6 ms·
Genuine question: can you explain how phonetics can be used in a character encoding for text?
by quickthrower2 5y ago
Genuine question: can you explain how phonetics can be used in a character encoding for text?
- WalterBright 5y agoI don't understand your question. `a` is for the sound `aaaahhhh`.
- Thiez 5y agoBut 'j' in Spanish sounds completely different from 'j' in English. Which of these languages should give up their j and add a new letter to their alphabet? At least in Spanish letters are usually pronounced the same, so presumably Spanish is closer to your ideal. Contrary to English, which seems to be designed specifically to torment its speakers. Here's a famous poem: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html Perhaps you could give an indication how this poem would be written in English in a hypothetical phonetic spelling? Or would all the languages just convert to the International Phonetic Alphabet, and we'd forbid all the existing alphabets? :)
- WalterBright 5y ago> Which of these languages should give up their j and add a new letter to their alphabet? Neither. They both use 'j'. Problem solved. No, I'm not being facetious. Spanish books are written in Spanish, and English books are written in English. Both use 'j'. Somehow, it works. No need to invent problems.
- Thiez 5y agoNo response to the poem, then?
- WalterBright 5y agoI thought my response was obvious. Should I cut&paste it from the article and post it here?
- Thiez 5y agoIt's not obvious at all. But let's cut&paste some of your stuff: > `a` is for the sound `aaaahhhh`. That's great for words like 'father', 'fall', and 'dark'. But not for words like 'dad' and 'fat' and 'frank'. Or 'same' and 'lame'. So no, in English, 'a' is not the sound for 'aaaahhhh'. 'aaaahhhh' is just one of the various sounds for 'a'. In a lot of ways English is like those hieroglyphics you seem to hate so much, because you have to know the mapping between the words and how they are written. It probably doesn't feel like that to you, because you're used to it by now. If you really want phonetic spelling, you'll have to change the spelling of most English words. That is fine, but I think most people would find that much less appealing than using unicode. Your suggestion would then basically boil down to: "Hey, let's change the spelling of most English words you know, and also ban emojis!" I would prepare for lots of little upside-down hands with the thumb pointing down.
- WalterBright 5y agoSo you want to turn Unicode into a semantic language, too?
- BjoernKW 5y agoThanks, you beat me to it with that poem :-) There have been attempts for a phonemic "respelling" of English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_E... However, apart from edge cases such as a writer wanting to convey the pronunciation of a word the audience might not be familiar with (e.g., ar-kuhn-saw for Arkansas or rice-lip for Ruislip ;-) ), other than for dictionaries, they are of little practical relevance. Personally, I sincerely dislike the predominant use of these phonemic spelling variants in lieu of the IPA in many dictionaries these days. In an understandable - and laudable - attempt to make their content more accessible to users who are not familiar with the IPA they, however, often got rid of the corresponding IPA representations entirely, which in turn makes the content far less accessible to users who are familiar with such representations. That's a classic example of "knowledge encoded in the world" (phonemic representations) vs "knowledge encoded in the head" (IPA) (from the "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman).
- BjoernKW 5y agoIn most languages there's no immediate, bijective mapping between graphemes and phonemes. Some Indo-European languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch come quite close in that there is a one-to-one (in some cases context-sensitive) mapping between graphemes or grapheme clusters and the sounds they signify. For English, famously, there's no such one-to-one mapping and for many cases pronunciation has to be memorised: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- WalterBright 5y agoSomehow, English printed books do just fine without icons.
- BjoernKW 5y agoSure, they do. That has little to do with phonetics, though.
- WalterBright 5y ago> That has little to do with phonetics, though. I learned to read by using phonetics. It has a lot to do with the success of English text. English works well as a phonetic language. Just like the text I write here can be read by any second grader.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThe ‘u’ in ruby and run sounds different. English writing is not phonetic. Arabic I think pretty much is though.
- WalterBright 5y ago> English writing is not phonetic. It's phonetic enough to work well as one. Teaching kids to read by sounding out the words works far better than any other method (like look-say). Have fun punishing students by making them learn 10,000 hieroglyphs instead.
- quickthrower2 5y agoI’m a bit lost as you were talking about character encoding with phonetics originally and I couldn’t picture how that would work. With kids yes in would agree sounding out (and pointing out exceptions to the rule) works well enough. But I’m no teacher!
- WalterBright 5y agoThere's a bit of a misunderstanding here. I was not talking about encoding phonetic sounds into Unicode. Unicode should not imply sounds or meaning. Unicode is about visual representation. The argument about phonetic alphabets is they are superior to hieroglyphs.
- dotancohen 5y agoMy acorn disagrees with you.
- WalterBright 5y agoUnicode is supposed to be about the visual representation, not the aural.
- dotancohen 5y agoThen that would have been a much better answer to GP's question "can you explain how phonetics can be used in a character encoding for text?"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kergonath 5y ago‘A’ as in ‘car’, or ‘A’ as in ‘care’? Yes, I might be being facetious, but letters are divorced from pronunciation, and the great vowel shift made that significantly worse amongst European languages.