5 ms·

> That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages

> That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.

anthk 3y ago
Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
- kragen 3y ago
  spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Chinese pronunciation is extremely regular though. Each character has its own pronunciation morphed only by a handful of regular tone rules. Both PRC and Taiwan have regular phonetic alphabets too.
    - kragen 3y ago
      english orthography is extremely regular at the word level too; there are only a handful of words like 'desert' which have multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. but, thus considered, the number of rules is extremely large, perhaps several thousand: a hundred or so for the words that do have regular orthography at the letter level, plus one for each exception: 'would', 'one', 'who', 'police', etc. there's a pretty good list in espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_list and espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_rules. en_list has about 5000 rules in it, things like Tycho taIkoU aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f (wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2 while the 7000 or so rules in en_rules are letter-level things like _d) am (i eIm und) am (en @m _) am (en a#m which specify how to pronounce a particular combination of letters in a particular context. i suspect you could probably reduce the 7000 down to 100 with a more expressive system; the schwa-reduction of [a] in "fundamental", the second example above from en_rules, is the same schwa-reduction applied everywhere to english low vowels in unstressed syllables by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
      - adastra22 3y ago
        I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. You can’t judge one system by the rules used to construct another entirely different system.
        kragen 3y ago
        i'm not sure what you are referring to
        adastra22 3y ago
        I was responding to the thing about Chinese specifically.
        kragen 3y ago
        which rules and which other entirely different system are you referring to? or, which system do you think i am judging by the rules used to construct chinese? i'm making a lot of effort here to express myself clearly and to understand your ideas, but i feel like you aren't really meeting me halfway
HKH2 3y ago
Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.
- hilux 3y ago
  Mao once considered replacing Chinese characters with Pinyin!
  - HKH2 3y ago
    Mandarin speakers will probably forget how to write characters over time anyway, as they depend so much on Pinyin.
adastra22 3y ago
Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago. If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry. English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.

anthk 3y ago

Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...

kragen 3y ago
spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
- adastra22 3y ago
  Chinese pronunciation is extremely regular though. Each character has its own pronunciation morphed only by a handful of regular tone rules. Both PRC and Taiwan have regular phonetic alphabets too.
  - kragen 3y ago
    english orthography is extremely regular at the word level too; there are only a handful of words like 'desert' which have multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. but, thus considered, the number of rules is extremely large, perhaps several thousand: a hundred or so for the words that do have regular orthography at the letter level, plus one for each exception: 'would', 'one', 'who', 'police', etc. there's a pretty good list in espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_list and espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_rules. en_list has about 5000 rules in it, things like Tycho taIkoU aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f (wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2 while the 7000 or so rules in en_rules are letter-level things like _d) am (i eIm und) am (en @m _) am (en a#m which specify how to pronounce a particular combination of letters in a particular context. i suspect you could probably reduce the 7000 down to 100 with a more expressive system; the schwa-reduction of [a] in "fundamental", the second example above from en_rules, is the same schwa-reduction applied everywhere to english low vowels in unstressed syllables by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
    - adastra22 3y ago
      I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. You can’t judge one system by the rules used to construct another entirely different system.
      - kragen 3y ago
        i'm not sure what you are referring to
        adastra22 3y ago
        I was responding to the thing about Chinese specifically.
        kragen 3y ago
        which rules and which other entirely different system are you referring to? or, which system do you think i am judging by the rules used to construct chinese? i'm making a lot of effort here to express myself clearly and to understand your ideas, but i feel like you aren't really meeting me halfway

HKH2 3y ago

Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.

hilux 3y ago
Mao once considered replacing Chinese characters with Pinyin!
- HKH2 3y ago
  Mandarin speakers will probably forget how to write characters over time anyway, as they depend so much on Pinyin.

adastra22 3y ago

Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago. If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry. English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.