6 ms·

English is far from being streamlined. In fact it's the only language I know that requires you to learn how to pronounce EACH word. Most languages only requir

by ajuc 12y ago

English is far from being streamlined. In fact it's the only language I know that requires you to learn how to pronounce EACH word. Most languages only require learning how each letter sounds, and maybe a few dozen di/trigraphs, the rest is regular. Not so in English.

sswezey 12y ago
You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.
- Symbiote 12y ago
  To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
  - umanwizard 12y ago
    Yup, so in Mandarin you have a vague hint as to how to pronounce each word, based on writing. Same goes for English.
    - rhino369 12y ago
      For most words you can "sound it out" in English. There are just a lot of exceptions.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    Yes, but these are based on how the words were pronounced when the character was created which means there is significant variation in the sounds the same radical is indicating.
  - doodpants 12y ago
    I'm guessing that the people who decided that those characters bore any resemblance to a horse or a woman are the same people responsible for naming the constellations.
    - Kronopath 12y ago
      That's because you're seeing them after literally thousands of years of evolution and simplification. 马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology) Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)
    - gbog 12y ago
      Quite the opposite. Once you have engraved in your brain the shape of these characters they become the very representative shapes of the things they draw. It is not a matter of resemblance, just as most caricatures do not resemble the model, but the model is still immediately recognized. Another analogy is the sign indicating lifts in airports: it do not resemble any kind of real life lifts, but everyone still understand it, without even having a sound for it. So are Chinese characters. If you don't believe me I'll pardon you: a long familiarity with them is required here.
logfromblammo 12y ago
No, you don't. You only need to learn separate spelling and pronunciation rules for each of the languages English has evolved or stolen from. The tough spellings usually come from Germanic roots via Old English and Middle English, whereas the French-Norman spellings are less difficult. Greek-Latin spellings are markedly less confusing when you learn the transliterations of the Greek alphabet. Of course Philadephia is pronounced with fricative 'f' sounds instead of plosive 'p' sounds, because the Greek letter for that sound is 'phi'. Because of that, I dislike it when people pronounce the feathered dinosaur archaeopterix as [ar-key-OP-tur-iks] rather than [ar-KAY-o-(p)TEAR-iks]. It isn't incorrect either way, because in English, correct is whatever other people will understand. (Suck it, French.) This is why I get sick of people complaining about "monolingual" English-speakers. The language has been glued together from Dutch-Germanic, North-Germanic, French-Norman, Greek, Latin, and centuries of absorbing and assimilating immigrant populations from all over the world. You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word-specific association. The remaining ten percent of words are correct when spelled and pronounced as in the native language or as anglicized renormalizations, even using the rules specific to unrelated languages. That is why the plural of octopus can be either octopodes or octopuses. Octopi is colloquially correct, but it is then acceptable to deliver a short lecture on Latinized Greek words. Similarly, the acceptable plurals of cactus are cactuses, cacti, or (los) cactus (pronounced as in Spanish). As Spanish has an increasingly large influence on American English, I have found it useful to know that it only has five vowel sounds, and knowing how to pronounce burrito and enchilada correctly gives you all five. Despite what your elementary school teachers may have said to you, you are only incorrect in English if other people cannot understand what you are trying to communicate. Nevertheless, failure to be incorrect does not imply correctness, which is why grammar nazis exist.
- nawitus 12y ago
  >You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word-specific association. Don't you also need to learn the language from which every word is derived from?

by ajuc 12y ago

sswezey 12y ago

You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.

Symbiote 12y ago
To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
- umanwizard 12y ago
  Yup, so in Mandarin you have a vague hint as to how to pronounce each word, based on writing. Same goes for English.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    For most words you can "sound it out" in English. There are just a lot of exceptions.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  Yes, but these are based on how the words were pronounced when the character was created which means there is significant variation in the sounds the same radical is indicating.
- doodpants 12y ago
  I'm guessing that the people who decided that those characters bore any resemblance to a horse or a woman are the same people responsible for naming the constellations.
  - Kronopath 12y ago
    That's because you're seeing them after literally thousands of years of evolution and simplification. 马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology) Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)
  - gbog 12y ago
    Quite the opposite. Once you have engraved in your brain the shape of these characters they become the very representative shapes of the things they draw. It is not a matter of resemblance, just as most caricatures do not resemble the model, but the model is still immediately recognized. Another analogy is the sign indicating lifts in airports: it do not resemble any kind of real life lifts, but everyone still understand it, without even having a sound for it. So are Chinese characters. If you don't believe me I'll pardon you: a long familiarity with them is required here.

logfromblammo 12y ago

No, you don't. You only need to learn separate spelling and pronunciation rules for each of the languages English has evolved or stolen from. The tough spellings usually come from Germanic roots via Old English and Middle English, whereas the French-Norman spellings are less difficult. Greek-Latin spellings are markedly less confusing when you learn the transliterations of the Greek alphabet. Of course Philadephia is pronounced with fricative 'f' sounds instead of plosive 'p' sounds, because the Greek letter for that sound is 'phi'. Because of that, I dislike it when people pronounce the feathered dinosaur archaeopterix as [ar-key-OP-tur-iks] rather than [ar-KAY-o-(p)TEAR-iks]. It isn't incorrect either way, because in English, correct is whatever other people will understand. (Suck it, French.) This is why I get sick of people complaining about "monolingual" English-speakers. The language has been glued together from Dutch-Germanic, North-Germanic, French-Norman, Greek, Latin, and centuries of absorbing and assimilating immigrant populations from all over the world. You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word-specific association. The remaining ten percent of words are correct when spelled and pronounced as in the native language or as anglicized renormalizations, even using the rules specific to unrelated languages. That is why the plural of octopus can be either octopodes or octopuses. Octopi is colloquially correct, but it is then acceptable to deliver a short lecture on Latinized Greek words. Similarly, the acceptable plurals of cactus are cactuses, cacti, or (los) cactus (pronounced as in Spanish). As Spanish has an increasingly large influence on American English, I have found it useful to know that it only has five vowel sounds, and knowing how to pronounce burrito and enchilada correctly gives you all five. Despite what your elementary school teachers may have said to you, you are only incorrect in English if other people cannot understand what you are trying to communicate. Nevertheless, failure to be incorrect does not imply correctness, which is why grammar nazis exist.

nawitus 12y ago
>You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word-specific association. Don't you also need to learn the language from which every word is derived from?