3 ms·

> It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation

by rlpb 3y ago

> It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation tends to drift, but spelling is more rigid, so over time they mismatch.

mcv 3y ago
Yet there are languages that are much more phonetic than English. In fact, most probably are. But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. (I don't know Polish, though.) And spelling is only more rigid in English. Plenty of languages update their spelling over time. Only in English this is useless because there is already barely any connection between spelling and pronunciation, so the break would be far bigger than in other languages.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where native speakers think that until exceptions are pointed out, because they are unaware. There's also the issue of accents, where we expect spelling to be universal across the language, but pronunciation in some accents have drifted (ie. it's not a straightforward mapping).
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Polish orthography – however bizarre it may look to foreigners at first glance – does map pretty closely to the spoken language, but it still isn’t perfectly phonetic. For example, the reflexive pronoun się is written with a nasal vowel, but whether the vowel is pronounced as a nasal vowel or as a non-nasal vowel differs across regions.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  There's quite a few languages with very good bidirectional mapping between written and spoken forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...

3 ms·

> It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation

by rlpb 3y ago

mcv 3y ago
Yet there are languages that are much more phonetic than English. In fact, most probably are. But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. (I don't know Polish, though.) And spelling is only more rigid in English. Plenty of languages update their spelling over time. Only in English this is useless because there is already barely any connection between spelling and pronunciation, so the break would be far bigger than in other languages.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where native speakers think that until exceptions are pointed out, because they are unaware. There's also the issue of accents, where we expect spelling to be universal across the language, but pronunciation in some accents have drifted (ie. it's not a straightforward mapping).
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Polish orthography – however bizarre it may look to foreigners at first glance – does map pretty closely to the spoken language, but it still isn’t perfectly phonetic. For example, the reflexive pronoun się is written with a nasal vowel, but whether the vowel is pronounced as a nasal vowel or as a non-nasal vowel differs across regions.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  There's quite a few languages with very good bidirectional mapping between written and spoken forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...