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English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
- perfunctory 3y ago"Radicals" in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
- rob74 3y agoThings get even funnier if you consider names - for instance, I was convinced that the name of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton (RIP) was pronounced Cr-itch-ton, until I actually heard it was pronounced Cry-ton.
- vintermann 3y agoI always mentally read Cr-ich-ton, as in German "ich". No need to worry how it's actually pronounced until i actually have to use it in speech. This is how I deal with a lot of words.
- bighoki2885000 3y ago[dead]
- CalRobert 3y agoThen you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"
- another-dave 3y agoIn fairness though, Niamh and Siobhán are names from another language! You do get dialectical differences in Irish and there's some spelling reform stuff, but at least for the most part there's some internal consistency (to the dialect) in how stuff should be pronounced.
- CalRobert 3y agoTrue, after a while living in Ireland it came without too much trouble. (consonant followed by "h" is close to "v", the "ough" thing, "oise" being like "osh", etc.) But I still made a fool of myself trying to say Portlaoise and Dun Laoghaire a few times. In conversation with my neighbour Eoghan no less. By the time we had a daughter the name Maeve was in serious contention and I admit I was pretty enthusiastic about going with "Méibh" or even "Medb" but we ended up going with something else.
- barrkel 3y agoThat is less Hiberno-English and more Gaelic. Niamh and Siobhán are Irish names following Irish orthography.
- saalweachter 3y agoI always felt like Gaelic spelling was the result of someone hearing about the written language, thinking it was a fantastic idea, and then rushing off to write down all the words without waiting to get all the details about how writing was supposed to work.
- CalRobert 3y agoWorth noting that "Gaelic" is a group of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_languages One of those languages is Irish. It used to be written in its own type - which I personally find beautiful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type
- Supernaut 3y agoYou should have left out the first sentence! Someone once sent me a link to a tooth-grindingly annoying performance by an English "comedian", where he expressed irritation and disbelief at what he saw as a preposterous disconnect between the spelling of indigenous Irish names and the way they are pronounced. As if the Irish language was really merely a dialect of English, and we're all just being awkward over here. Someone who knows English but not Irish will have no idea how to pronounce "Niamh", because it's not a word from the English language. As you say, it's an Irish name that follows Irish orthography.
- gampleman 3y agoMy teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you have all the drawbacks (i.e. you need to memorise a whole lot of pronunciation) but none of the benefit (i.e. faster reading speeds, more compact representation).
- TheGigaChad 3y ago[dead]
- Scarblac 3y agoRather than going to that extreme, English spelling could be made easier. My native language is Dutch. For Dutch there are spelling reforms every so many years. English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think. The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced, and that it's much more standardized. The disadvantage is that older texts become hard to read much sooner. It's amazing how English from the 19th century (like _Three Men In A Boat_) is effortlessly readable, whereas Dutch from before WW2 is noticeably old.
- bonoboTP 3y agoEnglish is spread out all over the globe with no mechanism to coordinate such a reform.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago> The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced Is that so? I'm pretty sure everybody pronounces pannenkoek as pannekoek. Don't get me started on conjugation of loanwords such as "gedeleteted" (I hope I got that one right)
- eesmith 3y ago> English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think. The UK uses a form of written English based on Samuel Johnson's dictionary. The US uses a form of written English based on Webster's dictionary. Both Johnson's and Webster's spelling reforms post-date Shakespeare. For example, Shakespeare's grave contains the inscription: GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES. (The "Y" is a form of the thorn symbol "þ", which Early Modern English used to represent the "Th" sound. The terms in [brackets] show the modern form.) You can see we are not using English spelling from Shakespeare's time.
- sharikous 3y agoSometimes even the entire word is pronounced differently: read/read
- pavlov 3y agoIMO this long/short vowel ambiguity is the #1 broken feature of English spelling, and could be reliably fixed by adopting an acute accent to mark long vowels (where a double letter isn't already doing the job). As in: I love to réad. Shé read all my books. I watched the gáme líve. Shé lives at hóme. Eurydicé had a fíníte supply of pátience. Etc. It wouldn't change any of the ASCII-only spelling rules, and would be a tremendous help to English learners. Since most text is written on smartphones nowadays, the new accented spellings would be immediately widely adopted as soon as the three OS vendors in the English world (Microsoft, Apple, Google) turned them on in their autocorrects. Of course there's no instance or process that could push through a change like this because English, unlike French and German for example, is not a language whose evolution is actively managed by a national committee.
- archgoon 3y ago[dead]
- bluGill 3y agoGám doesn't need the following e anymore as it is only there to indicate long A.
- pavlov 3y agoYes, but that would change the ASCII spelling, to which there seems to be tremendous resistance in English-speaking countries. But if we sneakily added entirely optional accents to the existing spelling, then in another hundred years maybe the vestigial hint letters could be cleaned up. (Probably not — see French spelling which is 50% silent letters from ancient orthography and Latin roots. But even the French system, despite its complex rules, is internally consistent unlike English.)
- 3y ago
- walthamstow 3y agoHiccough is very out of date. Even my mother doesn't write it like that. She thought about a rough drought in Loughborough though...
- Karellen 3y agoNot only is hiccough old, it's also new... at least compared to hiccup. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccough https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccough > Hiccough is a later spelling, and an example of folk etymology. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccup#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccup#English > Alternative forms > hiccough (old-fashioned, hypercorrection) ...and see the etymology for more info.
- stephen_g 3y agoInteresting, I’ve never seen that word spelt as ‘hiccough’ (native English speaker here). Do some people really claim that fake spelling is the correct one?
- eesmith 3y agoNgrams shows "hiccough" was 5-6x more common than "hiccup" between the 1860s and 1920s. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hiccough%2Chiccup&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hiccough%2Chic... . An archive.org search found plenty of texts from that era using hiccough, though often with some hiccups as well. This one from 1886 is interesting: https://archive.org/details/b21699331/page/n1/mode/2up?q=hiccough+hiccup https://archive.org/details/b21699331/page/n1/mode/2up?q=hic... > No doubt many of my professional brethren are well acquainted with the Hippocratic aphorism <Greek transcription omitted> "Sneezing occurring after hiccough removes the hiccough,” or, as it is rendered by Adams, “Sneezing coming on, in the case of a person afflicted with hiccup, removes the hiccup.” The 1886 author uses hiccough while quoting the older Adams reference, from 1849, as using hiccup (primary reference for Adams is at https://archive.org/details/genuineworksofhi02hippuoft/page/754/mode/2up?q=hiccup https://archive.org/details/genuineworksofhi02hippuoft/page/... )
- 3y ago
- markjonsona989 3y ago(non-native here) I've been saying this for as long as I remember. Non-Anglophones often get frustrated in attempt to (de)construct a word in English like they would in other European languages only to find that it doesn't work and they don't understand why. I often say you'll have a much easier time accepting English if you consider it to be more like Mandarin; a collection of images. The only difference is that unlike an image of a drawing (of a house or a tree), a word in English is an image of letters. But it's still an image! It's not a word with individual letters, you can't break it apart; you have to memorise it instead. So don't feel bad for not knowing how something is pronounced, because native Anglophones will not know either.
- bonoboTP 3y agoThat's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.
- andyferris 3y agoNow GB has left the EU, maybe Europe should create an “international written English”? It’s kinda a joke, but would be kinda cool. They’d only have to negotiate with Ireland, so hopefully wouldn’t get too bogged down.
- rahen 3y agoHave a look at Interlingua, it would make a great official language for the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua Same article written in Interlingua: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
- raverbashing 3y ago
- beardyw 3y agoThere was an old lady from Slough Who developed a terrible cough. She drank half a pint Of warm honey and mint, But, sadly, she didn’t pull through. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/06/03/limerick-10/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/06/03/limerick-10/
- croisillon 3y agohttp://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html
- mytailorisrich 3y agoAh, Slough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By8PfyNQ060 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By8PfyNQ060
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoNow sing it with the melody of Stairways to heaven.
- ajb 3y agoA good description Another amusing one is Mark Twain's plan: A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld*
- cprecioso 3y agoI can't decipher what "doderez" is in the passage "bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez"
- yorwba 3y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dodderers https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dodderers
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 3y agoDodderers. People who dodder.
- DemocracyFTW2 3y agoG. "Tattergreis"
- DrIronstein 3y ago
- zokier 3y agoEnglish is quite amazing in how people do not agree on either spelling nor pronounciation, and yet it exists as a language and people mostly comprehend each other, heavy accents nonwithstanding
- stephen_g 3y agoI’ve come to find this kind of thing pretty tedious… Having learnt other languages to various extents, they all have different things that are hard, because they have history, outside influence, etc. I’m learning French at the moment, struggling with pronunciation and comprehension but hey, that’s just how it is. In the past I’ve done some Spanish, that’s easy to pronounce but I still remember very few of the conjugations of irregular verbs… It’s almost impossible to reform and I don’t think most people really care to have it reformed. And it’d eventually change in unexpected and irregular ways anyway!
- joshlk 3y agoThere are many proposals to change the English spelling so it's more phonetical, unfortunately they don't get much attention. For example SoundSpell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel Here is an example: > It was on th ferst dae of th nue yeer th anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that th moeshun of th planet Neptune, th outermoest of all planets that wheel about th Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then, a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in th reejon of th perterbd planet.
- pxeger1 3y agoObligatory reference to The Chaos: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- teddyh 3y agoComplete version as originally published in 1920: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos>
- Gualdrapo 3y agoEnglish is crazy! — A nun from a Franciscan order from Minnesota who taught us English (and some Japanese) at school
- Ingaz 3y agoPure truth. When somebody says that Chinese/Japanese is hard because of kanji - just show them that English is crazy on almost the same level. Kanji has more radicals but some of them only on top, some on bottom, some on left or right. And you don't even need to learn them all - rare radicals remembered as "this strange thing that appears only in X"
- lynguist 3y agoIt is because the writing rules of English were frozen in 1755 with the release of A dictionary of the English language, and that dictionary normed the spellings which were already standardized 100 years prior to that in the mid 17th century. And those spellings from the mid 17th century were influenced by spellings that arose with the introduction of the printing press to England in the late 15th century. I will make the example of German to show the difference: The German normative dictionary Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache was released in 1880 and abolished variant spellings then. It compiled the spelling that was developed since the mid 18th century. I will make another example showcasing Turkish: its writing system was developed only in 1928. In Turkish we have a 100 year old spelling and a 100 year old norm. In German we have a 140 year old spelling and a ca. 200 year old norm. In English we have a 270 year old spelling and a ca. 370 year old norm. That’s what you see and only that. Language drifts away from the spelling over centuries.
- soco 3y agoI can't tell about other languages mentioned but German spelling does have updates way more recent than 200 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...
- felipesabino 3y agoI think this is what the Phonetically Intuitive English (PIE) [0] tries to mitigate (not solve) by showing diacritics on normal English words to make their pronunciation more clear https://sites.google.com/site/phoneticallyintuitiveenglish/what-is-pie https://sites.google.com/site/phoneticallyintuitiveenglish/w...
- sowbug 3y agoSee the ghoti swimming in the pond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- penguin_booze 3y agoIsn't it the case that, in languages like German and French, I've to "remember" what the gender of a fricking table is?