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> English is not a phonetic language. Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is. The property that characteri

by pif 1y ago

> English is not a phonetic language. Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is. The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.

taeric 1y ago
Counter point, anyone that claims English isn't a phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing system is. Or what a gesture language is.
- pif 1y ago
  I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.
  - taeric 1y ago
    That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
    - pif 1y ago
      I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
      - taeric 1y ago
        No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc. Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        We're discussing features of written language ("phonetic" -- or the etymologically related "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems by their relationship to spoken language. > Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic "Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language. > They even have two fully regular alphabets I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)
        taeric 1y ago
        Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It quite literally is relating to spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        > Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language. But it is not a feature of a spoken language. > Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language. But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)
        1y ago
    - pif 1y ago
      > but not regular. There is "not being regular" and there is "not even trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from time to time".
bluGill 1y ago
English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of words where it isn't clear what is the correct pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of letters together there are only a few possible pronunciations, often exactly one. I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.
- pif 1y ago
  There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid! We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English. And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.
  - bcatanzaro 1y ago
    Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.) English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.
    - pif 1y ago
      You are wrong on several levels. 1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel. 2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects. 3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it. 4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
thechao 1y ago
I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography? I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?
- pif 1y ago
  > I think you're trying to to argue something like: I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before. Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
  - thechao 1y ago
    Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is?
    - codethief 1y ago
      Spanish and Italian are.
      - trealira 1y ago
        There's also Finnish.
    - pessimizer 1y ago
      This is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not. Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet. Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.

by pif 1y ago

taeric 1y ago

Counter point, anyone that claims English isn't a phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing system is. Or what a gesture language is.

pif 1y ago
I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.
- taeric 1y ago
  That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
  - pif 1y ago
    I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
    - taeric 1y ago
      No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc. Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        We're discussing features of written language ("phonetic" -- or the etymologically related "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems by their relationship to spoken language. > Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic "Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language. > They even have two fully regular alphabets I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)
        taeric 1y ago
        Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It quite literally is relating to spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        > Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language. But it is not a feature of a spoken language. > Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language. But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)
        1y ago
  - pif 1y ago
    > but not regular. There is "not being regular" and there is "not even trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from time to time".

bluGill 1y ago

English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of words where it isn't clear what is the correct pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of letters together there are only a few possible pronunciations, often exactly one. I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.

pif 1y ago
There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid! We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English. And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.
- bcatanzaro 1y ago
  Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.) English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.
  - pif 1y ago
    You are wrong on several levels. 1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel. 2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects. 3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it. 4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.

thechao 1y ago

I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography? I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?

pif 1y ago
> I think you're trying to to argue something like: I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before. Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
- thechao 1y ago
  Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is?
  - codethief 1y ago
    Spanish and Italian are.
    - trealira 1y ago
      There's also Finnish.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    This is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not. Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet. Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.