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Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

gxqoz 6y ago
John McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley podcast that although English has many problems (especially spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities from other languages do not exist in it. Obviously, any artificial language is going to be much simpler. But these have never caught on for a variety of reasons.
- keiferski 6y ago
  English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.
  - soldehierro 6y ago
    In the case of Spanish, I can't speak for French, having an academy (the RAE in this case) regulating the language sounds like a problem on paper, but really isn't a problem in practice. The RAE accepts Americanisms and treats American Spanish just as it would European Spanish (referring to the continent(s), not the country) and encourages lingusitic diversity. Anglicisms are only discouraged when an acceptable Spanish alternative is in WIDE use (but never prohibited, as can be evidenced by the sheer quantity of anglicisms in the Spanish language.) Spanish is very willing to accept new words, and as diverse as English in terms of decentralization. Grammar doesn't make or break a lingua franca, number of speakers does, which is where English really shines. So what does the RAE do you ask? They write grammars and compile dictionaries, describe phonology and answer people's questions on Twitter. Just like what Merriam Webster or Oxford would do, but the RAE has official backing and creates consensus among the hispanophone countries. English is a regulated language, just not officially regulated.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Similarly in Norway the authority in charge often proposes Norwegian alternatives to Anglicisms, but they'll yield if an import becomes dominant, and will even reverse official reforms if they fail to gain traction.
    - orwin 6y ago
      I which french academy was this tolerant.
      - Bayart 6y ago
        The problem of the French Academy isn't that it's intolerant, there are linguistic bodies in Europe that are far more conservative, it's that it's too slow and simply cannot keep up.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      I'd say it's more accurate to describe Webster and Oxford as documenting established usage, rather than being informal regulators. They generally view their role as being purely observers and not as active influencers of the language. Some other language authorities do not take a usage-evidence-based approach to defining their dictionaries, and take into account cultural or historical concerns.
    - yongjik 6y ago
      Oh how I envy you. Here in Korea we are stuck with the tax-funded imbeciles of National Institute of Korean Language, whose hobby is saying "ALL you Koreans are using the Korean language wrong!" with a straight face at every occasion.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier for most people (except for native English speakers, as I've noticed).
    - GlennS 6y ago
      Surely it will be a Romance/Germanic split? So Spanish is easier for speakers of French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, and English for speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish?
      - Koshkin 6y ago
        Not sure about those others but the Germans that I know struggle with English just like everybody else. (Despite common roots German and English are very different, and, in fact, I find the written Spanish and even French to be quite close to English, and rather easy to understand if you know English and learn a few words that are different or spelled differently; not so with German.)
      - Tor3 6y ago
        What I've noticed while working on most continents is that when people learn just a little English, they can communicate better than I can if I try to learn their language. The reason is, I think, that English grammar is, in a way, so redundant that even if the speaker use wrong grammar all the time the meaning often doesn't change. You can say "I is", which is wrong, but there's no problem with understanding (at least not for non-native English speakers who are so used to hear all kinds of wrong grammar). But make a single mistake in a Romance language like Italian, and suddenly your sentence "I'm stupid" now means "You're stupid". The grammar matters. In English the grammar, for the most part (not for everything, of course) is about correctness more than meaning - which is why the language is so robust, which is one reason it works as a lingua franca: A little English knowledge goes a long way.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    All languages are decentralized regardless of regulation by official government bodies. The role of regulation is mostly a legal role employed by countries that use a civil legal system. Most English speaking countries use a common law legal system and so interpretation of words is fairly fluid and subject to interpretation by the courts. Civil law does not have this kind of flexibility and room for interpretation, so courts will make use of regulatory bodies to uniformly interpret language. This is why almost all countries with a civil law system have a regulatory body, while countries with a common law system do not.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
  Imagine the github issue tracker for the synthetic lingua franca. "Cannot express...", "ambiguity in..."
- anticristi 6y ago
  I don't know John McWhorter, but is this the "second languages are hard" argument? I tend to get annoyed when people compare the relative difficulty of learning a language they spoke 1636518 hours vs ... 18 hours.
  - gxqoz 6y ago
    McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to master, especially its very large vocabulary. Some of it is covered in this recent episode: https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/03/english-language-not-normal https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/03/english-la...
    - ajuc 6y ago
      > especially its very large vocabulary Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO. The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to write it and how to say it) - is. I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still pronounce any German word I see. I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36 now. I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce.
      - mason55 6y ago
        > I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce. Do you mind sharing some examples? As a native English speaker, I'm so curious! Do you think that if you heard them without seeing the word you'd realize what the written form was? Or might there be words where you know the written form and the spoken form and don't realize it's the same word?
jccooper 6y ago
Well, that, and no one wanting to update the orthography. Though speaking of lingua franca, that language also has a very outdated orthography.
Umofomia 6y ago
Changes to written representation of languages tends to be much more conservative compared to the changes in the spoken languages they're based upon. This is often due to the desire to preserve continuity in the ability for people to gain literacy without having to relearn a new system and retranslate all works that were written in the previous system. This generally lasts until the difference between speech and writing becomes bad enough to hinder literacy, at which point script reforms may happen. Many of the more "phonetic" writing systems encountered in continental European languages were due to the fact that they had relatively more recent script reforms that made spellings closer to how their words were pronounced in their modern languages. Written English, on the other hand, still tends to conserve spelling that reflects older pronunciations. An example of a language that has it worse than English is Tibetan, which hasn't had a script reform since 800: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  The other side of that coin being that the more the script is reformed, the less accessible to non-specialists become a culture’s great works of literature. Shakespeare being the obvious example.
CogitoCogito 6y ago
> So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually. It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English will probably only be _more_ different as time goes forward. In other words, you have it easier than all future generations. Also as much as spelling matching pronunciation is a convenience, it isn't really necessary. The variety of spoken Chinese languages using the same characters is greater than the spoken romance languages. Maybe English really slowly becoming more character-like over time. There are languages that can undergo spelling reforms, and there are languages people actually use.
- bluGill 6y ago
  To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but it seems reasonable). There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and written languages: kids need to spend more time in school learning basic reading skill - time that could be spent either learning something else, or playing.
  - lebuffon 6y ago
    An old book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Unger) addresses this somewhat. As I recall it speaks about the desire by the Japanese leadership of the time to build AI translation and related it to the challenge of full literacy in Japanese due to the requirement of learning 4 alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romanji.
  - presentation 6y ago
    In the region, countries like Korea and Vietnam did move away from Chinese characters - though I'm not sure what impact that's had on educational outcomes and time spent studying different stuff.
Kranar 6y ago
Any lingua franca will end up deviating in pronunciation from how it's written. For example, Finnish is said to have very shallow orthographic depth (the technical term for this phenomenon), but you can imagine if people from across the world began speaking and writing Finnish that over 100 years you'd end up with different accents and different variations of the original Finnish. The language would branch and merge and branch in unpredictable ways as it gets incorporated into various cultures and you'd end up with a situation similar to English today.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I don't think Finnish (or any language in a state of diglossia) is the best example here. That is, Finnish is already essentially two separate languages. Written Finnish (kirjakieli) is a somewhat artificial language that was a compromise between different dialects, because at the birth of Finnish literacy there was no longer an "original Finnish" on which to base writing. Written Finnish is mainly a written thing, and while there is a close correspondence between the orthography and how it would be read aloud, when Finns actually speak they use spoken Finnish (puhekieli), which isn't standardized and varies from region to region.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    I am referring strictly to the correspondence between a written language and its pronunciation. The fact that people speak differently from how they read/write is an altogether separate matter. When reading Finnish, one pronounces the words very closely to how the word is spelled, regardless of whether when they speak they do so in an altogether different manner.
irrational 6y ago
It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written.
irrational 6y ago
It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.
- supergarfield 6y ago
  This might be somewhat subjective, as I don't know how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written, but French seems to have a much higher match between written and spoken language than English. Going from spelling to pronunciation in French follows (admittedly complex) rules that are rarely broken except for common words (or endings such as -ent). Vowel pronunciations for a given spelling are far more variable in English, and often depend on the etymology of the word. Plus, English has word-level stress that is not marked in writing (French has none, and it's marked in Spanish), and moving the stress will usually make a word unintelligible! That alone makes writing => pronunciation very difficult.
  - gecko 6y ago
    French spelling is unidirectional. I can comfortably say any French word (albeit with a couple key exceptions, such as "et" or "clef", that break rules), but I can't reliably go from someone talking to how to spell it. "Eaux", "eau", "au", and "aux", or alternatively e.g. "ou", "oux", etc., all have identical pronunciations, but different spellings. Unsurprisingly, we can vaguely quantify this by looking at dyslexia amongst languages. English and various Southeast Asian languages that rely on Chinese ideographs are by far the worst, followed by things like Arabic, French, Hebrew, and German that have fewer exceptions but less guidance, and then followed last by things like Spanish, Cherokee, and so on that are truly one-to-one.
  - eindiran 6y ago
    > how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written There are a number of ways currently used, but I have a new one to propose: compare the size of two G2P models (1 for each language), which have similar RMS errors. Assuming they are generated using similar techniques, the one which requires the bigger model probably has a less clean phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence.
ajmurmann 6y ago
It was my second language, do I started out assuming that this was a problem with any language you'd learn. I do, however, wish natives English speakers were more aware of this for their own sake. Most seem to default pronouncing vowels in foreign words as if it was English, whereas they'd be much closer to the correct pronunciation of they defaulted to pronouncing it like words for any language other than English they might know even a little of. To me this should be one of the first things you learn when learning your second language as a natives English speaker. It even holds true for romanizations of Asian languages like pinyin for Chinese or Hepburn for Japanese

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

gxqoz 6y ago

John McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley podcast that although English has many problems (especially spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities from other languages do not exist in it. Obviously, any artificial language is going to be much simpler. But these have never caught on for a variety of reasons.

keiferski 6y ago
English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  In the case of Spanish, I can't speak for French, having an academy (the RAE in this case) regulating the language sounds like a problem on paper, but really isn't a problem in practice. The RAE accepts Americanisms and treats American Spanish just as it would European Spanish (referring to the continent(s), not the country) and encourages lingusitic diversity. Anglicisms are only discouraged when an acceptable Spanish alternative is in WIDE use (but never prohibited, as can be evidenced by the sheer quantity of anglicisms in the Spanish language.) Spanish is very willing to accept new words, and as diverse as English in terms of decentralization. Grammar doesn't make or break a lingua franca, number of speakers does, which is where English really shines. So what does the RAE do you ask? They write grammars and compile dictionaries, describe phonology and answer people's questions on Twitter. Just like what Merriam Webster or Oxford would do, but the RAE has official backing and creates consensus among the hispanophone countries. English is a regulated language, just not officially regulated.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Similarly in Norway the authority in charge often proposes Norwegian alternatives to Anglicisms, but they'll yield if an import becomes dominant, and will even reverse official reforms if they fail to gain traction.
  - orwin 6y ago
    I which french academy was this tolerant.
    - Bayart 6y ago
      The problem of the French Academy isn't that it's intolerant, there are linguistic bodies in Europe that are far more conservative, it's that it's too slow and simply cannot keep up.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I'd say it's more accurate to describe Webster and Oxford as documenting established usage, rather than being informal regulators. They generally view their role as being purely observers and not as active influencers of the language. Some other language authorities do not take a usage-evidence-based approach to defining their dictionaries, and take into account cultural or historical concerns.
  - yongjik 6y ago
    Oh how I envy you. Here in Korea we are stuck with the tax-funded imbeciles of National Institute of Korean Language, whose hobby is saying "ALL you Koreans are using the Korean language wrong!" with a straight face at every occasion.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier for most people (except for native English speakers, as I've noticed).
  - GlennS 6y ago
    Surely it will be a Romance/Germanic split? So Spanish is easier for speakers of French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, and English for speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish?
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      Not sure about those others but the Germans that I know struggle with English just like everybody else. (Despite common roots German and English are very different, and, in fact, I find the written Spanish and even French to be quite close to English, and rather easy to understand if you know English and learn a few words that are different or spelled differently; not so with German.)
    - Tor3 6y ago
      What I've noticed while working on most continents is that when people learn just a little English, they can communicate better than I can if I try to learn their language. The reason is, I think, that English grammar is, in a way, so redundant that even if the speaker use wrong grammar all the time the meaning often doesn't change. You can say "I is", which is wrong, but there's no problem with understanding (at least not for non-native English speakers who are so used to hear all kinds of wrong grammar). But make a single mistake in a Romance language like Italian, and suddenly your sentence "I'm stupid" now means "You're stupid". The grammar matters. In English the grammar, for the most part (not for everything, of course) is about correctness more than meaning - which is why the language is so robust, which is one reason it works as a lingua franca: A little English knowledge goes a long way.
- Kranar 6y ago
  All languages are decentralized regardless of regulation by official government bodies. The role of regulation is mostly a legal role employed by countries that use a civil legal system. Most English speaking countries use a common law legal system and so interpretation of words is fairly fluid and subject to interpretation by the courts. Civil law does not have this kind of flexibility and room for interpretation, so courts will make use of regulatory bodies to uniformly interpret language. This is why almost all countries with a civil law system have a regulatory body, while countries with a common law system do not.
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
Imagine the github issue tracker for the synthetic lingua franca. "Cannot express...", "ambiguity in..."
anticristi 6y ago
I don't know John McWhorter, but is this the "second languages are hard" argument? I tend to get annoyed when people compare the relative difficulty of learning a language they spoke 1636518 hours vs ... 18 hours.
- gxqoz 6y ago
  McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to master, especially its very large vocabulary. Some of it is covered in this recent episode: https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/03/english-language-not-normal https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/03/english-la...
  - ajuc 6y ago
    > especially its very large vocabulary Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO. The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to write it and how to say it) - is. I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still pronounce any German word I see. I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36 now. I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce.
    - mason55 6y ago
      > I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce. Do you mind sharing some examples? As a native English speaker, I'm so curious! Do you think that if you heard them without seeing the word you'd realize what the written form was? Or might there be words where you know the written form and the spoken form and don't realize it's the same word?

jccooper 6y ago

Well, that, and no one wanting to update the orthography. Though speaking of lingua franca, that language also has a very outdated orthography.

Umofomia 6y ago

Changes to written representation of languages tends to be much more conservative compared to the changes in the spoken languages they're based upon. This is often due to the desire to preserve continuity in the ability for people to gain literacy without having to relearn a new system and retranslate all works that were written in the previous system. This generally lasts until the difference between speech and writing becomes bad enough to hinder literacy, at which point script reforms may happen. Many of the more "phonetic" writing systems encountered in continental European languages were due to the fact that they had relatively more recent script reforms that made spellings closer to how their words were pronounced in their modern languages. Written English, on the other hand, still tends to conserve spelling that reflects older pronunciations. An example of a language that has it worse than English is Tibetan, which hasn't had a script reform since 800: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug

everybodyknows 6y ago
The other side of that coin being that the more the script is reformed, the less accessible to non-specialists become a culture’s great works of literature. Shakespeare being the obvious example.

CogitoCogito 6y ago

> So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually. It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English will probably only be _more_ different as time goes forward. In other words, you have it easier than all future generations. Also as much as spelling matching pronunciation is a convenience, it isn't really necessary. The variety of spoken Chinese languages using the same characters is greater than the spoken romance languages. Maybe English really slowly becoming more character-like over time. There are languages that can undergo spelling reforms, and there are languages people actually use.

bluGill 6y ago
To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but it seems reasonable). There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and written languages: kids need to spend more time in school learning basic reading skill - time that could be spent either learning something else, or playing.
- lebuffon 6y ago
  An old book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Unger) addresses this somewhat. As I recall it speaks about the desire by the Japanese leadership of the time to build AI translation and related it to the challenge of full literacy in Japanese due to the requirement of learning 4 alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romanji.
- presentation 6y ago
  In the region, countries like Korea and Vietnam did move away from Chinese characters - though I'm not sure what impact that's had on educational outcomes and time spent studying different stuff.

Kranar 6y ago

Any lingua franca will end up deviating in pronunciation from how it's written. For example, Finnish is said to have very shallow orthographic depth (the technical term for this phenomenon), but you can imagine if people from across the world began speaking and writing Finnish that over 100 years you'd end up with different accents and different variations of the original Finnish. The language would branch and merge and branch in unpredictable ways as it gets incorporated into various cultures and you'd end up with a situation similar to English today.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I don't think Finnish (or any language in a state of diglossia) is the best example here. That is, Finnish is already essentially two separate languages. Written Finnish (kirjakieli) is a somewhat artificial language that was a compromise between different dialects, because at the birth of Finnish literacy there was no longer an "original Finnish" on which to base writing. Written Finnish is mainly a written thing, and while there is a close correspondence between the orthography and how it would be read aloud, when Finns actually speak they use spoken Finnish (puhekieli), which isn't standardized and varies from region to region.
- Kranar 6y ago
  I am referring strictly to the correspondence between a written language and its pronunciation. The fact that people speak differently from how they read/write is an altogether separate matter. When reading Finnish, one pronounces the words very closely to how the word is spelled, regardless of whether when they speak they do so in an altogether different manner.

irrational 6y ago

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written.

irrational 6y ago

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.

supergarfield 6y ago
This might be somewhat subjective, as I don't know how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written, but French seems to have a much higher match between written and spoken language than English. Going from spelling to pronunciation in French follows (admittedly complex) rules that are rarely broken except for common words (or endings such as -ent). Vowel pronunciations for a given spelling are far more variable in English, and often depend on the etymology of the word. Plus, English has word-level stress that is not marked in writing (French has none, and it's marked in Spanish), and moving the stress will usually make a word unintelligible! That alone makes writing => pronunciation very difficult.
- gecko 6y ago
  French spelling is unidirectional. I can comfortably say any French word (albeit with a couple key exceptions, such as "et" or "clef", that break rules), but I can't reliably go from someone talking to how to spell it. "Eaux", "eau", "au", and "aux", or alternatively e.g. "ou", "oux", etc., all have identical pronunciations, but different spellings. Unsurprisingly, we can vaguely quantify this by looking at dyslexia amongst languages. English and various Southeast Asian languages that rely on Chinese ideographs are by far the worst, followed by things like Arabic, French, Hebrew, and German that have fewer exceptions but less guidance, and then followed last by things like Spanish, Cherokee, and so on that are truly one-to-one.
- eindiran 6y ago
  > how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written There are a number of ways currently used, but I have a new one to propose: compare the size of two G2P models (1 for each language), which have similar RMS errors. Assuming they are generated using similar techniques, the one which requires the bigger model probably has a less clean phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence.

ajmurmann 6y ago

It was my second language, do I started out assuming that this was a problem with any language you'd learn. I do, however, wish natives English speakers were more aware of this for their own sake. Most seem to default pronouncing vowels in foreign words as if it was English, whereas they'd be much closer to the correct pronunciation of they defaulted to pronouncing it like words for any language other than English they might know even a little of. To me this should be one of the first things you learn when learning your second language as a natives English speaker. It even holds true for romanizations of Asian languages like pinyin for Chinese or Hepburn for Japanese