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Growing up, speaking US English natively, I never realized how messed up English is. Then I learned Spanish (and lived in a Spanish speaking country for 2 years
by irrational 7y ago
Growing up, speaking US English natively, I never realized how messed up English is. Then I learned Spanish (and lived in a Spanish speaking country for 2 years). Wow. Now that is a sane language. Once you learn the alphabet and a few pronunciation rules you can read anything in Spanish correctly. Try doing that with English. Ha!
This has become even more reinforced as I've helped my children learn how to read English. Trying to explain to a child why a certain word is pronounced the way it is, even though it looks nothing like how we are pronouncing it, usually falls back to "that's just the way it is" unless I want to try explaining to them the niceties of Old French/Latin, Old English, Old Germanic, the great vowel shift, etc. Eh, that's just the way it's pronounced.
There are so many people who already speak Spanish and it is such a nice sane language that I think it is a real shame that it did not become the universal language.
- randall 7y agoI bet you're from Utah... just a guess.
- irrational 7y agoNo... Oregon. But I grew up in South Florida. Why would you bet I'm from Utah? Do they have some sort of English fetish?
- enriquto 7y agoAs a native speaker of a romance language, I do not find English particularly insane. It is quite straightforward as a language. That is, written English is a sane language, and spoken English is a sane language as well. The problem is that they are two unrelated languages :)
- morningseagulls 7y ago>That is, written English is a sane language, and spoken English is a sane language as well. What's your definition of "sane" here? >The problem is that they are two unrelated languages Sounds like Chinese/Mandarin to me. :)
- mwyah 7y agoI disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before. I can make up a word in Spanish and I know everybody will pronounce it the same way.
- enriquto 7y ago> I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before. I do not understand what do you mean here. In spoken English, the only way to know about one word is by having heard it, so you know how it is pronounced. Illiterate people can speak perfectly correct English.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoBut literate people can't speak all the words they know in an agreed way. It's like the whole "how do you pronounce Linux" thing. Then you move, and local people (in UK, say) pronounce the word differently (eg bath, heard).
- mwyah 7y agoThat is exactly my point. If you've never heard a word you can never know how it's pronounced. That's not the case with Spanish where I can make up a word and everybody will pronounce it (almost) the same way.
- enriquto 7y agoThis is not exactly true. There are some fundamental differences between spanish dialects. For example, "yo", "calle", are pronounced in an unrecognizable way between Argentina and Spain. But I agree that the mapping from written to spoken spanish is mostly deterministic (like that for French, Italian, and other romance languages). The mapping from spoken to written, of course, is not deterministic at all, which you can verify by looking at how illiterate spanish-speakers try to write.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
- gpderetta 7y agoI actually agree wholeheartedly. My 5 year old is learning to read and write in English; his spoken English is quite good (his pronunciation is way better than mine of course), but I'm at loss of how to teach him properly to map the written to the spoken word (and the reverse mapping is even harder); he seems to be learning fine anyway.
- morningseagulls 7y ago>Trying to explain to a child why a certain word is pronounced the way it is, even though it looks nothing like how we are pronouncing it, usually falls back to "that's just the way it is" unless I want to try explaining to them the niceties of Old French/Latin, Old English, Old Germanic, the great vowel shift, etc. I want an ELI5 about this, please. I'm sure there's room for swords, dragons and secret treasure maps somewhere in that story. :)
- Xophmeister 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English
- dagw 7y agoGive https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley a listen
- rmah 7y agoNot the OP, but consider the following... Of course, you know of odd plurals such as house -> houses vs mouse -> mice. why is womb pronounced "woom" and tomb "toom" but bomb is not "boom"? gh: tough and laugh (as f) vs thigh (silent) vs ghost (hard g) Why is tear (crying) pronounced the same as tier (levels) but spelled differently when tear (ripping) spelled the same as tear (crying) but pronounced differently? The list of weird English oddities just go on and on. English is just plain weird.
- morningseagulls 7y agoThanks for the list of oddities, all of which I'm aware, but I was hoping OP could work on an explanation.
- kace91 7y agoMeh, each language has its quirks. I am a native Spanish speaker, and while English pronunciation is a clusterfuck, Spanish has its own share of issues for non-native speakers - like the need to memorise the useless the gender of words that refer to non-gendered things. Nobody cares that a table is female, but you won't sound native if you don't know it. I'm told that some of the advanced forms of verbs (like the subjunctive) are real trouble for non native speakers, although at least learning that isn't a fruitless task.
- bluGill 7y agoI don't need to memorize table is female. I need to memorize it is "mesa" and I always use la with words than end in a. Spanish needs to fix el mapa and a small number other words that break the rule. There is no reason for two different words for the depending on how the noun ends, but since the rule is easy and there are only two I'm fine with it - it is exceptions and complex rules I'm against, not rules.
- jajag 7y agoI'm currently learning Spanish, and have to say that I don't find noun gender to be a huge problem, as generally (apart from some exceptions) if it ends in 'a' then it's feminine, and if 'o' then masculine. Compare that to German, which has no general and easy mnemonic for guessing a noun's gender, adds an additional gender, has a grammatical system where the article attached to a noun changes to that of another gender depending on case, and then to top it all off has no standard rule for creating a plural from the noun singular...
- scoutt 7y agoApply that masculine/feminine rule to 'wing'/'wings', or 'sea', or 'eagle'/'eagles' in spanish :) I know those are exceptions. The thing is... there are a lot of exceptions.
- ggreer 7y agoLa foto, la mano, la radio. El dia, el mapa, el sofa. There are plenty of words that are exceptions. English’s main issue is spelling, but every language has its quirks.
- sornaensis 7y agoThis is an absurd view to hold. English accepts an extremely wide range of pronunciations for almost all words, allowing it to be easily used (ironically) as a linuga franca. Re: 'That's just how it's pronounced' --> In your regional dialect of the language, which can probably still be understood, with >99% certainty, by anyone else in the world who is also a native speaker, and probably by almost anyone who speak English as a second language... If you want a phonetic English, you'd need an alphabet with about 40 characters in it. And for what gain exactly...? And suddenly dialects are writing the same word completely differently, because the sounds are different..
- bluGill 7y agoCommunication can only happen when the people involved get the same internal mental model on what a given sequence of sounds/letters mean. To that end dialects need to die. They harm communication. Even when they are close enough to each other for understanding they slow down the speed of communication. I don't care if we need 100 characters in the language, one sound per character would greatly aid English. Enough of this to/too/two nonsense: one pronunciation, one and only one spelling. (if we could reform word definitions to get rid of those issues so much the better)
- FrojoS 7y agoDialects should not die! That would be a shame in my opinion. We should just all speak a „common dialect“. I guess what the speak on US TV (Friends) is the most likely candidate.
- throwaway744678 7y agoAs a simple example, please consider live and live.
- Timpy 7y agoYou're absolutely correct that phonetics are really bad in English, but that's not the only metric of sanity in a language. English is pretty simple when you compare it to other languages, even considering our nightmarish spelling issues.