3 ms·

What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a

What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji. In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.

michael_j_ward 4y ago
Pointing out a few outliers in such a large system like the English Language and using them to justify reclassifying the entire thing is braindead.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
  - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
    I would say that English has a greater level of orthographic depth than some other languages (but far less than, say, Thai).
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    Spanish is "strictly phonetic" English is "[very] loosely phonetic" Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
    - josefx 4y ago
      > Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic" Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?
      - wl 4y ago
        The Latin alphabet is ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
    - wl 4y ago
      Egyptian hieroglyphs are, for the most part, phonetic.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard. Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
jcranmer 4y ago
The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling, many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40 phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet). The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple: * Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/). * Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter. * Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/). * Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation. Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are present throughout the language (H/CH, Ż/RZ, Ó/U); voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always sounds like PSZ...); Ą and Ę have a rule where they are fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part. Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja" from your example). Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago

michael_j_ward 4y ago

Pointing out a few outliers in such a large system like the English Language and using them to justify reclassifying the entire thing is braindead.

phoe-krk 4y ago
If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
- TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
  I would say that English has a greater level of orthographic depth than some other languages (but far less than, say, Thai).
- rcoveson 4y ago
  Spanish is "strictly phonetic" English is "[very] loosely phonetic" Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
  - josefx 4y ago
    > Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic" Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?
    - wl 4y ago
      The Latin alphabet is ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  - wl 4y ago
    Egyptian hieroglyphs are, for the most part, phonetic.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard. Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.

jcranmer 4y ago

The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling, many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40 phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet). The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple: * Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/). * Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter. * Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/). * Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation. Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).

phoe-krk 4y ago
Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are present throughout the language (H/CH, Ż/RZ, Ó/U); voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always sounds like PSZ...); Ą and Ę have a rule where they are fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part. Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja" from your example). Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago