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This is more generally the concept of Orthographic depth [1] A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most
by gok 6y ago
This is more generally the concept of Orthographic depth [1]
A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321
- mumblemumble 6y agoasterisk note: The study only looked at 14 languages. The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
- madhadron 6y agoFrench is so ambiguous that they have dictation bees where people try to figure out what words someone just said and accurately record them.
- nrclark 6y agoAre those different than American spelling bees?
- mumblemumble 6y agoIn a dictée, you listen to a longer passage, and the challenge is to transcribe what the person wrote. They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
- tasogare 6y agoFrench was at some point written more akin to spoken, with variations in-between writers (and sometimes in text too). Now the orthography is hard mainly due to: (1) change in the language not reflected in the writing, (2) etymological speeling choices made on standardization and (3) latent phonological information. Instances of (1) include graphemes likes "au" [o]. Example of (2) is "pied" with final letter here to refer to Greek "podo". Point (3) is more complex. Take "parent" were final t is mute. Its presence makes is clear it’s related to "parental". Some with pairs like "grand" / "grande" were in the feminine form the final d is pronounced. Edit: Tibetan alphabet is notoriously difficult, and Thai alphabet is quite hard too, so the problem exists elsewhere as well even when staying in the realm of alphabets.
- boudewijnrempt 6y agoThe Tibetan script isn't difficult at all. You just need to learn the sound changes for the past five, six hundred years and apply them to logically arrive at "tro" for something written "bsgribs" -- but it's all very logical and clear. As my teachers made clear at university, using the Grundriss der Klassischen Tibetischen Schriftsprache and books of a similar age.
- tasogare 6y agoHaving to learn a significant portion of the phonological/phonetic history of a language to read it is exactly something that can be considered difficult. In fact, most people don’t even know what a phonological or phonetic change is, and can’t give an example.
- boudewijnrempt 6y agoYou might need to work on your reading comprehension. Particularly when it comes to sarcasm, or irony. I did quote my teacher verbatim, and he wasn't using neither irony nor sarcasm when calling this tour de force "easy". But I was...
- howlgarnish 6y agoWhile formal (written) Finnish tends to justly get high marks here, there's a notable divergence between this and what people actually speak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Finnish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Finnish