English. Hats off to them for it. I do miss the pre-war spellings though, where they wrote

Japanese is one of the few languages with a worse writing system than English. Hats off to them for it. I do miss the pre-war spellings though, where they wrote things based on 10c pronunciation, eg AU is pronounced OH (like in French). Tibetan is also in pretty desperate need of spelling reform. I’d love to hear replies about other terrible writing systems.

gumby 7y ago
In the scheme of writing systems it's hard for me to see why English is so bad. In general writing (like spoken grammar) is so heavily used that all the "rough corners" get sanded smooth pretty rapidly and continuously. For example, though the histogram of Kanji/Hanzi has a very steep drop-off, it's not that hard for people to recognize and keep track of, because characters that were hard to read at first tend to get restructured or dropped. As far as Indo-European languages go, languages like English and French are quite conservative in spelling and underlying meaning, which means they do diverge from pronunciation but retain semantic clues which help the reader unlock the meaning of unknown words. While languages that continuously reform to try to match pronunciation shifts (e.g. German) discard this info. In addition they have to pick one canonical pronunciation, and themselves typically retain various homophonic issues (e.g. how many ways can you write the sound of ä (I don't mean "ae")). Even as a kid (should be "easy to learn", right?) I struggled far more with the variants of the devanagari alphabet even though it was so phonetic. But hundreds of millions of people use it every day without thinking about it.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  English is pretty bad unless you are a total orthography history nerd. For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method. English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. This is objecting to the .01%--I find it hard to take seriously. English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. It's not always one-to-one, and it's sometimes really weird, but it's generally there. So, if someone sees Xi Jinping in writing, the utterance out of their mouth will be close enough for me to know what they are talking about. However, even when someone completely botches the spelling of a word, there is almost always enough logic behind the error for the person looking at it figure out the actual word meant. That's a really nice feature in a language. (For example--I have seen phlegm or subtle spelled in all manner of ways, but I generally could tell what was meant.). By contrast, lots of the articles talking about Chinese highlight all the really common words that native speakers can't even cough up the kanji for because there is so little phonic correspondence.
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      > English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation It's absolutely not the case and it's actually one of the most mocked feature of English on the internet. The pronunciation of the name of “Sean Bean” is a good example. As a non native speaker, I have had a lot of pain learning the pronunciation of words I've only seen written. In American English, you have at least one direction easy (from pronunciation to spelling) but not in British English. And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        It's actually Sean. Pronounced shawn. Be thankful we didn't get more from Gaelic, where "Laoghaire" is pronounced leery. :) Don't agree US English makes it easier, it's just differently idiosyncratic. Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p If I hear in the US "cull err" and go to spell, I don't end up at color, hearing "sell fone" doesn't lead me to cell phone, etc. Half the problems of English spelling are the three (four in US English, with Webster) significant attempts to simplify spelling over the centuries, and outsourcing some temporarily illegal printing to the Dutch.
- Izkata 7y ago
  Any time this general topic comes up, I like to drop the Chaos Poem as an example, for anyone who hasn't yet encountered it: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
thefringthing 7y ago
Tibetan and French usually come up on lists of worst correspondence between orthography and pronunciation. Irish is also pretty bad. (It makes sense once you learn how it works, then stops making sense once you hear people of different dialects actually pronounce words.)
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  French is terrible in one direction: pronunciation to spelling is a nightmare, as most sounds can be written in a least 3 ways. «un» «um», «in», «im», «ain», «aim» and «ein» are pronounced the same, so if you hear this sound, good luck figuring out how to spell it. But the other way around isn't really bad: a spelling almost always have an unambiguous pronunciation. (There are exceptions but they are few and far between) At least if you don't count ancient French, which is still prominent in places name's, and have a totally arbitrary pronunciation. As a little game for French speakers, try pronouncing the name of the city of «Meung sur Loire» ;).

gumby 7y ago

In the scheme of writing systems it's hard for me to see why English is so bad. In general writing (like spoken grammar) is so heavily used that all the "rough corners" get sanded smooth pretty rapidly and continuously. For example, though the histogram of Kanji/Hanzi has a very steep drop-off, it's not that hard for people to recognize and keep track of, because characters that were hard to read at first tend to get restructured or dropped. As far as Indo-European languages go, languages like English and French are quite conservative in spelling and underlying meaning, which means they do diverge from pronunciation but retain semantic clues which help the reader unlock the meaning of unknown words. While languages that continuously reform to try to match pronunciation shifts (e.g. German) discard this info. In addition they have to pick one canonical pronunciation, and themselves typically retain various homophonic issues (e.g. how many ways can you write the sound of ä (I don't mean "ae")). Even as a kid (should be "easy to learn", right?) I struggled far more with the variants of the devanagari alphabet even though it was so phonetic. But hundreds of millions of people use it every day without thinking about it.

earthboundkid 7y ago
English is pretty bad unless you are a total orthography history nerd. For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method. English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.
- bsder 7y ago
  > For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. This is objecting to the .01%--I find it hard to take seriously. English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. It's not always one-to-one, and it's sometimes really weird, but it's generally there. So, if someone sees Xi Jinping in writing, the utterance out of their mouth will be close enough for me to know what they are talking about. However, even when someone completely botches the spelling of a word, there is almost always enough logic behind the error for the person looking at it figure out the actual word meant. That's a really nice feature in a language. (For example--I have seen phlegm or subtle spelled in all manner of ways, but I generally could tell what was meant.). By contrast, lots of the articles talking about Chinese highlight all the really common words that native speakers can't even cough up the kanji for because there is so little phonic correspondence.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    > English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation It's absolutely not the case and it's actually one of the most mocked feature of English on the internet. The pronunciation of the name of “Sean Bean” is a good example. As a non native speaker, I have had a lot of pain learning the pronunciation of words I've only seen written. In American English, you have at least one direction easy (from pronunciation to spelling) but not in British English. And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      It's actually Sean. Pronounced shawn. Be thankful we didn't get more from Gaelic, where "Laoghaire" is pronounced leery. :) Don't agree US English makes it easier, it's just differently idiosyncratic. Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p If I hear in the US "cull err" and go to spell, I don't end up at color, hearing "sell fone" doesn't lead me to cell phone, etc. Half the problems of English spelling are the three (four in US English, with Webster) significant attempts to simplify spelling over the centuries, and outsourcing some temporarily illegal printing to the Dutch.
Izkata 7y ago
Any time this general topic comes up, I like to drop the Chaos Poem as an example, for anyone who hasn't yet encountered it: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

thefringthing 7y ago

Tibetan and French usually come up on lists of worst correspondence between orthography and pronunciation. Irish is also pretty bad. (It makes sense once you learn how it works, then stops making sense once you hear people of different dialects actually pronounce words.)

littlestymaar 7y ago
French is terrible in one direction: pronunciation to spelling is a nightmare, as most sounds can be written in a least 3 ways. «un» «um», «in», «im», «ain», «aim» and «ein» are pronounced the same, so if you hear this sound, good luck figuring out how to spell it. But the other way around isn't really bad: a spelling almost always have an unambiguous pronunciation. (There are exceptions but they are few and far between) At least if you don't count ancient French, which is still prominent in places name's, and have a totally arbitrary pronunciation. As a little game for French speakers, try pronouncing the name of the city of «Meung sur Loire» ;).