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Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?
by xigoi 11mo ago
Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?
- QuercusMax 11mo agoIf French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might have a point. At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.
- wewtyflakes 11mo agoEnglish is the top language spoken in all the world; it would be lovely to facilitate better communication with that population.
- QuercusMax 11mo agoAnd the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet. I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet. Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.
- QuercusMax 11mo agoSure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.
- AndriyKunitsyn 11mo agoAbout 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet. Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
- QuercusMax 11mo agoThose are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.
- AndriyKunitsyn 11mo agoOkay, I misread the context of the discussion. I apologize.
- tmtvl 11mo agoWorcestershire.
- QuercusMax 11mo agoWe're not talking about words like worcestershire. I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey" "chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There can't possibly be irregular spellings using the romanizations we're talking about!
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet." Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
- rdtsc 11mo ago> Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”? Already done. - Komen ça va? - Mo byin, mærsi. We don't have anything against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole, do we?
- ronsor 11mo agoJapanese people don't read romanized Japanese. Even Japanese learners don't read romanized Japanese. Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people who already know European/Western languages.
- xigoi 11mo agoWhat I’m complaining arout is that it seems to only be designed for English speakers, not for European language speakers.
- SpecialistK 11mo agoOthers in the thread have suggested that Hepburn works quite well for German and other European languages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286292#46286611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286292#46286611) But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear) in schools, played on train announcements, is the only Western language available on ticket machines, and is the assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not "arbitrary" at all.
- devnullbrain 11mo ago>English Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.
- lostlogin 11mo agoWe could start by standardising English, so that pronunciation was always the same for a given letter order.
- stickfigure 11mo ago> “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour” English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary - including the word pronounce - comes from French.
- soraminazuki 11mo agoDo you think Japanese people actually read and write in kunrei-shiki? No, they write using their own letters. Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and 2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons. Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.
- xigoi 11mo agoWhat I’m complaining about is that the romanization is based specifically on English, arbitrarily chosen from all languages that natively use the Latin alphabet. For example, what’s transcribed as “shi” is only “aligned with the correct pronunciation” for English speakers. In other languages it would be more accurately transcribed as “ši”, “szi“, “chi”, “schi” or even “si”.