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I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200. That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to
by noosphr 8mo ago
I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
- abustamam 8mo agoI'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago. Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
- ETH_start 8mo agoI think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoThat's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.
- noosphr 8mo ago>But most words are spelled as they sound. English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- naniwaduni 8mo agoThe Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
- noosphr 8mo agoAn alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet. Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
- jamiek88 8mo agoInteresting! So what’s the abc’s we learn then?
- scubbo 8mo agoSpelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words. ...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoThat's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.
- noosphr 8mo agoChinese kids manage with 6,000 character. Just because we normalize child abuse doesn't mean its right.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoAnd English speakers learn tens of thousands of words, and eventually read almost all of them by sight. I don't see where any abuse is happening.
- CRConrad 8mo agoOTOH, those 6,000 characters sound rather like child abuse to me.
- Oreb 8mo agoPhonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller. People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
- dontlaugh 8mo agoThe other big problem would be the lack of intelligibility of English written by native speakers from different places.
- cyberax 8mo ago> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian). Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced. E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
- kstrauser 8mo agoOTOH, I’ve seen what y’all call cursive, and want no part of it.
- cyberax 8mo agoIt depends on a writer, but it can be very legible. I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes. It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore. A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
- williadc 8mo agoI've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention. https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/
- sheept 8mo agophonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry" and "Mary" be spelled the same? besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language
- noosphr 8mo agoYou suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet. There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case. If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing system.
- sheept 8mo agoThen under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects. For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.
- noosphr 8mo agoOne I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- accidentallfact 8mo ago