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> the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct
by yakireev 3y ago
> the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling
It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.
In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g. Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than English - in English the best you've got is a guess.
Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.
Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some other languages.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIt's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons. This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible. Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.
- gggmaster 3y agoWhy do they use kanji now?
- thaumasiotes 3y agoBecause that's what Japanese writing is like. Why do US senators wear suits instead of T-shirts?
- lIl-IIIl 3y agoThere's something to that argument in Japanese. According to [1] Japanese has 643 distinct syllables, while English has about 6949. There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji. For example, let's take a company named "Bandai". Now look up "ban" (https://jisho.org/search/ban https://jisho.org/search/ban) and look up "dai" (https://jisho.org/search/dai https://jisho.org/search/dai) and "da" (https://jisho.org/search/da https://jisho.org/search/da) and "i" (https://jisho.org/search/i https://jisho.org/search/i), each of which has 3-5 meanings, and tell me which combination of possible words is the company's name derived from? There's literally no way to tell. [1] https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThis is a fundamental misunderstanding of how language works. Determining the etymology of a name is not possible in any language. What combination of words was "Xerox" derived from? Does that affect the meaning of "Xerox"? How about "Samuel"? "Rachel"? "Ted"?
- lIl-IIIl 3y agoI was originally thinking about names that have intended meanings "Target", "Burger King", "Taco bell", "Pager Duty", "DuckDuckGo", "Texas Instruments", "Aperture Laboratories" etc.
- shard 3y ago> Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible. Only if people communicate without context. A large amount of ambiguity can be removed by understanding the context of the conversation.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoYou haven't described a difference between oral and written communication.
- shard 3y agoI am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThat is not something any of my comments says. On the contrary, I identified it as "incredibly stupid".
- munificent 3y agoThe spelling of English words gives you two separate clues: 1. How it is pronounced. 2. Its etymology and what it means. Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to etymology and meaning. For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that "native", "nation" have related meanings because of the shared "nat". If we made the spelling follow pronunciation and did "naytiv" and "nayshun", some of that is lost. Ideally, pronunciation would be fixed across time and place so that a language's spelling reliably reflected both meaning and sound. But that ain't how humans work. In written languages that do this "better", it's mainly through some combination of: 1. The written language is simply younger than written English and thus has had less time for pronunciation to diverge. 2. The language is used by a smaller, more homogeneous community. 3. Elites exert political force to prevent pronunciation or meaning from changing and to reject loanwords at the loss of expressivity. English does none of those things. It's been around a long time, has spread throughout the world across widely disparate communities, and is happy to absorb any good idea it finds in any other language. It is the Perl of written languages, for better or worse.
- mcguire 3y agoBy the way, meaning also drifts over time.
- ttfkam 3y agoYou just "decimated" his proposal.
- tragomaskhalos 3y ago4. Spelling reforms have been introduced to amend the orthography to rationalise it and better reflect current pronunciation. This is what some people advocate for English - entirely misguidedly in my view.
- zztop44 3y agoWhy misguidedly, in your view?
- Max-q 3y ago« Even Korean is more phonetic than English» Well, that’s a strange statement. Hangul is not just better by accident, it’s designed to be an advanced phonetic system making it possible to write many languages. You can learn in a few evenings, no need to know Korean, and you will be able to read Korean perfectly out loud without understanding what you are saying.
- bluesmoon 3y agoHangul is phonetic, but doesn't have the capability to represent all phonetic sounds of a language. For example, Hindi has 4 distinct letters and consequently sounds for the each of D and T (D: ड ढ द ध, T: ट ठ त थ), which all correspond to the single Hangul letter diot (ㄷ). I have Korean friends who write their names in the Chinese script because they don't have the necessary letters to represent the sounds.
- shard 3y agoI don't think there is any language which can represent all the phonetic sounds of other languages.
- steele 3y agobluesmoon is right. Hangul doesn't solve all problems ever, anyways, here is some miscellaneous trivia. I have Korean friends. You're welcome Max-q. Please don't try to appreciate things around bluesmoon. You know how they get.
- shard 3y agoI don't think that's right. One example would be the words with the same spelling which are pronounced differently depending on meaning (e.g. dragonfly and sleeping spot), you have to know what you are saying to pronounce it correctly.
- kibwen 3y ago> It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time. "Most of the time" is an exaggeration. English is (sadly) less strictly phonetic than many other languages, but still highly phonetic. Nearly every word in your own comment can be pronounced phonetically.
- lIl-IIIl 3y ago"-ough" vs "-ought" are not a problem since they are different, and this there can be a consistent no-exceptions rule distinguish a them. Same as "sch" and "tsch" are pronounced differently in German but are still considered phonetic. Although/through/ebough is a problem tho. I wish the general public cared enuff to push a spelling reform thru.
- yakireev 3y ago> "Most of the time" is an exaggeration. "Most" like "cost", or like "ghost?" Also, only now I checked the transcription for "exaggeration", and "gg" is not "g", like in "blogger", but ʤ like in "Jason". TIL. If this is not "most of the time", than I don't know what is.
- ttfkam 3y agoEnglish is obviously your first language. No one learning English as a second (or more) language would ever make such a ludicrous assertion. https://youtu.be/Mfz3kFNVopk https://youtu.be/Mfz3kFNVopk English is not learned; it's memorized.
- jk_i_am_a_robot 3y agoEnglish has had a long trip to the language it is today. It doesn't help that at the latter stages of its development writers disagreed on or disregarded the rules of spelling.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. OK, but... the position of the word stress in Russian radically alters the pronunciation of all the vowels in the word. Missing the stress means mangling the whole word. That's not something to just dismiss.
- paulusthe 3y agoI wasn't claiming English is the best language. I was saying non pictographic languages are one of humanity's most important inventions, which is one reason they've spread so rapidly everywhere.
- shard 3y agoToo bad non pictographic languages weren't paired with simple orthogonal grammars and consistent spelling rules. Learning different languages always feel like choosing whether I want to beat myself up with my left fist, my right fist, or my feet.