5 ms·

No, as the "Ghoti" examples shows, contextual rules actually create infinite possibilities of phonological representations in the English script which is only e

No, as the "Ghoti" examples shows, contextual rules actually create infinite possibilities of phonological representations in the English script which is only exceeded by the IPA itself, since there are some edge cases, like "read" and "tear", where there is some confusion that wouldn't be clarified otherwise.

illiarian 4y ago
The Ghoti example shows just how poor English is at presenting sounds, relying on bizarre letter combinations and context. And it still cannot properly represent the large variety of sounds that exist in it, even if it reuses the same combination of letters for completely different sounds.
- DiscourseFan 4y ago
  I don't know why being able to represent a great number of sounds with a relatively small set of characters is a bad thing, if English had to have separate signs for every single sound in the language, even if we didn't count loanwords, that would still be about 50 or 60 characters. And with it, well, why don't we just adopt the syllabary of the Japanese, which can almost never accurately represent loan-words phonetically. To my point, there is not a single script, aside from the IPA, that can represent more sounds than Roman script in English, because there is no direct correspondence between spelling and sound value.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > I don't know why being able to represent a great number of sounds with a relatively small set of characters is a bad thing 1. I didn't say it was a bad thing 2. English actually can't represent a grwat number of sounds using a small set: there are many, many sounds in English that are not actually represented by its set of letters. The most common of them, shwa, isn't in any shape, way or form represented by English language. It's a mess of different letter combinations in different contexts, none of which adequately express the sound. To quote Wikipedia: "In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with. 3. You claimed that "in other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited" which is, of course, untrue.
    - DiscourseFan 4y ago
      >"In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with. I watched a video about this recently I found fascinating, I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because it occurs only in certain stress positions of a word, which changes depending on the surrounding words. But notice when you "talk slowly", that is, fixate on each and every word, you actually don't pronounce the shwa very often, if at all. Couldn't find the video but it turns out there are a million on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus
      - illiarian 4y ago
        > I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because Doesn't matter. You claimed English is so much better at representing sounds than other languages. And yet, it cannot represent the most common one. And of course, shwa is just one of them. As I mentioned before, English has significantly more sounds than letters, and of course cannot represent most of them even if those exist when you "soeak slowly". More over, its so poor in expressing these sounds that it re-uses and repurposes completely different letter combinations for the same sound. Or the same letter for completely different sounds. Because of course get/gist and use/you and fashion/mission/faction show us not the poor expressiveness of the language but how wonderfully rich it is in representing the different sounds.

illiarian 4y ago

The Ghoti example shows just how poor English is at presenting sounds, relying on bizarre letter combinations and context. And it still cannot properly represent the large variety of sounds that exist in it, even if it reuses the same combination of letters for completely different sounds.

DiscourseFan 4y ago
I don't know why being able to represent a great number of sounds with a relatively small set of characters is a bad thing, if English had to have separate signs for every single sound in the language, even if we didn't count loanwords, that would still be about 50 or 60 characters. And with it, well, why don't we just adopt the syllabary of the Japanese, which can almost never accurately represent loan-words phonetically. To my point, there is not a single script, aside from the IPA, that can represent more sounds than Roman script in English, because there is no direct correspondence between spelling and sound value.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > I don't know why being able to represent a great number of sounds with a relatively small set of characters is a bad thing 1. I didn't say it was a bad thing 2. English actually can't represent a grwat number of sounds using a small set: there are many, many sounds in English that are not actually represented by its set of letters. The most common of them, shwa, isn't in any shape, way or form represented by English language. It's a mess of different letter combinations in different contexts, none of which adequately express the sound. To quote Wikipedia: "In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with. 3. You claimed that "in other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited" which is, of course, untrue.
  - DiscourseFan 4y ago
    >"In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with. I watched a video about this recently I found fascinating, I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because it occurs only in certain stress positions of a word, which changes depending on the surrounding words. But notice when you "talk slowly", that is, fixate on each and every word, you actually don't pronounce the shwa very often, if at all. Couldn't find the video but it turns out there are a million on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus
    - illiarian 4y ago
      > I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because Doesn't matter. You claimed English is so much better at representing sounds than other languages. And yet, it cannot represent the most common one. And of course, shwa is just one of them. As I mentioned before, English has significantly more sounds than letters, and of course cannot represent most of them even if those exist when you "soeak slowly". More over, its so poor in expressing these sounds that it re-uses and repurposes completely different letter combinations for the same sound. Or the same letter for completely different sounds. Because of course get/gist and use/you and fashion/mission/faction show us not the poor expressiveness of the language but how wonderfully rich it is in representing the different sounds.