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As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is t
by germandiago 1y ago
As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it.
Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
- woleium 1y agoas i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.
- devman0 1y agoBlame the Normans for that one...well English was already kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the Normans really sealed the deal.
- jcranmer 1y agoThis often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'. Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
- kleiba 1y agoLet's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
- grey413 1y agoAs I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology. The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.
- School-Cotton 1y ago> English has a relatively simple grammar You mean "relatively simple morphology". English phonology and syntax are not simple at all (e.g. lots of information carried by word order).
- trchek 1y agoSolidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French. I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling. I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long. This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
- jason-johnson 1y agoI believe this is because England was conquered by the Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally stopped speaking French among themselves.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the result of a modern reform movement, not something that happened naturally within the language. > [English] never really adopted foreign grammar There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from Celtic.
- aeonik 1y agoAt least 3: ~26% Germanic ~29% Latin ~29% French ~16% Other RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3 https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3
- zahlman 1y agoIt seems hard to measure with any kind of objectivity here, considering how much Latin is in French (and even modern German) as well.
- School-Cotton 1y agoThat might be true if you just count up every word in the dictionary by origin. However if you weight the words by frequency, Germanic will be way higher. That is, if you take a transcript of an average conversation in English, the proportion of words inherited from Old English (i.e., Germanic) will be much higher than 26%.
- throaway955 1y agoAlmost all the most used words in English are Germanic. Latin in particular is overrpresented because of scientific and technical terms which are rarely used.
- jghn 1y agoThere's a really good podcast [1] that dives into the background of English. It starts off even further back, talking about PIE and how that affected all the earlier languages of the region. And then starts tying the pieces together on how English was formed. [1] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
- dkdbejwi383 1y ago> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. is there no accent variation in Spanish? Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.
- inigoalonso 1y agoYou're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not random deviations from spelling norms. In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or Korean.
- coffeeling 1y agoI don't know if Korean is ultimately that good. Hangeul are a monstrous improvement over the old mixed script (which itself is better than the Japanese iteration because the Koreans only used Chinese characters for Chinese loans), but it still has a lot of sound change rules and can be a bit of a pain to read because of how letters flow to the next syllable. It's not in the same league with Finnish or Spanish, at any rate.
- pxndxx 1y agoYeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.
- gwd 1y agoMy son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds). English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500 graphemes.
- decimalenough 1y agoSpanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.
- MarceColl 1y agoThe rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?
- daeken 1y ago(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.
- germandiago 1y agoI see what you mean. I think you should stick to one form and learn by difference or you could quickly get lost. "ll" in standard spanish is a strong english "y". However, in spanish argentinian from the area of Buenos Aires (but not the argentinian Córdoba, which sounds more like colombian spanish) it is "sh", being that s something like a mix in-between of "j" and "s" + h as in "she" but the sound is a bit different. Without being able to record some sound I cannot express it better but I am sure you can find something around. Javier Milei, the president, has such an accent.
- 1y ago
- diogolsq 1y agoPortuguese and German are like that. You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly. English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms. English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well. Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know exactly how it’s pronounced.
- beAbU 1y agoI've only really been exposed to French in music, where I've sung various French pieces of the years. But from my experience, at least French is consistent? As-written is as-pronounced. Is this not really the case, and therefore is French also guilty of having the same vowels/consonants pronounced differently for completely arb reasons?
- germandiago 1y agoOr live and live, read and read (past participle), or castle (the t is mute) or bear, beard, the ea is different. I do not want to be offensive, there are lots more , but it is an amazing sh*tshow the mapping.
- lelandfe 1y agoIf you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)
- germandiago 1y agoHahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like undecipherable.
- stockresearcher 1y agoA lot of nautical terms have unusual pronunciations. English sailors primarily came from coastal regions, and were very happy to have a lingo that was incomprehensible to the landsman. All of this carried over to North America as well.
- pmontra 1y agoYes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because the correct pronunciation would require the word to be written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation rules to the written words.
- throaway955 1y agoits just a soft c? other languages have that too. English has soft c's after i, e and y. They probably didn't teach you that rule. its true that most English speakers pronounce soft c's as a "sh" sound these days, but it wasn't always the case.
- trealira 1y agoIf it were just a soft C, then "ocean" would sound more like "oh-see-in" or "oce-yin". But it's also been palatalized to sound like "oshin" in typical pronunciation. People might not have understood them because they didn't know this.
- zajio1am 1y ago> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form. In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individual morphemes, but not necessary for words, as in written form morphemes are just concatenated (to make words), while in spoken form there may be complex interactions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)
- gus_massa 1y agoIt's not so strict, but we try most time to keep it consistent. For example, here in Buenos Aires we almost don't say the "d" at the end of the word, like in "ciudad" (city), in some pronunciation guides I saw it written with a tiny d. If the variant get's too popular the two versions become the official spelling, for example "septiembre" and "setiembre" (September) are correct. I hate the second one and I never use it, but it's popular somewhere. After many years, sometime the old spelling disappears and is marked as archaic.
- germandiago 1y agoStrictly speaking, spanish has the same sound for v and b, unlike other romance languages. G and j when followed by e or i also.
- pitpatagain 1y agoThis is true, but Spanish orthography isn't completely phonemic (and simpler for it). It is very shallow and very consistent but it doesn't spell out things like assimilation differences, people are just wrong to describe it as completely phonemic.
- int_19h 1y agoAn orthography that surfaces (non-phonemic) assimilation would be phonetic rather than phonemic. For example, many languages assimilate "n" to "m" before "b", but the phoneme is still /n/, and native speakers are often not even aware that this assimilation occurs (which is what indicates that it's still the same phoneme).