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Coming from a background whose native tongue is completely phonetic, English feels like absolute madness w.r.t written words and their spellings. What's intere

by devsda 3y ago

Coming from a background whose native tongue is completely phonetic, English feels like absolute madness w.r.t written words and their spellings. What's interesting is, in some places those inconsistencies are acknowledged and even celebrated annually in the form of spelling bee competitions. They make zero sense for any of the phonetic languages including Korean. For a native english speaker, I suspect Hangul/Korean is impressive because of its simplicity (and the popularity of K-pop and k-drama also help to an extent) in writing with a smaller alphabet compared to the relative madness of the English language.

inkyoto 3y ago
> […] is completely phonetic […] … for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century. Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem. There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future. The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though. So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently. Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.
t-3 3y ago
The complexity of English spelling reflects the origin of the language as a trade tongue, also possibly reflecting influence from Latin, which went so far as to add redundant letters for the sole purpose of indicating foreignness. The majority of words are loanwords, and the spelling reflects the origin of the word (unless you're British, in which case some of the spelling reflects the British desire to be French). This can actually be very useful for divining pronunciation and meaning, but I admit I do sometimes think about dropping the redundant letters and reforming the alphabet to one sound per letter.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  The great vowel shift is complicit in the divergence of the pronunciation and spelling in English, not the loan words. Loaned or not, the «bite», «meet», «meat», «serene», «mate», «out», «boot», «boat», «stone», «day», «they», «boy», «law», «knew», «dew», «know» were pronounced differently before and after the great vowel shift. The GVS was a gradual process that encompassed several centuries and – in some dialects of English in Britain – the remnants of the pre-GVS pronunciation have persisted into today.
smsm42 3y ago
My native language is Russian, which is very non phonetic, but it's nothing compared to English. Russian just has some vowels and consonants pronounced and written differently in some situations, but there are rules and nothing like "ghoti" is possible. I think English and French take it way out there.

by devsda 3y ago

inkyoto 3y ago

> […] is completely phonetic […] … for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century. Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem. There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future. The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though. So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently. Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.

t-3 3y ago

The complexity of English spelling reflects the origin of the language as a trade tongue, also possibly reflecting influence from Latin, which went so far as to add redundant letters for the sole purpose of indicating foreignness. The majority of words are loanwords, and the spelling reflects the origin of the word (unless you're British, in which case some of the spelling reflects the British desire to be French). This can actually be very useful for divining pronunciation and meaning, but I admit I do sometimes think about dropping the redundant letters and reforming the alphabet to one sound per letter.

inkyoto 3y ago
The great vowel shift is complicit in the divergence of the pronunciation and spelling in English, not the loan words. Loaned or not, the «bite», «meet», «meat», «serene», «mate», «out», «boot», «boat», «stone», «day», «they», «boy», «law», «knew», «dew», «know» were pronounced differently before and after the great vowel shift. The GVS was a gradual process that encompassed several centuries and – in some dialects of English in Britain – the remnants of the pre-GVS pronunciation have persisted into today.

smsm42 3y ago

My native language is Russian, which is very non phonetic, but it's nothing compared to English. Russian just has some vowels and consonants pronounced and written differently in some situations, but there are rules and nothing like "ghoti" is possible. I think English and French take it way out there.