If we are voting on missing letters I want thorn(þ). My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages, and it deserves to get it's own letter back.
On the topic of screwball spelling is this video essay on silent letters. The fun takeaway for me was that a lot of silent letters were never pronounced. it is just that when some of the first dictionaries were being produced, and the spellings decided on, they decided to introduce silent letters to indicate the origin of the word. the b in debt is because it comes from the latin debitum. but it was not spelled that way until the 1500's prior to that it was dette.
It would be nice to revive all of the Old English letters (well, except for the wynn Ƿ because it's so easily confused with P).
"æ" even has the same obvious sound value still, it can even keep the name "ash"
"þ" and "ð" for the two th-sounds (the former unvoiced, the latter voiced).
And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc, then "j" could instead be used with the value it has in French, i.e. used to spell words like "measure" - this is one of the few English phonemes that doesn't have a definitive letter associated with it right now.
Always use "k" for that sound and repurpose c/q/x for something else, and we could ditch the digraphs completely.
I don't know how many of you need to read this but no one is stopping you from doing any of this. Putting aside cultural friction and being thought a bunch of quacks, you could just start doing these things. There's no real authority telling anyone that they can't despite what some people believe. Just do it!
It's in quantum superposition. Actually speaking it collapses the wavefunction around that particular speaker, although some prefer to believe instead that reality forks. ~
By the "g as in graphics" logic for "gif", for "jpeg" we have "j as in joint", "p as in photographic", "e as in experts", and "g as in group", so "je-feck"?
i am inclined to agree on all points, and while the second parenthetical would be useful in Contemporary English, i cannot help but note that "þ" and "ð" in Old English both represented the same phoneme (unlike in, say, Icelandic). all of the OE fricatives (/s/, /f/, /þ/) had predictable phonetic voicing depending on environment (voiced intervocalically, unvoiced elsewhere), but no phonemic distinction. in extant MSS, <þ> and <ð> are completely interchangable, mere stylistic variants of writing the phoneme, and even texts written by a single scribe will often have the same word written with both letters. some older MSS will use a plain <d> for the voiced sound (and a plain <b> for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used <th>. in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see <th> or <d>, but Classical OE spelling didn't generally distinguish the voiced or unvoiced.
even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!
Well, we get those two letters "for free" anyway, and the phonemes are distinct in modern English, so let's use them!
"ð" also has the nice property of being sufficiently similar in looks to "d" that someone reading it and not familiar with the letter might pronounce it as "d" and thereby make a decent approximation. Unfortunately that's not the case with "þ" though. If we ignored the historical letters and instead just picked something reasonably sensible, I'd probably go with "đ" and "ŧ" for this reason.
i've had people mistake "ð" for an "o" with a diacritic, but presumably that's a typeface problem. whatever we choose, i insist that we drop the names and call them "eþþ" and "ðee", by analogy with our other fricatives ;)
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative[1] is another fun one. The only european languages that have it are Welsh and Icelandic where it's simply written "ll" and "hl". In some medieval texts it had a dedicated letter "Ỻ" or "ỻ".
Here's a fun thing you can do with AI, here ChatGPT:
"I speak a number of languages, but I'm not a linguist. How could I get a list of sounds that aren't included in the languages I speak? Would be interesting to hear what sounds I'm not used to hearing"
<Long blurb about what a great idea I had, and an intro to how to do it>
If you’d like, you could just tell me the languages you speak, and I can give you a first-pass list of major sound types you’re probably missing (like clicks, ejectives, tones, pharyngeals, etc.).
Would you like me to sketch a concrete example with your languages?
"Sure, here's my list: <my list>"
And then it gives a list of sounds you know, and sounds you don't. Pretty cool. It even has links to a sound map site so you can hear them.
If you like, I could generate a concrete list of IPA symbols that are not in <my list> — a sort of “negative phoneme inventory”. Would you like me to build that for you?
"Yes please. Also what additional language would cover the most ground?"
One language that covers the most new ground
Amharic (Ethiopian Semitic) is a superb single add-on because it gives you, in one go:
• Ejectives (tʼ, kʼ, qʼ, sʼ/tsʼ),
• Pharyngeal consonants (ħ, ʕ),
• Uvular stop (q), and
• True gemination (contrastive long consonants).
If you want a two-language combo to “max out” the world’s rarities, add Zulu (or Xhosa) for clicks alongside Amharic.
About silent letters, French did the same, but one of the unintended consequences was to change pronunciation of many words when reading became common in the XIXth century. For instance "admirer, admiration" had a silent d before ~1830, which is now pronounced by everyone. Ditto the "ir" termination of verbs, the "r" was silent, that's why old songs have strange rhymes such as "Compère Guilleri" rhyming with "te lairas-tu mourir", and "les lilas sont fleuris" rhyming with "qu'il fait bon dormir".
This is just a feature of Castilian Spanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
\th\ only occurs naturally in like 5% of the thousands of human languages that have ever existed. Just because those languages are some of the most widely-spoken ones worldwide does not make the sound a commonly-occurring one in a meaningful phonological sense.
I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, but am less sure about that. Unfortunately I lack the data needed to substantiate my claim.
with
lang_sounds as (
select
lang,
unnest(string_to_array(ipa, null) ) as sound
from world_dictionary
),
totals as (
select
lang,
count(sound) as sound_count
from lang_sounds
group by lang
)
select
lang,
totals.sound,
count(sound) / totals.sound_count
from
lang_sounds join
totals on
lang_sounds.lang = totals.lang
where sound = 'θ' or sound = 'ð' or sound = 'θ̠' or sound = 'z'
group by lang, sound
order by count(sound) / totals.sound_count
https://phoible.org/parameters has the data you seek: 5% of languages in the database have eth (ð) and 4% have theta (θ). Z is not a 'th' sound and fairly common at 30% of languages, though.
> I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, [...]
There's no single th sound in English. There's a few different sounds you get from that letter combination in different words (and in different dialects).
It’s true. English and the main Spain version of Spanish are two of the few languages in the world which have the sound. Even most Latin American versions of Spanish (maybe all?) do not have it.
In "distinción" spanish, the classic pair is the word for house and for hunt - "casa" and "caza" respectively. If you pronounce them the same (with an S sound), you're a Seseo speaker like (most) latin america. If you pronounce them with different sounds, one an S sound, the other a TH sound, you're a "distinción" speaker, and if you pronounce them both with a TH sound, it's the more uncommon ceceo accent, usually largely Andalusian.
I stand corrected. All of those seem loanwords, but you are absolutely right.
My main point is that if you hear the sounds "th" (za) with e or i 99% it is cena or circo and will not be zena or zirco. It is an heuristic but very reliable.
My favourite word to troll people who are learning the language is "cerrojo" /θe'roxo/, meaning "latch" or "lock", as it contains the three most difficult consonants in the language in sequence xD
I was talking about spelling. I can clearly see how these clusters of consonants characteristic of all Slavic languages can be a pain for a beginner, no matter how you spell them.
No Cyrillic imports, thank you. Russia decided to be the bully and murderer of its closest neighbors, don't need any more russian influence, even if literally just on paper. The further one is from them the more safety and prosperity there is, in every possible way.
What I found helpful in parsing those z combinations is just replacing them with h instead. for example, if you went up to a random monolingual English speaker and showed them "shchotechka" they could probably pronounce it reasonably well. All those z's just throw people off.
> My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages,
Not as rare as the lateral fricative, the "ll" in Welsh and "hl" in Southern African languages. e.g. in the place names Llandudno in Wales and Hluhluwe in KwaZulu.
And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
> And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
<q> is only one of the clicks in Bantu languages! The letters <c> and <x> are used for other kinds of clicks too (for dental and lateral clicks, respectively).
And then of course there are the Khoisan languages, which use a completely different set of click letters: <ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ>.
I work for a small remote company with employees all over Europe; it's pretty common for most non-native English speakers to pronounce it this way. Especially noticeable with Germans.
Interesting; I don't recall hearing it pronounced like that from my Polish colleagues, so perhaps it's something about the Germanic languages specifically?
Who's judging? I'll save that for when my Swedish är lite mindre dålig! It's just a little strange that the "b" somehow transforms into a "p" when "b" is a perfectly common letter in Swedish. If they just pronounced the "b" I wouldn't have thought it at all notable.
It depends on whether you define "rare" in terms of language variety or human variety, obviously. In terms of languages, it is a relatively rare phoneme. It occurs more often as an allophone of other phonemes, but in that case the speakers may not be able to distinguish it and will struggle to reproduce it in "unusual" environments.
I want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular.
As I watched my son learn to speak, then later to read and write, I paid attention to his misspellings and they all made perfect sense if you approached the language phonetically.
The first sentence he wrote for me was:
“my daddy and i tocd on d woki toki”
(“My Daddy and I talked on the walkie talkie.”)
At first confusing, but it omits all the silent, or effectively silent because native speakers usually omit the sound, or abbreviate it so much that non-native speakers would miss it if they didn’t know it was there. Like “l” in “talked”.
And don’t get me started on irregular conjugations.
With the very wide variety of English accents around the world, you would have a tough time creating phonetic spelling in English that everyone would agree to. My mother (a true Brit) might want 'wahtah' for water, where I think it is perfect as is.
With that said, there are clearly some things that could be changed.
There are a wide variety of accents in Britain alone - ‘wahtah’ isn’t recognisable to me for example. It’s a cliche to say brits don’t pronounce “r”, but all you have to do is watch Harry Potter to see all the different accents that do.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,
I believe that there is a lowest common denominator for accented English, and it sounds like “sung” English - which sounds like non-regional American English if the singer is singing and doesn’t naturally have a very pronounced accent. This is partially due to cultural effects but partially due to the mechanics of speaking with an accent.
By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.
But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.
Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.
> I want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular
I don’t. The complexity and history is what makes life fun, and makes English one of the most interesting languages read, written, and spoken today.
Similar to Imperial versus Metric. Yes the metric system is better (aside from temperature ranges - Fahrenheit is superior) but it’s not nearly as fun. Why 12 inches in a foot? Who knows!
I don’t think it’s etymology and irregularity that make English “fun”; I think that it’s English’s large number of concepts because we freely appropriate words and their ideas from other languages (“schadenfreude”, “Deja vu”, etc), the small alphabet, the lack of diacritics, and the flexibility that has been forced onto it primarily by American speakers abusing grammar- verbification, etc.
I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.
The writing system has 0 to do with that. More the UK and USA being superpowers for ages.
There is no reason why English would be more interesting to native speakers than German, Spanish, Finnish or Bulgarian to their respective native speakers.
In college I would go climbing frequently and one of the people I met along the way was a student from Italy that was here for her doctoral. On one trip we were talking about all the things we found beautiful and I made a comment about how much I loved the sound of the romance languages, and how they were so sing-songy to my ear. She then proceeded to talk at length about how she found English so much more interesting because it allowed for expression that just wasn't possible in Italian. Specifically, the nature of English being a pidgin that not only accepts creating new concepts on the fly but almost encourages it means that she can think about things in English that are actually difficult to formulate in her native Italian.
I've since heard interesting comparisons as well from native Mandarin speakers, where there is a certain formulaic piece missing in English that let's them form ideas easier. Interestingly in that case they would describe opposites too where there are certain groupings of ideas that they found easier to form in Mandarin that they had to invent words for in English to get across. But they could do so - invent those words.
I'm a native English speaker and only a third rate French and Spanish speaker, so I have to take this on faith for the most part, but it is interesting to hear that common view across origins.
Jorge Luis Borges would agree with you, as he articulates in this interview with fellow native Spanish speaker William F. Buckley (starts at about 17:15 in case the timestamp disappears)
English has more words than those " around 500,000 words, compared to German’s 135,000" due to to it being the result of a merger of various different languages (https://ititranslates.com/which-language-is-richest-in-words...) So there's more stuff if you are into that sort of thing.
Sources generally seen as authoritative (Duden, Wahrig etc.) estimate that the German everyday language has between 250,000 and 500,000 words (depending how you count), without counting technical terms.
I've always wondered: do speakers of other languages enjoy spelling bees and puzzles based on spelling and wordplay as much as English speakers do? It seems like spelling bees wouldn't be as interesting in a more phonetic language, for instance.
A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.
I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).
Those are "phono-semantic compounds" for anyone looking to do more reading up on them. The example that springs most readily to mind is "嗎" (in Pinyin "mǎ") which is a question particle you put at the end of sentences meaning, roughly, "is it not so?" The left character is "口" meaning "mouth" (in Pinyin "kǒu" but that's neither here nor there) and the right particle is "馬" in Pinyin "mǎ" (and meaning "horse" but that's neither here nor there).
French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.
English is three languages smashed together with thousand of words borrowed from dozens of other languages (Latin, “Proto-German”, Norman French). There’s no other language that has such a rich vocabulary.
To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.
Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.
You're changing the definition of "better" so you can have your cake (admit X is better than Y) and eat it too (prefer Y over X). It's ok to like fun things! It's ok to like Imperial and weird grammar, but then you can't also claim that you agree it's worse.
Most imperial units are how they are because they can be easily divided into a bunch of different ways - 10 can only be divided by 5 and 2, 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This is practical when you have a physical amount something you need to deal with, like re-portioning a recipe.
Because it is the human scale for temperature. It turns out to not matter that much. but imagine a cold snowy winter, that's 0 and image a hot summer that's 100.
Really both C and F are silly, the minute temperature was found out to have a zero point, they should have been discarded, and we should have gone full in on Kelvin(or Rankine if that is your jam), or even better a new unit that better integrates 0, a scale from 0 to the boiling point of water? and give water boiling 1000? or would it be better to give water freezing 1000? Triple cells are a common way to calibrate temperature.
Yea but the scales don't match. 0-30 isn't very metric, whereas 0-100 is. If you added Fahrenheit to metric I think you'd be much more consistent.
Of course both scales can go above and below the numbers mentioned above, but if you are going to do things based on units of 10 you might as well be consistent.
0°F to 100°F spans the full range of temperatures I'd go out in & not consider it "extreme weather", so it's rather intuitive in that you can think of it as "how hot is it on a scale of 0-100". It feels very human centric & convenient for everyday usage IMO.
Spelling preserves a lot of meaning and etymology in words. Phonetic spelling would remove some of this richness from the written language. Logographic systems like Chinese take this to the extreme. I think English strikes a nice balance.
Spelling can also bridge the gap between phonetic differences between accents. Many variants of English don't even have the same number of sounds as others, but we all "come together" when we write.
In English, it would frustrate me if every time I read marry it would be spelled the same as merry, because I say those differently, even if most Americans I come in contact with daily do not.
Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English, but one thing I admire about it is when things are correctly spelled, you can adjust the text for accent based on spelling. The only area I can think of where spelling does not denote contrast in any accent is between b and v. (Edit: and that h is silent.) There are some contrasts that are only kept by a minority of speakers (Ll is merged with Y for most people, but maybe not in Bolivia or parts of Spain; s and z are merged in Latin America), but it's still a meaningful contrast for somebody.
"a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling"
My favorite example of a phonetic misspelling - when my older daughter was learning to write, we were potty-training my younger daughter. The older one made a sign "PODE CHRAN FOR [younger daughter's name]" and taped it to the wall over the potty.
Maybe we could have a separate version that was fonetik and regular and the kids could learn it? They could always use google translate to deal with texts in normal English like I do with most languages.
Edit - I looked up and there is a translation thing online.
"this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.
> "this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.
These samples are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which isn’t really designed for the purpose of being a practical orthography — it’s used as a language-independent transcription method which can represent any sound. (That’s also why the British and American versions are different: different accents use different sounds, so they’re transcribed differently.) So this isn’t really a ‘phonetic spelling of English’, though it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.
Learning to read phonetically still pays off handsomely, despite the erratic spellings of English.
I sometimes discover that I mispronounce words I know very well. The reason is that I never heard those words used audibly, I only encountered them in books. So I "invented" a phonetic sound to them, and long ago forgot that I did that. Until whammy, I encounter it verbally, decades later.
> This is why, when you read Old English, you can often replace ‘ᵹ’ (or ‘g’ in modern editions) with ‘y’ and get recognizable Modern English words: ᵹear is year, dæᵹ is day, weᵹ is way.
Interesting, because at least for the last two, "tag" is "day" and "weg" is "way" in German. Replacing both of the G's there make a more recognizably English equivalent word.
Also, "-ig" is the suffix most commonly associated with "-y". For example, "hungrig" is "hungry", which tracks.
Super interesting article. Also I think "cat in a barbershop run by monkeys" is my new favorite classical painting.
> you are using a super set of letters (or am I reaching too far)
You're not though. The original letters are not available, so uppercase is not a superset of lowercase. (Unless you're just stating your opinion that the set of uppercase letters happens to be super)
I always get confused around this and it seems to depend on specific keyboard and software. It seems to mostly be Alt, sometimes Alt Gr, and sometimes the Windows key. But I do remember using Meta to mean Alt when I was setting things up in Ubuntu maybe ten years ago.
I think Super and Meta are the vendor independent terms.
Ctrl - Ctrl - Ctrl
Super - Windows - Command
Left/Right Super - ?? - Open/Close Apple
Left Meta - Alt - Option
Right Meta - Alt Gr - Right Option?
Anybody able to fill the gaps?
Approaching an Apple keyboard for the first time, I naively thought Command would be Ctrl and was quite confused, since there also is Ctrl. But once you start a terminal it became quite clear that this was not the case. This is quite neat, it directly solves the SIGINT,SIGSTOP / Copy, Ctrl-D? confusion. Also having these operation as OS command means that all programs support them.
Still not as strange as ꙮ, the Multiocular O from a 15th century manuscript used to describe a many-eyed seraphim. (Officially added to unicode in 2022)
"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.
Recommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”
Xavi is catalan (shorter form of the name Xavier) and in Catalan "x" has exactly the "sh" sound. To get the "ch" sound you need to use "tx". And yes, most people - even natives - pronounce Xavi badly, due to Castillan influence on Catalan, and the lack of the "sh" sound in Castillan.
Yes Catalans haver no problem with the "x" :) but it's just with the name that is mispronounced due to the Castillan overlap. I think that "caixa" with the "i" before the "x" makes it easier also for Castillans (although it's funny to hear them pronounce it). There is also the fact that both speakers have serious issues with words starting with "s" + consonant, so my theory is that "shavi" is also affected, while "chavi" is far easier.
Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.
If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.
How is it that you can say these words without confusion?
Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.
On paper, yes. But not when someone speaks. If you used a homophone while speaking, the listener would be able to distinguish which variant the talker intended based on context. I would argue this is enough of a reason for written text as well.
"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does.
Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.
There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).
"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.
But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".
"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same.
Depends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually.
Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)
English gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse.
I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
> I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
Maybe, but more due to the spelling of numbers and long sentences. Compound words are not an example of this, since Germans can parse these words just fine as different things. It just means that the lowest "tokenization" in everyday use is not the word, but subcomponents of them.
Do English native speakers "tokenize" expressions in words? Do you see it as '(labelling) (of) (minced)' or '(label)l(ing) (of) (minc)(ed)' ?
I can't speak for most Germans, but the algorithm I think I use is just greedy from left to right. This is also consistent with how mistokenization in common puns works, so I think this is common.
In primary school we trained to recognize syllable boundaries. Is that just a German thing, or is this common in other countries? You need to know these for spelling and once you know these, separating word components becomes trivial.
a) the title of the regulation is not equivalent to the law (unsurprisingly), onestay42's translation is clunky but a lot closer
b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.
I am. It is a semantic difference. Single entities get referred to by a single word. If you use a word group to describe it, it means you don't consider it a single "thing", but a "system" described by the relations of single "things".
The composed word also has a specific meaning that the same words with space between doesn't. For example "das rote Kraut" – "red herb" and "das Rotkraut" – "red cabbage". Also suppose "red cabbage" was grown in abnormal conditions, so it doesn't have the color pigments, it is still "red cabbage", but not "red" "cabbage". This is awkward to state in English, but no problem in German.
Maybe in speech they are similar, but not in writing. The underlying construction is as different as it can be. English puts " " between words, and German does not.
In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.
I've played around with respelling quite a bit; one of the most difficult adaptations is forcing yourself to correctly use "dh" (few-but-common words, "thy", "either", "teethe") vs "th" (most words, "thigh", "ether", "teeth").
j -> dzh is more weird than anything.
Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.
I kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words.
Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.
One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).
Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.
OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.
The problem with þ is that it dates from a time when /ð/ vs /θ/ were allophones. That is, none of the minimal pairs I listed above existed (mostly due to more words having additional syllables - often, inflections at the end).
I completely agree with you. I've taken an amateurish interest in linguistics over the past couple of years, and I've often thought that it might be a fun exercise to come up with a phonetic alphabet for the English language. Use the letter 'c' to represent /ch/, 'x' to represent /sh/, etc.
Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.
Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)
It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.
> ‘ȝ’ was used to write two completely different sounds in Middle English
Was it, though? By comparing English and Dutch you can clearly see that one of the ways this harsh "gh" changed in English is it became "y" as in "yesterday". "Weg" (Dutch) - "way" (English), "gister[en]" (Dutch) - "yester[day] (English), etc. I wonder if at the time pronouncing it as "gh" was still common and this would make using the same letter in some words much more logical.
The other sound ȝ was used for in words now written with 'gh' like 'laugh' and 'night' corresponds to 'ch' in Dutch/German 'lachen' and 'nacht'. If ȝ had corresponded to a single sound in Middle English, it's implausible that it would've split into two different sounds in exactly the same way as in other Germanic languages. So it's more likely that the two sets of words had always been pronounced with different sounds even in Proto-Germanic, and Middle English scribes merely didn't consider it important enough to distinguish them in writing.
They still treat the g consistently the same in every word. It's silent-ish in all words, not some.
The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".
Dutch is a very easy language to learn if you already know English. The main problems are the lack of content to consume and the fact that everyone in the country would rather speak English than tolerate your bad Dutch.
As someone who learned Dutch from scratch in adulthood, these points come up very often but I don't think they are true.
1) Dutch is not an easy language to learn if you speak English. Both the grammar and the vocabulary are way closer to German than to English. The grammar works in a different way, there is an actual grammatical gender, the vowels sound different, etc.
2) There is a lot of content to consume. Let's just start with programming oriented to older children, like the Klokhuis or Jeugdjournaal, which are both in simple language and interesting to adults as well. It's really all there.
3) when taking to people, they want to have a conversation and will switch to a language where that goal can be reached. If people consistently switch to English to you, the sad fact is that your pronunciation and/or grammar are not good enough yet, and you can't assume that the role of random people is to be your teachers.
I learned several languages as an adult, so I compare the effort needed to learn Dutch to the effort needed to learn a much more different language, like French.
1) Yes, Dutch is even closer to German, but it doesn't change the fact that it's very close to English. The grammar is very close, a lot of words are clearly related, learning to read Dutch when you are already profficient in English is a breeze. I never said they were mutually intelligible, but they are close enough to make the leap from one to the other much simpler.
Just as an example, let's consider three words from three different languages that mean the same thing: "gestolen", "volé" and "украденный". Which one of them is closer to the English word "stolen"? Not only in its stem form, but even in the way this irregular verb is conjugated.
2) Some content does exist, but not much. Again, comparing to a language with a much bigger speaker base, like French, let alone English. The difference is orders of magnitude, it's very noticeable when trying to find something interesting to watch or listen.
3) Every time I go to a country where English is less prevalent, I'm forced to learn and practice the language. The same pressure just does not exist in the Netherlands, and the sad fact is, people do not like making unnecessary effort. It is an obstacle and it doesn't help, no matter how you look at it
1) Dutch may be easier to learn for English speakers than, say, French, but it's not easy. Learning it to the point that you can have a naturally flowing conversation with a native is still very difficult for an average person. To go on with your example of gestolen, yes, that sounds easy, but it gets harder very fast. To use a horrible stereotype that is still a very simple sentence, Vandaag gestolen morgen in Polen is not easy to interpret even if you correctly deduce that Polen is Poland. Further, being a native speaker of another Slavic language I could guess what your Russian example mean, but without knowing, I wouldn't put money on it. Does brood mean bread or has it to do with brooding? Once you know, it's easy, but you still have to learn.
2) Obviously there's a huge difference in available content compared to bigger languages. But I do think there's enough, especially if you're not too picky (and you shouldn't be if your goal is to learn the language).
3) it is true that English proficiency is more prevalent in the Netherlands than elsewhere. People don't like making unnecessary effort anywhere, and even if they do, the conversation turns into a lesson, which is I guess not generally desirable.
I speak Dutch to anyone that serves me in English. Which is pretty common at bars or shops in The Netherlands nowadays. At first I thought doing that was rude, but I'm actually doing people a favor to have the chance to learn Dutch. We can always switch to English when it gets too hard or confusing.
And to be honest, somebody that refuses to even try to understand that "Twee croissants en een koffie, alsjeblieft" means "Two croissants and a coffee, please", but replies with "English please" instead can kindly go fuck themselves.
While I agree with your point, don't underestimate how different the pronunciation is between languages, especially if you have an English monolingual on the other side of the counter that is not used to ever hearing anything other than English.
Especially the word "croissant" is tricky. Chances are they they only got "koffie" in your example sentence and had no idea what came before it.
Honestly, the pronunciation in this case is probably closer to English than the spelling is!
I don't know any Germanic languages, but it turns out I can understand a surprising amount of Dutch just by closing my eyes and listening to the flow of the sounds.
Afrikaans is even easier, as I get the impression that the word order is almost always the same as in English, whereas in Dutch it sometimes isn't (I think... as I say, I don't actually know either language!)
wait, now I realize, is not only Dutch but German as well. TIL!
yesteday -> gestern
way -> weg
But the mistery is: how was it pronounced in the old English? The modern y was possibly a norman induced change, and people started reading it as modern y instead of "g" ?
In Old English it was already pronounced /j/ there, even though the spelling was still "weg". Ditto for Old Frisian, so Normans had nothing to do with it.
The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].
In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.
Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.
The "y" in "day" went through the same process, so in your theory it would be something like "ghjesterdaghj". Or maybe it was still just "ghjester" back then, dunno. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know exactly what it sounded like.
I think the article is very bad and that it assumes that modern pronunciation is what it was pronounced back then while as you stated all the sounds of one sign might have been identical back then
The article is describing the generally accepted reconstruction of Middle English pronunciation, which is based not only on the modern pronunciation, but also on comparison with related languages.
In the UK, yogh existed in Scotland a while longer than in England. You can observe it still in the name Menzies which is pronounced Ming-is there - the z in place of the yogh.
In the last week, our most famous Menzies passed away - politician Sir "Ming" Campbell.
Took me a couple of seconds - Georgian .. as in the other country with a red cross on a white background (although you add a few extra crosses than England)
I have no doubt that two very disparate languages and scripts will find a few similarities simply due to proximity. Georgia and England (UK) are close enough for a fair amount of cultural exchange.
And AFAIK Georgian alphabet predates Insular script by a few centuries.
It's not uncommon for otherwise unrelated alphabets to come with similar symbols simply because the trend over time is towards simplification of letter shapes, and there are only so many basic elements. So even originally quite different characters can end up looking very similar when reduced to a few squiggles.
If you start looking into it, you will surely be astonished at just how much “cultural exchange” there must have been going back even into the Paleolithic time, and definitely during the period of the OP article is touching on.
People have an extremely distorted perspective on European history for many reasons, but the late industrial age nation state probably had the biggest impact on that mental model people still have today in many ways. By all evidence I’ve seen, the cultural exchange in the distant past was far more organic than most people can easily imagine today for many reasons. Trade and cultural communion, religious exchanges and defensive unions all made that possible in a world that was not at all as controlled and authoritarian as we even experience today. It all waxed and waned over the centuries and regions of course, in a rather organic manner; but due to practical limitations a lot of the authoritarian restrictions we are all subject to today simply did not exist.
In some ways the USA until about 1960, is probably the most similar analogue of how Europe seems to have generally been for the longest time leading up to the Industrial Revolution. It was a land of general regions of self-regulating, cultural clustering with local levels of varying jurisdictions and power structures which to a large extent kept most people in their home region, if not their place of birth. By the latter part of that period the identity with one’s state and region and local culture had already largely succumbed to the oppressive force of the centralized dominating power of the federal and global power, but your region was still largely your cultural identity as a person and community.
That of course has all been totally razed and destroyed now and the USA effectively exists in name only today, which has been the case for an even longer time, but that’s a different topic altogether.
my biggest TIL takeaway from that article was an "oh wow" moment:
The other sound that ‘ȝ’ once spelled is the “harsh” or “guttural” sound made in the back of the mouth, which you hear in Scots loch or German Bach.4 This sound is actually the reason for the most famous bit of English spelling chaos: the sometimes-silent, sometimes-not sequence ‘gh’ that you see in laugh, cough, night, and daughter. Maybe one day I’ll tell you that story too.
I personally am more fond of provoking an "angstschreeuw" in English speakers by asking them to pronounce "slechtstschrijvend" or "zachtstschrijdend" and watching them recoil in horror at the consonant clusters[0][1].
> Sometime in the deep prehistory of the English language, the ‘g’ sound got pulled forward in the mouth to sound like ‘y’ whenever it was next to these front vowels.
My understanding is that a modern Greek gamma (γ) is the same way: actually a voiced version of "loch". So before "back vowels", it sounds to modern English speakers like a hard 'g', but before "front vowels" it sounds to a modern English speaker like a 'y'.
What you described did take place as Old English evolved, except it happened not just before front vowels but also sometimes after. However at some point late in Old English the palatalized allophones "broke off" and became phonemes in their own right, and most Old English texts are already at that stage, so it really was pronounced like modern "y" at that point, usually. What they got instead is "y" and "j" as allophones, which is partly why modern English pronunciations of most Biblical names are so weird.
Shameless plug for my homeland. The book titled Newzild [1] is the 1966 light-hearted "dictionary" New Zild and how to speak it, by author Arch Acker. The title mimics the broad New Zealand accent, which shortens the pronunciation of "New Zealand". It opens with 'Air gun?' (or 'Acid gun?', I honestly no longer remember) – a humorous pronunciation of the common colloquial greeting 'how are you going?'
Here's a curious thing I found when visiting government officials in Fiji a while back.
They all wrote the fancy 'g' rather than the simplified 'g' we use now. I assume they copied text from textbooks rather than (say) from teachers from England.
As a real young'un I used to attempt to do the same as an exercise but it's not easy to make it look good.
ot but i recently discovered that the latin alphabet western languages use has it's roots in the semitic languages of the middle east. It is of course obvious when you think about it, even the name alphabet is basically the same as aleph bet, the first two letters of hebrew. It's even more obvious when you look at the similarities in the names of the Greek alphabet which Latin is based off.
What happened in short was that the greeks copied the ancient and now virtually defunct phoenican script, varieties of which were used across the region and kept the names even though they made no sense in the context of Greek, added vowels and wrote it from left to right.
The russians adapted the script in one way, Latin in another, Hebrew and arabic took entirely separate paths and now the only thing they share in common is alphabets that follows vaguely the same ordering.
And Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic in turn derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Furthermore, most alphabets in the world derive from that same one source.
It goes to show just how powerful the idea of writing is - once you have a society where it's pervasive, all its neighbors acquire it from them in short order, and they usually do so by adapting the original writing script to their needs. I strongly suspect that the reason why alphabets (and to a lesser extent syllabaries) spread especially widely is because they are easier to adapt to a different language - usually, once you've learned a new alphabet, it's more or less readily obvious how to use it to approximate any language that you already know.
(Which is also how you get imperfect spellings even in brand new orthographies. Practicality usually beats purity.)
> has it's roots in the semitic languages of the middle east
In some way everything has it's roots there: language, numbers, math, philosophy, politics, religion. And earlier humans itself moved in the same direction. It's just were the large population and the high culture used to be. The last remnants were purged in the middle ages and now by islamic fundamentalists.
When I was in elementary school in the 70s in Albania, we had some older teachers who wrote z as ᵹ. I don't know where that came from, but it was not part of the official alphabet.
> English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
Quick reminder that writing != language. Even the highest fidelity writing systems are lossy encoding systems. In fact, the more phonologically accurate a writing system is to its language, the more it obscures the history of its words, especially words borrowed from other languages.
So from the perspective of someone interested in etymology, English writing's tendency to preserve old and foreign spellings is a good thing.
Plus, a more phonetic writing system is also problematic for dialectal variation. I pronounce marry/Mary/merry identically, as well as bag/beg, but other dialects distinguish them. I don't think the written standard would benefit from spelling them identically. That's relevant for everyday use, not just upsetting etymology enthusiasts.
Of course it also depends on how conservative the language is, like Finnish orthography is practically IPA, and yet Finnish is a freaking time capsule for words like borrowed Proto-Germanic *kuningaz and *wīsaz, which became king and wise in English, but kuningas and viisas in modern Finnish. So you can have both phonemic writing as well as etymological transparency if your phonology doesn't change much.
That is indeed a problem with English, but even then it is possible to come up with a morpho-somewhat-phonemic spelling that would be far more consistent than modern English - because the bar set by the standard orthography is really that low.
And OTOH even modern English spelling often doesn't distinguish differences that are there in most dialects (e.g. "bear" vs "near"), so this isn't even a new problem. Realistically I suspect there's some "minimal reasonable set" of phonemes that need to be distinguished to reflect the most prominently distinct pairs in all major dialects, even if some subtle dialectal distinctions might not be reflected in spelling.
Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare. This does npt preclude the existence of rich dialects and accents.
This increases the complexity of learning to write the language -- 56 letters in alphabet and each combination of consonant+vowel and consonant+consonant takes on a different letter form instead of just being a string of independent letters like English.
But reading / pronunciation is straightforward. (No we don't have spelling bees :) )
Indian languages, yes, but the story is more complicated with languages that use Indic scripts.
Tibetan, Mon-Burmese and Thai scripts, as an example, all derive from the Brahmi script (through a long and sometimes windy ancestry), but neither reflects the modern pronunciation, hence mind numbing transcription systems.
Tibetan and Burmese languages are particularly notorious for codifying the archaic pronunciation of respective languages that has been frozen in time for centuries. It is a treasure trove for linguists that have got a time machine for free, but I don't think that the same can't be said modern speakers of both languages.
> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare.
It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English.
Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).
Phonemic spelling does not require a syllabary, though. Several European languages are also written "as spoken" using the Latin alphabet, usually with a few extra digraphs or letter variants. Or you can make the syllabary itself compose regularly, like in Hangul.
Indian languages are generally rich in phonemes though. My mind boggles at the notion of [n] [ɳ] [ɲ] [ŋ] all being distinct. I mean, I can reproduce each one of them on its own, but doing that in rapid speech, and worse yet, recognizing the same in others' speech...
> My mind boggles at the notion of [n] [ɳ] [ɲ] [ŋ] all being distinct.
They are phonetically distinct, but not phonemically distinct, which is to say that in most places they occur, they aren't used to distinguish words or meanings.
In particular, the velar nasal "ङ" or "ng" always appears adjacent to a velar sounds (k/kh/g/gh) and similarly the palatal nasal "ञ" always appears adjacent to palatal sounds (c/ch/j/jh), both as allophones of the nasal phonemes "m" (bilabial) and "n" (alveo-dental), basically just like we speak in English under the exact same conditions (like the nasal in the word "English"!)
You perceive a difference with Indic language and English because the Latin script doesn't distinguish nasals for velar and palatal points of articulation - it only distinguishes by bilabial (m) and alveolar (n), whereas Indic scripts do distinguish those, even though they offer no additional information.
The unique nasal sound which is often contrastive in many Indian languages is the retroflex nasal "ण" (ṇ). That's the one that it's easy to confuse in speech if you are not a native speaker, so it's the only one you need to pay extra attention to when learning.
I don't actually perceive a difference. For that matter, my native language doesn't have [ŋ] at all (not even before velars), so it's actually tricky for me to distinguish it in English as well.
But, as far as I know, the different nasals are phonemic in some languages of India. Which ones depends on which languages, but I do remember seeing at least one in which all four of these were distinct.
> but I do remember seeing at least one in which all four of these were distinct.
None of the major Indian languages I'm familiar with have 4 nasal phones, from either the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language families.
In the Indo-Aryan languages, the convergence of the various nasals is so complete that they are all often represented with a single "dot" diacritic character when they occur at word junctions.
I'd be open to hearing examples of Indian languages that have 4 nasal phonemes, though.
> Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph:
m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)
There are 5 nasal glyphs, but like in other Indian languages, 2 (velar and palatal) are allophones of the others, leaving only 3 actual phonemes. Indian scripts are often overspecified, and not every glyph represents a phoneme.
How does that play out for languages that use characters that are pictorial.
eg. Egyptian Heiroglyphs, or Asian characters (esp. Korean which has a relatively young alphabet - which IIRC is phoneme based, or Chinese which has a very old set, which is used across multiple languages (eg. Mandarin/Cantonese/etc)
It plays out perfectly. E.g. Chinese is one of the least phonological scripts around, and this is precisely why old texts in it are more interpretable.
Korean Hangul is not ideographic (I think what you meant by pictorial?). It's a morphophonemic alphabet that just happens to organize the basic phonemic units into larger graphemes representing whole syllables - but in a completely predictable way. And it is another example of this playing out: the original Hangul was entirely phonemic, but over time pronunciation diverged from spelling, and today it's morpho-phonemic, and even then not perfectly so. So they preserved the history at the cost of some mismatch between the spelling and the sound.
> How does that play out for languages that use characters that are pictorial.
Chinese' pictorial writing completely obfuscates the historical state of the spoken language, to the extent that in order to reconstruct older phases of the spoken Chinese language, scholars have had to inspect old Chinese loan-words in foreign languages that do preserve the old phonetic structure.
An example of this is the discovery that Chinese tones developed from earlier final-consonants, which were lost in Mandarin, but are preserved in Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. i.e: Mandarin "guó" compared with the early borrowing into Japanese : "koku", both meaning "country".
Time to get on the English/American spelling reform and alphabet reform soapbox. 54% of US citizens have a less than 6th grade reading ability and 21% are functionally illiterate. The cause of this is almost entirely non-phonetic/phonemic spelling.
We pretend phonics exists, but it's just a lie we tell little kids to kickstart their learning. In reality, English spelling is more like learning Kanji. The original meanings of the words is warped beyond belief and we tell the specific pronunciation of specific letter sequences based on the surrounding letter sequences (much like telling which Kanji reading to use based on the surrounding Kanji). Words aren't so much sounded out as memorized and because English has such a massive vocabulary, the memorization work needed to be proficient is very extensive.
The classic example of this is "ough" which has NINE different pronunciations for the same letters and no real rules to indicate which one should be used. Spelling reform would make such situations completely unnecessary.
Languages with more phonetic alphabets tend to have much higher literacy rates for the same education quality and literacy can be achieved much faster. This works because once you memorize the sounds the letters make, you can sound out any word or write any word (provided you pronounce it correctly). The memorization process slowly kicks in where common words are still sight-read, but that process can happen much sooner and the individual can start independent reading much earlier with a focus on comprehension rather than memorizing weird rules and exceptions.
English departments have done massive damage in this regard. English started finalizing how words would be spelled around the same time the great vowel shift happened and completely screwed up everything. We then mass-adopted words with foreign spellings that used completely different phonetic systems. Despite the issues, English departments insist that these bugs are actually features despite the great harm they cause students and not only codify them, but denigrate all attempts to fix the problems.
English departments aren't the only ones. Even 150 years ago when Webster was trying small spelling reforms (some stuck around and some did not), people complained that the writing was childish. When Teddy Roosevelt tried a further spelling reform of getting rid of unneeded letters, he was turned into a laughing stock for the same reason (again with a handful sticking around). Modern "text speak" is yet another unofficial attempt to simplify spelling so it is more consistent, but once again, better, shorter alternatives are derided as making someone look unintelligent.
This still doesn't deal with the more fundamental phoneme/alphabet mismatch though. English has 44 common phonemes and a bunch of less common and regional sounds (for example, the χ sound in "cloCK"). Our adopted Latin alphabet has 26 letters of which at least 3 are unneeded (C as K or S, Q as KW, and X as KS). This leads to a horrible situation where a lot of sounds no longer have letters (Futhorc didn't get all the sounds, but still did better with 33 letters of which something like 11 were vowels). Some English sounds like the S in "treaSure" seem to have no real, unique spelling at all. Others like th and th have no indicator if it is supposed to be voiced like "THen" or unvoiced like "THink" (we used to have thorn and eth for this). We have 18 unique consonants and 24 common consonant sounds.
The vowel situation is even more dire. We have just 5 vowels and around 20 common vowels leaving each vowel desperately overloaded with all kinds of weird phonics "rules" and almost all of them having either multiple rules or different pronunciations for the same word (eg, "reed" vs "red" in "I read the book"). There needs to be massive vowel reform (either a ton of stable digraphs, diacritics, or more letters) so that sounds can be differentiated properly.
Spelling reform could all but eliminate our illiteracy problems and open a whole new world of possibilities to more than half of all Americans. In a world dominated by ever-increasing volumes of information, these people would have much better lives if we lowered the bar of learning to read to something more attainable.
I strongly object to the claim "In reality, English spelling is more like learning Kanji." as someone who had to learn both Chinese and English characters.
Both rely on groups of characters. Both are non-phonetic. Both rely on multiple memorized pronunciations for those character groups based on surrounding character group context. Both preserve symbol shape for reason of historical context.
There are certainly differences, but if you place current English spelling next to something like Shavian (or some other language with near-pure phonetic spelling), I'd say that Modern English learning patterns are closer to Kanji than the pure phonetic alphabets.
The trouble is that most people can read English effortlessly and are completely unconscious of it's many, many inconsistencies. It's also not that hard for an average child to pick up. Also, i enjoy the sophistication of english because i've mastered it.
One thing that worries me is the widespread adoption of english words and nouns in many languages. The list is ever increasing, even though the word makes absolutely no sense out of the context of English, cannot be adapted by a mon english speaker to have anything more then a single, rigid meaning. It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words. I don't know how everyone else copes.
As for literacy, i find it hard to believe the true statistics are as dire as you say but i'm prepared to accept that it is. Firstly, what are the statistics for contemporary societies with more sensible spellings? And can better education help? A final point, you clearly know far more about this topic then i do, but would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?
> It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words.
From around 1060 to 1360, French was the official language of England. It wasn't normal French though as William the Conqueror spoke Norman French. Both French dialects mixed in what can only be considered English style. For example Norman French said Warder while other French speakers said Guarder. English adopted both Warden and Guard, but gave them two different meanings. Overall, some 30% of our words are French though over 800 of the most common 1000 words are English in origin.
> would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?
ITA (International Teaching Alphabet) shows the benefits and problems.
ITA students rocketed ahead the first couple of years and could read way more words than their traditional counterparts. The problem was the transition. Learning both systems seems to have evened things up or maybe even caused a net negative for ITA students. I believe this was because they had to learn two sets of spelling for everything. If you would like to see the difficulty in learning a new way to read/write and have a bit of fun, try learning Shavian script.
In an ideal world, they would have phonetic spelling only. I believe under those conditions that their advantage would continue to grow all the way through school. The problem is that this study is unethical to conduct because even if it is correct, the students would graduate and be unable to read traditional English which would permanently harm them.
This leaves the tricky problem of bridging the gap. This can't be done too quickly or the older generations get left behind. There's also an issue of transcribing everything into the new spelling. Technology has made that easier than ever, but it would still be a very hard proposition.
The first and easiest step is cleaning up the spellings using the letters we currently have. Stuff like all those -ough endings get rewritten in sane letters as an accepted alternative spelling. Silent letters start going away. We start moving toward consistent vowel and consonant digraphs. This will take time for older people to adapt to, but more consistent rules will mean they will have an easier time sounding them out.
After this, we start adding back letters. Maybe eth and thorn come back for the two "th" sounds. We certainly need a new letter for the S in "treaSure" and maybe bring back the elongated S to use for SH. At some point, we then start working on slowly adding new characters to stand in for the vowel digraphs.
I don't think you could convince adults to do more than a couple of steps at a time each generation. Such a plan would likely take decades to maybe even a century or two. Until the creation of the printing press, such slow changes were considered normal. Only in recent times have we attempted to gate-keep what "real English" is. If we allow the language to grow more organically, I think it could be guided into something far better than we have today.
There wis a young lassie named Menzies,
That askit her aunt whit this thenzies.
Said her aunt wi a gasp,
"Ma dear, it's a wasp,
An you're haudin the end whaur the stenzies!
If we are voting on missing letters I want thorn(þ). My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages, and it deserves to get it's own letter back.
On the topic of screwball spelling is this video essay on silent letters. The fun takeaway for me was that a lot of silent letters were never pronounced. it is just that when some of the first dictionaries were being produced, and the spellings decided on, they decided to introduce silent letters to indicate the origin of the word. the b in debt is because it comes from the latin debitum. but it was not spelled that way until the 1500's prior to that it was dette.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVqZpHY5R8 (RobWords: Why English is full of silent letters)
It would be nice to revive all of the Old English letters (well, except for the wynn Ƿ because it's so easily confused with P).
"æ" even has the same obvious sound value still, it can even keep the name "ash"
"þ" and "ð" for the two th-sounds (the former unvoiced, the latter voiced).
And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc, then "j" could instead be used with the value it has in French, i.e. used to spell words like "measure" - this is one of the few English phonemes that doesn't have a definitive letter associated with it right now.
Always use "k" for that sound and repurpose c/q/x for something else, and we could ditch the digraphs completely.
I don't know how many of you need to read this but no one is stopping you from doing any of this. Putting aside cultural friction and being thought a bunch of quacks, you could just start doing these things. There's no real authority telling anyone that they can't despite what some people believe. Just do it!
Exactly. What are we, French?!
or American
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc
I'm in. It would also clear up some ambiguity over the pronunciation of "gif" ;-)
There is no ambiguity in the pronunciation of "GIF". The "g" is pronounced just like the the "g" in "garage".
It's in quantum superposition. Actually speaking it collapses the wavefunction around that particular speaker, although some prefer to believe instead that reality forks. ~
omg. fell down laughing. perfect comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_G
Pronounce the g in garage
Not like the g in jraphics then? :D
I'm more interested in the pronunciation of "jpeg"... you're all saying jay-pezh properly, aren't you?
By the "g as in graphics" logic for "gif", for "jpeg" we have "j as in joint", "p as in photographic", "e as in experts", and "g as in group", so "je-feck"?
It's pronounced gee-pejh.
"J as in jif"-p-e-"g as in gif"
Get it right you people!
i am inclined to agree on all points, and while the second parenthetical would be useful in Contemporary English, i cannot help but note that "þ" and "ð" in Old English both represented the same phoneme (unlike in, say, Icelandic). all of the OE fricatives (/s/, /f/, /þ/) had predictable phonetic voicing depending on environment (voiced intervocalically, unvoiced elsewhere), but no phonemic distinction. in extant MSS, <þ> and <ð> are completely interchangable, mere stylistic variants of writing the phoneme, and even texts written by a single scribe will often have the same word written with both letters. some older MSS will use a plain <d> for the voiced sound (and a plain <b> for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used <th>. in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see <th> or <d>, but Classical OE spelling didn't generally distinguish the voiced or unvoiced.
even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!
Well, we get those two letters "for free" anyway, and the phonemes are distinct in modern English, so let's use them!
"ð" also has the nice property of being sufficiently similar in looks to "d" that someone reading it and not familiar with the letter might pronounce it as "d" and thereby make a decent approximation. Unfortunately that's not the case with "þ" though. If we ignored the historical letters and instead just picked something reasonably sensible, I'd probably go with "đ" and "ŧ" for this reason.
i've had people mistake "ð" for an "o" with a diacritic, but presumably that's a typeface problem. whatever we choose, i insist that we drop the names and call them "eþþ" and "ðee", by analogy with our other fricatives ;)
It would be good to see the old english letters brought in. I particularly enjoy thorn.
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative[1] is another fun one. The only european languages that have it are Welsh and Icelandic where it's simply written "ll" and "hl". In some medieval texts it had a dedicated letter "Ỻ" or "ỻ".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
It also occurs in Southern African languages, e.g. in the place name Hluhluwe, in KwaZulu.
Here's a fun thing you can do with AI, here ChatGPT:
"I speak a number of languages, but I'm not a linguist. How could I get a list of sounds that aren't included in the languages I speak? Would be interesting to hear what sounds I'm not used to hearing"
<Long blurb about what a great idea I had, and an intro to how to do it>
If you’d like, you could just tell me the languages you speak, and I can give you a first-pass list of major sound types you’re probably missing (like clicks, ejectives, tones, pharyngeals, etc.).
Would you like me to sketch a concrete example with your languages?
"Sure, here's my list: <my list>"
And then it gives a list of sounds you know, and sounds you don't. Pretty cool. It even has links to a sound map site so you can hear them.
If you like, I could generate a concrete list of IPA symbols that are not in <my list> — a sort of “negative phoneme inventory”. Would you like me to build that for you?
"Yes please. Also what additional language would cover the most ground?"
One language that covers the most new ground
Amharic (Ethiopian Semitic) is a superb single add-on because it gives you, in one go: • Ejectives (tʼ, kʼ, qʼ, sʼ/tsʼ), • Pharyngeal consonants (ħ, ʕ), • Uvular stop (q), and • True gemination (contrastive long consonants).
If you want a two-language combo to “max out” the world’s rarities, add Zulu (or Xhosa) for clicks alongside Amharic.
I don't think Amharic has a uvular ejective /q'/, nor the uvular stop or pharyngeal consonants.
you're right
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Phonology
LOL, total hallucination?
About silent letters, French did the same, but one of the unintended consequences was to change pronunciation of many words when reading became common in the XIXth century. For instance "admirer, admiration" had a silent d before ~1830, which is now pronounced by everyone. Ditto the "ir" termination of verbs, the "r" was silent, that's why old songs have strange rhymes such as "Compère Guilleri" rhyming with "te lairas-tu mourir", and "les lilas sont fleuris" rhyming with "qu'il fait bon dormir".
And the r ending verbs like "parler" is still silent.
> one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages
Is that true? Seems like it's in every other word when I visit Spain...
This is just a feature of Castilian Spanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis... \th\ only occurs naturally in like 5% of the thousands of human languages that have ever existed. Just because those languages are some of the most widely-spoken ones worldwide does not make the sound a commonly-occurring one in a meaningful phonological sense.
I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, but am less sure about that. Unfortunately I lack the data needed to substantiate my claim.
https://phoible.org/parameters has the data you seek: 5% of languages in the database have eth (ð) and 4% have theta (θ). Z is not a 'th' sound and fairly common at 30% of languages, though.
> I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, [...]
There's no single th sound in English. There's a few different sounds you get from that letter combination in different words (and in different dialects).
Out of all Asian languages (East and South East) I can think of, only Burmese has ð and θ.
It’s true. English and the main Spain version of Spanish are two of the few languages in the world which have the sound. Even most Latin American versions of Spanish (maybe all?) do not have it.
Can you give an example of a common Spanish word that has it?
In "distinción" spanish, the classic pair is the word for house and for hunt - "casa" and "caza" respectively. If you pronounce them the same (with an S sound), you're a Seseo speaker like (most) latin america. If you pronounce them with different sounds, one an S sound, the other a TH sound, you're a "distinción" speaker, and if you pronounce them both with a TH sound, it's the more uncommon ceceo accent, usually largely Andalusian.
Any c+e/i (cena, cine) or z+a/o/u (zarza, zorro, zurrar) is a good heuristic.
c+a/o/u sounds like k (casa, cosa, cuchara) and z+e/i does not exist.
Z+e/i does exist, but it is not very common. A few examples:
- Words that are only written with Z: zepelín, zigurat, zigzag.
- Words that can be written with either Z or C: zénit, zinc, zirconio, azimut.
I stand corrected. All of those seem loanwords, but you are absolutely right.
My main point is that if you hear the sounds "th" (za) with e or i 99% it is cena or circo and will not be zena or zirco. It is an heuristic but very reliable.
P.S. Or pececín, as a random example :P
You are right, and yes, my nickname is an intentional misspelling from the old cybercafe days when I was a silly teenager trying to look cool xD
My favourite word to troll people who are learning the language is "cerrojo" /θe'roxo/, meaning "latch" or "lock", as it contains the three most difficult consonants in the language in sequence xD
In Polish there is 'szczoteczka', which took me just about forever to learn how to pronounce. I just could not hear what I was doing wrong.
Same word in Russian is "щёточка". The lengths to which Poles are willing to go instead of just using Cyrillic will never stop to amuse me :D
I struggled quite a bit with "существительное" when learning Russian.
I was talking about spelling. I can clearly see how these clusters of consonants characteristic of all Slavic languages can be a pain for a beginner, no matter how you spell them.
No Cyrillic imports, thank you. Russia decided to be the bully and murderer of its closest neighbors, don't need any more russian influence, even if literally just on paper. The further one is from them the more safety and prosperity there is, in every possible way.
Dude, this is a linguistics thread. Ukrainian also uses Cyrillic, btw
And Cyrillic is, if anything, Bulgarian originally.
What I found helpful in parsing those z combinations is just replacing them with h instead. for example, if you went up to a random monolingual English speaker and showed them "shchotechka" they could probably pronounce it reasonably well. All those z's just throw people off.
With Polish it may be even harder to go backwards, look for a clip from "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" movie on Youtube.
Since we're piling on with hard to say words: Danes love to ask people to say "rødgrød med fløde".
https://translate.google.com/?sl=da&tl=en&text=rødgrød%20med...
(click the speak icon)
cien
> My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages,
Not as rare as the lateral fricative, the "ll" in Welsh and "hl" in Southern African languages. e.g. in the place names Llandudno in Wales and Hluhluwe in KwaZulu.
And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
> And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
<q> is only one of the clicks in Bantu languages! The letters <c> and <x> are used for other kinds of clicks too (for dental and lateral clicks, respectively).
And then of course there are the Khoisan languages, which use a completely different set of click letters: <ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ>.
True. It was remiss of me to not mention the <x> click in the Xhosa language.
It's literally in the name.
> the b in debt
English speaking Swedes often transform this silent b into a spoken p which is about as awkward a result as you're imagining.
I work for a small remote company with employees all over Europe; it's pretty common for most non-native English speakers to pronounce it this way. Especially noticeable with Germans.
Interesting; I don't recall hearing it pronounced like that from my Polish colleagues, so perhaps it's something about the Germanic languages specifically?
You'd have to be a pretty mean native English speaker to judge people on how they pronounce silent letters
Who's judging? I'll save that for when my Swedish är lite mindre dålig! It's just a little strange that the "b" somehow transforms into a "p" when "b" is a perfectly common letter in Swedish. If they just pronounced the "b" I wouldn't have thought it at all notable.
Quite the contrary. I live in Germany, for the most part they're pretty thankful, just as I am when they correct my German.
Anyone correcting my Swedish is in a target rich environment!
Lots of Germans do this too, in my experience.
Made me think of this SMBC comic[1], where there's a debate if being in English or Spanish, each with around a billion speakers, makes it rare or not.
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/phonemes
It depends on whether you define "rare" in terms of language variety or human variety, obviously. In terms of languages, it is a relatively rare phoneme. It occurs more often as an allophone of other phonemes, but in that case the speakers may not be able to distinguish it and will struggle to reproduce it in "unusual" environments.
Isn’t “þ” used in Icelandic? So it’s not completely gone at least.
I want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular.
As I watched my son learn to speak, then later to read and write, I paid attention to his misspellings and they all made perfect sense if you approached the language phonetically.
The first sentence he wrote for me was:
“my daddy and i tocd on d woki toki” (“My Daddy and I talked on the walkie talkie.”)
At first confusing, but it omits all the silent, or effectively silent because native speakers usually omit the sound, or abbreviate it so much that non-native speakers would miss it if they didn’t know it was there. Like “l” in “talked”.
And don’t get me started on irregular conjugations.
With the very wide variety of English accents around the world, you would have a tough time creating phonetic spelling in English that everyone would agree to. My mother (a true Brit) might want 'wahtah' for water, where I think it is perfect as is.
With that said, there are clearly some things that could be changed.
As a Philadelphian, that should be "wooder".
Or perhaps 'Filidelfian.'
> a true Brit
There are a wide variety of accents in Britain alone - ‘wahtah’ isn’t recognisable to me for example. It’s a cliche to say brits don’t pronounce “r”, but all you have to do is watch Harry Potter to see all the different accents that do.
You want ENGLISH to be more phonetic?
English, a language with over 40 different dialects in its country of origin.
English, the official language of over 60 countries?
English, the bastard child of millenia of Roman, Germanic, and French colonization?
English, a language with documented vowel shift that occured over 200-300 years?
THAT language would be easier if the words were spelled how they were pronounced?
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll
I'm reminded of a meme that compared "car keys" with the word "khaki" in a 'Boston'-accent (non-rhotic).
Or the "pin=pen" merger of some accents, or "caught=cot". No one speaks "English", it's an ugly compromise of an army of dialects.
Is there a black purse in here?
Is there a black person here?
Which accent should the phonetic representation be based on?
Thick lousiana accent? Southeast london accent? Boston southie accent? Mid-atlantic?
No matter what you choose, it won't be phonetic for someone
Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,
I believe that there is a lowest common denominator for accented English, and it sounds like “sung” English - which sounds like non-regional American English if the singer is singing and doesn’t naturally have a very pronounced accent. This is partially due to cultural effects but partially due to the mechanics of speaking with an accent.
By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.
But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.
Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.
type in your own accent, it works when we talk
It sometimes work when we talk.
The west-coast US/Canadian accent most likely as it's most prominent in popular media, and likely the largest English speaking accent group.
But good luck getting the UK or India to adopt it.
Yu hav too bee bluddy kidding mee if yu fink aim gonna yuz som yanky spellin skeem.
Yu du waht yu havf tu du m8.
All these license plate numbers now finally make sense!!!
> I want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular
I don’t. The complexity and history is what makes life fun, and makes English one of the most interesting languages read, written, and spoken today.
Similar to Imperial versus Metric. Yes the metric system is better (aside from temperature ranges - Fahrenheit is superior) but it’s not nearly as fun. Why 12 inches in a foot? Who knows!
I don’t think it’s etymology and irregularity that make English “fun”; I think that it’s English’s large number of concepts because we freely appropriate words and their ideas from other languages (“schadenfreude”, “Deja vu”, etc), the small alphabet, the lack of diacritics, and the flexibility that has been forced onto it primarily by American speakers abusing grammar- verbification, etc.
I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.
The writing system has 0 to do with that. More the UK and USA being superpowers for ages.
There is no reason why English would be more interesting to native speakers than German, Spanish, Finnish or Bulgarian to their respective native speakers.
In college I would go climbing frequently and one of the people I met along the way was a student from Italy that was here for her doctoral. On one trip we were talking about all the things we found beautiful and I made a comment about how much I loved the sound of the romance languages, and how they were so sing-songy to my ear. She then proceeded to talk at length about how she found English so much more interesting because it allowed for expression that just wasn't possible in Italian. Specifically, the nature of English being a pidgin that not only accepts creating new concepts on the fly but almost encourages it means that she can think about things in English that are actually difficult to formulate in her native Italian.
I've since heard interesting comparisons as well from native Mandarin speakers, where there is a certain formulaic piece missing in English that let's them form ideas easier. Interestingly in that case they would describe opposites too where there are certain groupings of ideas that they found easier to form in Mandarin that they had to invent words for in English to get across. But they could do so - invent those words.
I'm a native English speaker and only a third rate French and Spanish speaker, so I have to take this on faith for the most part, but it is interesting to hear that common view across origins.
Jorge Luis Borges would agree with you, as he articulates in this interview with fellow native Spanish speaker William F. Buckley (starts at about 17:15 in case the timestamp disappears)
https://youtu.be/bNxzQSheCkc?si=LK_ZyRpBQjTvx7Av&t=1035
English has more words than those " around 500,000 words, compared to German’s 135,000" due to to it being the result of a merger of various different languages (https://ititranslates.com/which-language-is-richest-in-words...) So there's more stuff if you are into that sort of thing.
Sources generally seen as authoritative (Duden, Wahrig etc.) estimate that the German everyday language has between 250,000 and 500,000 words (depending how you count), without counting technical terms.
I've always wondered: do speakers of other languages enjoy spelling bees and puzzles based on spelling and wordplay as much as English speakers do? It seems like spelling bees wouldn't be as interesting in a more phonetic language, for instance.
They don't exist.
A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.
I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).
Those are "phono-semantic compounds" for anyone looking to do more reading up on them. The example that springs most readily to mind is "嗎" (in Pinyin "mǎ") which is a question particle you put at the end of sentences meaning, roughly, "is it not so?" The left character is "口" meaning "mouth" (in Pinyin "kǒu" but that's neither here nor there) and the right particle is "馬" in Pinyin "mǎ" (and meaning "horse" but that's neither here nor there).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
French orthography competitions are on a different level. Spelling of difficult words combined with grammar rule exceptions.
French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.
In Germany spelling bees don't exist. Took me a while to understand why it is a thing in American culture.
Not that German is "pure" but even with words you don't know you got a fair chance of being right most of the time
I haven't heard of them in England. They probably happen but do seem more of an American thing.
English is three languages smashed together with thousand of words borrowed from dozens of other languages (Latin, “Proto-German”, Norman French). There’s no other language that has such a rich vocabulary.
To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.
Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.
You mean Old English, proto-germanic was long gone by the time of the norman conquest
> Yes the metric system is better
You're changing the definition of "better" so you can have your cake (admit X is better than Y) and eat it too (prefer Y over X). It's ok to like fun things! It's ok to like Imperial and weird grammar, but then you can't also claim that you agree it's worse.
> but then you can't also claim that you agree it's worse.
Sure I can. Didn't I just do it?
Most imperial units are how they are because they can be easily divided into a bunch of different ways - 10 can only be divided by 5 and 2, 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This is practical when you have a physical amount something you need to deal with, like re-portioning a recipe.
(don't let anyone hear this but I always kind of thought that Imperial was more practical for every day life)
How is Farenheit superior? If I may ask.
Because it is the human scale for temperature. It turns out to not matter that much. but imagine a cold snowy winter, that's 0 and image a hot summer that's 100.
Really both C and F are silly, the minute temperature was found out to have a zero point, they should have been discarded, and we should have gone full in on Kelvin(or Rankine if that is your jam), or even better a new unit that better integrates 0, a scale from 0 to the boiling point of water? and give water boiling 1000? or would it be better to give water freezing 1000? Triple cells are a common way to calibrate temperature.
It's not. I just want "cold, cool, warm, hot" and that maps nicely to 0C, 10C, 20C, 30C very nicely.
Yea but the scales don't match. 0-30 isn't very metric, whereas 0-100 is. If you added Fahrenheit to metric I think you'd be much more consistent.
Of course both scales can go above and below the numbers mentioned above, but if you are going to do things based on units of 10 you might as well be consistent.
0°F to 100°F spans the full range of temperatures I'd go out in & not consider it "extreme weather", so it's rather intuitive in that you can think of it as "how hot is it on a scale of 0-100". It feels very human centric & convenient for everyday usage IMO.
Most people who like it like that it puts "human temperatures" on a 0-100 scale, with 0 being "freaking cold" and 100 being "too damn hot".
>Why 12 inches in a foot?
Lots of divisible factors.
That's actually a pretty fair point I can't say I recall thinking of before.
Spelling preserves a lot of meaning and etymology in words. Phonetic spelling would remove some of this richness from the written language. Logographic systems like Chinese take this to the extreme. I think English strikes a nice balance.
Spelling can also bridge the gap between phonetic differences between accents. Many variants of English don't even have the same number of sounds as others, but we all "come together" when we write.
In English, it would frustrate me if every time I read marry it would be spelled the same as merry, because I say those differently, even if most Americans I come in contact with daily do not.
Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English, but one thing I admire about it is when things are correctly spelled, you can adjust the text for accent based on spelling. The only area I can think of where spelling does not denote contrast in any accent is between b and v. (Edit: and that h is silent.) There are some contrasts that are only kept by a minority of speakers (Ll is merged with Y for most people, but maybe not in Bolivia or parts of Spain; s and z are merged in Latin America), but it's still a meaningful contrast for somebody.
Finnish is basically 100% phonetic. A raw Finnish English sounds pretty funny but it's basically pronouncing every character as it's written
Plug for the Shavian alphabet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
"a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling"
Couldn't you use a subset of IPA for this? (Not a language person, so I don't know)
My favorite example of a phonetic misspelling - when my older daughter was learning to write, we were potty-training my younger daughter. The older one made a sign "PODE CHRAN FOR [younger daughter's name]" and taped it to the wall over the potty.
Maybe we could have a separate version that was fonetik and regular and the kids could learn it? They could always use google translate to deal with texts in normal English like I do with most languages.
Edit - I looked up and there is a translation thing online.
"this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.
Not sure it's going to catch on.
> "this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.
These samples are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which isn’t really designed for the purpose of being a practical orthography — it’s used as a language-independent transcription method which can represent any sound. (That’s also why the British and American versions are different: different accents use different sounds, so they’re transcribed differently.) So this isn’t really a ‘phonetic spelling of English’, though it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.
Learning to read phonetically still pays off handsomely, despite the erratic spellings of English.
I sometimes discover that I mispronounce words I know very well. The reason is that I never heard those words used audibly, I only encountered them in books. So I "invented" a phonetic sound to them, and long ago forgot that I did that. Until whammy, I encounter it verbally, decades later.
The impressive part is that he said '...and I' rather than 'me and...'!
https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
(Not actually by Mark Twain)
What about homophones that are clearly different when written? I suppose that would be balanced out by the heteronyms.
"Ze drem vil finali kum tru."
(What was that essay/joke called again?)
ah, 'newspeak'
> This is why, when you read Old English, you can often replace ‘ᵹ’ (or ‘g’ in modern editions) with ‘y’ and get recognizable Modern English words: ᵹear is year, dæᵹ is day, weᵹ is way.
Interesting, because at least for the last two, "tag" is "day" and "weg" is "way" in German. Replacing both of the G's there make a more recognizably English equivalent word.
Also, "-ig" is the suffix most commonly associated with "-y". For example, "hungrig" is "hungry", which tracks.
Super interesting article. Also I think "cat in a barbershop run by monkeys" is my new favorite classical painting.
For some reason this is an unstable sound. There's also a g/j/ch alternation in some northern varieties of German
Yogh is indeed strange. Wynn is the most irritating loss though; couldn't we have at least kept the name rather than "double-yoo"?
That would be convenient. Microsoft would have had to rename the ⊞ key then lol.
WynnDOS
Maybe you didn't realize until now that it is indeed Wynn-DOS as in W-Disk Operating System
Why, isn't that just called 'Super' key?
Why would it be? It’s the Windows key, not Microsoft’s rebadge of the Super key.
I like Apple's thinking - Option key
Super key could arguably apply to the shift keys, because you are using a super set of letters (or am I reaching too far)
> you are using a super set of letters (or am I reaching too far)
You're not though. The original letters are not available, so uppercase is not a superset of lowercase. (Unless you're just stating your opinion that the set of uppercase letters happens to be super)
shift could be the metakey? Maybe too many syllables...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key
But, the meta key already exists and on Windows it is the Windows key. We're going around in circles.
I thought the Meta key is labeled "Alt" in Windows(-like) keyboards.
I always get confused around this and it seems to depend on specific keyboard and software. It seems to mostly be Alt, sometimes Alt Gr, and sometimes the Windows key. But I do remember using Meta to mean Alt when I was setting things up in Ubuntu maybe ten years ago.
I think Super and Meta are the vendor independent terms.
Anybody able to fill the gaps?Approaching an Apple keyboard for the first time, I naively thought Command would be Ctrl and was quite confused, since there also is Ctrl. But once you start a terminal it became quite clear that this was not the case. This is quite neat, it directly solves the SIGINT,SIGSTOP / Copy, Ctrl-D? confusion. Also having these operation as OS command means that all programs support them.
Still not as strange as ꙮ, the Multiocular O from a 15th century manuscript used to describe a many-eyed seraphim. (Officially added to unicode in 2022)
That's basically a doodle from a single manuscript that somehow made it into Unicode. It's cool but not a real letter.
"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise
https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
> fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all
But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"
We'll just make it g'jif
I remember a version which ends with how we'll end up speaking German.
The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.
Recommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”
Or X -> ch, as in Greek, and footballers called Xavi?
Xavi is catalan (shorter form of the name Xavier) and in Catalan "x" has exactly the "sh" sound. To get the "ch" sound you need to use "tx". And yes, most people - even natives - pronounce Xavi badly, due to Castillan influence on Catalan, and the lack of the "sh" sound in Castillan.
> most people - even natives - pronounce Xavi badly, due to...the lack of the "sh" sound in Castillan
Catalans seem to pronounce "caixa" fine, so I think they _could_ say "Shabi"... But this does back up your larger point about "x" -> "sh" in Catalan.
Yes Catalans haver no problem with the "x" :) but it's just with the name that is mispronounced due to the Castillan overlap. I think that "caixa" with the "i" before the "x" makes it easier also for Castillans (although it's funny to hear them pronounce it). There is also the fact that both speakers have serious issues with words starting with "s" + consonant, so my theory is that "shavi" is also affected, while "chavi" is far easier.
I wonder how the castilians pronounce "xaile" now.
There's no /x/ phoneme in modern English, so it's unneeded in English spelling.
By the way the source was a Mr Shield's letter to the Economist rather than Twain https://web.archive.org/web/20200311221105/http://www.letter...
There are a lot of things Mark Twain didn't say.
On the whole, most things that have been said were not said by Twain.
I'm convinced that this is Just The Right Thing To Do. Like ridiculously strong benefits, and practically no drawbacks at all.
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English's spelling irregularities help with disambiguating homophones:
Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.
Also read (future tense) and read (past tense) being pronounced differently despite the same spelling.
And present present (to pull a gift out of, well, a bag)
Only in writing. The disambiguation is already needed when spoken and the context does this.
If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.
How is it that you can say these words without confusion?
Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.
On paper, yes. But not when someone speaks. If you used a homophone while speaking, the listener would be able to distinguish which variant the talker intended based on context. I would argue this is enough of a reason for written text as well.
Some other languages do the same with diacritics.
Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.
And cause confusion with needless heterographs?
practice / practise licence / license
"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does.
Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.
There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).
"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.
But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".
"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
In Dutch and German Ch is pronounced as 'g'.
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
Almost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.
Touche
Call me a douche, but the e in "touche" is silent, whereas that in "touché" is voiced.
I was lazy, I didn't do the accent.
The food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
Does that mean, that "compound word" counts as a single word? And how do I distinguish between "a" "compound" "word" and "a" "compound word"?
Depends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually.
Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
I don't know, I think German laymen have a unambiguous understanding. "der Schiffskapitän" = 2, "des Schiffes Kapitän" = 3
Sure, linguists can dissect everything and should, but how does the English laymen perceive it?
"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)
Usually English will try to come up with a single, Latin-or-Greek-derived word for compound ideas like this, which is another bad habit.
So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.
Medicine terms in German also use Latin or Greek, since this is the subject language, so this is a bad example.
English gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse.
I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
> I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
Maybe, but more due to the spelling of numbers and long sentences. Compound words are not an example of this, since Germans can parse these words just fine as different things. It just means that the lowest "tokenization" in everyday use is not the word, but subcomponents of them.
Do English native speakers "tokenize" expressions in words? Do you see it as '(labelling) (of) (minced)' or '(label)l(ing) (of) (minc)(ed)' ?
I can't speak for most Germans, but the algorithm I think I use is just greedy from left to right. This is also consistent with how mistokenization in common puns works, so I think this is common.
In primary school we trained to recognize syllable boundaries. Is that just a German thing, or is this common in other countries? You need to know these for spelling and once you know these, separating word components becomes trivial.
a) the title of the regulation is not equivalent to the law (unsurprisingly), onestay42's translation is clunky but a lot closer
b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.
I'm not a German speaker. Why would someone use such a long word as a convenience?
I am. It is a semantic difference. Single entities get referred to by a single word. If you use a word group to describe it, it means you don't consider it a single "thing", but a "system" described by the relations of single "things".
The composed word also has a specific meaning that the same words with space between doesn't. For example "das rote Kraut" – "red herb" and "das Rotkraut" – "red cabbage". Also suppose "red cabbage" was grown in abnormal conditions, so it doesn't have the color pigments, it is still "red cabbage", but not "red" "cabbage". This is awkward to state in English, but no problem in German.
Maybe in speech they are similar, but not in writing. The underlying construction is as different as it can be. English puts " " between words, and German does not.
In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.
But which "ch" sound? "Ch" as in "church" is just "tsh". "Ch" as in "charade" is just "sh".
Seconding this. C should be the ʃ sound, and then TC should be the "ch" in "church." The fact that there's no one letter for ʃ is the real tragedy.
Post-alveolar affricates are phonemic in English and deserve their own characters.
(To put it another way, most native speakers treat "ts" as two sounds but not "ch")
Luckily there are other wasted characters, like "x" and "q".
I imagine integrals would make a loud static-y burst of noise.
It's not an integral sign. It's U+0283 LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH.
No, crackle is the 5th derivative, not the integral.
I've played around with respelling quite a bit; one of the most difficult adaptations is forcing yourself to correctly use "dh" (few-but-common words, "thy", "either", "teethe") vs "th" (most words, "thigh", "ether", "teeth").
j -> dzh is more weird than anything.
Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.
I kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words.
Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.
One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).
Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.
OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.
Bring back þ!
The problem with þ is that it dates from a time when /ð/ vs /θ/ were allophones. That is, none of the minimal pairs I listed above existed (mostly due to more words having additional syllables - often, inflections at the end).
"ð" was also a thing at that time, so we can bring them both back and use them to distinguish.
I completely agree with you. I've taken an amateurish interest in linguistics over the past couple of years, and I've often thought that it might be a fun exercise to come up with a phonetic alphabet for the English language. Use the letter 'c' to represent /ch/, 'x' to represent /sh/, etc.
Maybe as a fun pet project someday!
Words of Latin origin are identifiable at a glance, and homonymic collisions are thereby avoided
-- Caeser, seizer of the day
"Caesar" was pronounced in Latin with a hard C, which is preserved in German ("Kaiser").
And v is pronounced like w, but people look at you funny if you pronounce vice versa "wikay wersa".
I made someone with a veni vidi vici tattoo when I told him that.
Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.
Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)
kyube or kyoob would definitely be the way to go.
It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.
Regional variations are available! I think the BBC would have had it pronounced tyoob. And don't Americans pronounce it "subway"?
In the north of England it is still commonly 'tyoob'.
Most Americans sadly never get to ride one anyway.
No but they do eat at them.
Why would it? "u" generally doesn't follow this pattern in English after "k" any more so than it does after "c".
That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.
This is an issue because vowel letters/digraphs are much more inconsistent than consonant letters/digraphs.
> as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound
What’s the ch sound? My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh. Somehow that got spoiled into k in most English words.
Every c in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. C is a silly letter.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.
> ‘ȝ’ was used to write two completely different sounds in Middle English
Was it, though? By comparing English and Dutch you can clearly see that one of the ways this harsh "gh" changed in English is it became "y" as in "yesterday". "Weg" (Dutch) - "way" (English), "gister[en]" (Dutch) - "yester[day] (English), etc. I wonder if at the time pronouncing it as "gh" was still common and this would make using the same letter in some words much more logical.
The other sound ȝ was used for in words now written with 'gh' like 'laugh' and 'night' corresponds to 'ch' in Dutch/German 'lachen' and 'nacht'. If ȝ had corresponded to a single sound in Middle English, it's implausible that it would've split into two different sounds in exactly the same way as in other Germanic languages. So it's more likely that the two sets of words had always been pronounced with different sounds even in Proto-Germanic, and Middle English scribes merely didn't consider it important enough to distinguish them in writing.
Even in Dutch today, weg is pronounced very differently between Holland and West Flanders.
In Holland the g will be hard while in West Flanders "weg" is much closer to English "way" with a very soft g.
They still treat the g consistently the same in every word. It's silent-ish in all words, not some.
The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".
Such a difficult language to learn! I’ve been learning it for a long time
Dutch is a very easy language to learn if you already know English. The main problems are the lack of content to consume and the fact that everyone in the country would rather speak English than tolerate your bad Dutch.
As someone who learned Dutch from scratch in adulthood, these points come up very often but I don't think they are true.
1) Dutch is not an easy language to learn if you speak English. Both the grammar and the vocabulary are way closer to German than to English. The grammar works in a different way, there is an actual grammatical gender, the vowels sound different, etc.
2) There is a lot of content to consume. Let's just start with programming oriented to older children, like the Klokhuis or Jeugdjournaal, which are both in simple language and interesting to adults as well. It's really all there.
3) when taking to people, they want to have a conversation and will switch to a language where that goal can be reached. If people consistently switch to English to you, the sad fact is that your pronunciation and/or grammar are not good enough yet, and you can't assume that the role of random people is to be your teachers.
I learned several languages as an adult, so I compare the effort needed to learn Dutch to the effort needed to learn a much more different language, like French.
1) Yes, Dutch is even closer to German, but it doesn't change the fact that it's very close to English. The grammar is very close, a lot of words are clearly related, learning to read Dutch when you are already profficient in English is a breeze. I never said they were mutually intelligible, but they are close enough to make the leap from one to the other much simpler.
Just as an example, let's consider three words from three different languages that mean the same thing: "gestolen", "volé" and "украденный". Which one of them is closer to the English word "stolen"? Not only in its stem form, but even in the way this irregular verb is conjugated.
2) Some content does exist, but not much. Again, comparing to a language with a much bigger speaker base, like French, let alone English. The difference is orders of magnitude, it's very noticeable when trying to find something interesting to watch or listen.
3) Every time I go to a country where English is less prevalent, I'm forced to learn and practice the language. The same pressure just does not exist in the Netherlands, and the sad fact is, people do not like making unnecessary effort. It is an obstacle and it doesn't help, no matter how you look at it
1) Dutch may be easier to learn for English speakers than, say, French, but it's not easy. Learning it to the point that you can have a naturally flowing conversation with a native is still very difficult for an average person. To go on with your example of gestolen, yes, that sounds easy, but it gets harder very fast. To use a horrible stereotype that is still a very simple sentence, Vandaag gestolen morgen in Polen is not easy to interpret even if you correctly deduce that Polen is Poland. Further, being a native speaker of another Slavic language I could guess what your Russian example mean, but without knowing, I wouldn't put money on it. Does brood mean bread or has it to do with brooding? Once you know, it's easy, but you still have to learn.
2) Obviously there's a huge difference in available content compared to bigger languages. But I do think there's enough, especially if you're not too picky (and you shouldn't be if your goal is to learn the language).
3) it is true that English proficiency is more prevalent in the Netherlands than elsewhere. People don't like making unnecessary effort anywhere, and even if they do, the conversation turns into a lesson, which is I guess not generally desirable.
I speak Dutch to anyone that serves me in English. Which is pretty common at bars or shops in The Netherlands nowadays. At first I thought doing that was rude, but I'm actually doing people a favor to have the chance to learn Dutch. We can always switch to English when it gets too hard or confusing.
And to be honest, somebody that refuses to even try to understand that "Twee croissants en een koffie, alsjeblieft" means "Two croissants and a coffee, please", but replies with "English please" instead can kindly go fuck themselves.
At least TRY
While I agree with your point, don't underestimate how different the pronunciation is between languages, especially if you have an English monolingual on the other side of the counter that is not used to ever hearing anything other than English.
Especially the word "croissant" is tricky. Chances are they they only got "koffie" in your example sentence and had no idea what came before it.
Honestly, the pronunciation in this case is probably closer to English than the spelling is!
I don't know any Germanic languages, but it turns out I can understand a surprising amount of Dutch just by closing my eyes and listening to the flow of the sounds.
Afrikaans is even easier, as I get the impression that the word order is almost always the same as in English, whereas in Dutch it sometimes isn't (I think... as I say, I don't actually know either language!)
wait, now I realize, is not only Dutch but German as well. TIL!
yesteday -> gestern way -> weg
But the mistery is: how was it pronounced in the old English? The modern y was possibly a norman induced change, and people started reading it as modern y instead of "g" ?
In Old English it was already pronounced /j/ there, even though the spelling was still "weg". Ditto for Old Frisian, so Normans had nothing to do with it.
The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].
In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.
Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.
something in between obviously ghjesterdaj
The "y" in "day" went through the same process, so in your theory it would be something like "ghjesterdaghj". Or maybe it was still just "ghjester" back then, dunno. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know exactly what it sounded like.
I think the article is very bad and that it assumes that modern pronunciation is what it was pronounced back then while as you stated all the sounds of one sign might have been identical back then
The article is describing the generally accepted reconstruction of Middle English pronunciation, which is based not only on the modern pronunciation, but also on comparison with related languages.
The article addresses this.
In the UK, yogh existed in Scotland a while longer than in England. You can observe it still in the name Menzies which is pronounced Ming-is there - the z in place of the yogh.
In the last week, our most famous Menzies passed away - politician Sir "Ming" Campbell.
The newsagent chain Menzies (plural implied) was pronounced Ming-is-es.
S/was/is/ in as much as the pronunciation remains even if the chain doesn't.
That's /ˈmɪŋɪs/,/ˈmɪŋɡɪs/ for anyone wondering
Australia's longest serving prime minister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Menzies also had the nickname 'ming'.
Some wag made a 'ming vase' of his face: https://www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2004.176/ming-vase-sir...
I prefer the modern pronunciation for the mild chuckle of hearing Antony Green talk about who won period blood every election.
Oof, 'menses' - never heard that pronunciation but thanks I think.
You're welcome, I think!
Thanks for that. I always thought it was Greek or something like that. I wondered why we had a major political party led by a Greek guy.
Funny. Russian pronounces the з as a z sound.
But apparently, Macungie, PA has nothing to do with Mackenzie
Yes it says this in the article.
Why is the far right always so racist?
The old English 'ᵹ' has visual similarities with the Georgian 'გ', also our 'g'.
We've two letters that are visually similar to yogh 'ȝ': 'ვ' (an English 'v', or 'w' if you're Tbliseli), and 'პ' (a hard 'p'). Our 'gh' sound is 'ღ'.
Took me a couple of seconds - Georgian .. as in the other country with a red cross on a white background (although you add a few extra crosses than England)
I have no doubt that two very disparate languages and scripts will find a few similarities simply due to proximity. Georgia and England (UK) are close enough for a fair amount of cultural exchange.
ᵹ has a clear line of development back to capital "G": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_script#/media/File:Evo...
And AFAIK Georgian alphabet predates Insular script by a few centuries.
It's not uncommon for otherwise unrelated alphabets to come with similar symbols simply because the trend over time is towards simplification of letter shapes, and there are only so many basic elements. So even originally quite different characters can end up looking very similar when reduced to a few squiggles.
If you start looking into it, you will surely be astonished at just how much “cultural exchange” there must have been going back even into the Paleolithic time, and definitely during the period of the OP article is touching on.
People have an extremely distorted perspective on European history for many reasons, but the late industrial age nation state probably had the biggest impact on that mental model people still have today in many ways. By all evidence I’ve seen, the cultural exchange in the distant past was far more organic than most people can easily imagine today for many reasons. Trade and cultural communion, religious exchanges and defensive unions all made that possible in a world that was not at all as controlled and authoritarian as we even experience today. It all waxed and waned over the centuries and regions of course, in a rather organic manner; but due to practical limitations a lot of the authoritarian restrictions we are all subject to today simply did not exist.
In some ways the USA until about 1960, is probably the most similar analogue of how Europe seems to have generally been for the longest time leading up to the Industrial Revolution. It was a land of general regions of self-regulating, cultural clustering with local levels of varying jurisdictions and power structures which to a large extent kept most people in their home region, if not their place of birth. By the latter part of that period the identity with one’s state and region and local culture had already largely succumbed to the oppressive force of the centralized dominating power of the federal and global power, but your region was still largely your cultural identity as a person and community.
That of course has all been totally razed and destroyed now and the USA effectively exists in name only today, which has been the case for an even longer time, but that’s a different topic altogether.
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my biggest TIL takeaway from that article was an "oh wow" moment:
The other sound that ‘ȝ’ once spelled is the “harsh” or “guttural” sound made in the back of the mouth, which you hear in Scots loch or German Bach.4 This sound is actually the reason for the most famous bit of English spelling chaos: the sometimes-silent, sometimes-not sequence ‘gh’ that you see in laugh, cough, night, and daughter. Maybe one day I’ll tell you that story too.
Lachen, Nacht and Tochter (don't know a cognate for 'cough') still have this sound in Standard German.
'cough' could share a root with 'keuchen' (IANAL)
That has a different sound though. But yes, it might be a cognate.
In Dutch there is an even harder 'g' sound.
Is it less hard than the ‘k’ sound?
Yes, more back of the throat. One particularly nasty form is as in 'Scheveningen'. The Scottish version comes close in for instance 'Loch'.
I personally am more fond of provoking an "angstschreeuw" in English speakers by asking them to pronounce "slechtstschrijvend" or "zachtstschrijdend" and watching them recoil in horror at the consonant clusters[0][1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_cluster
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medeklinkerstapeling (Dutch wiki page for consonant clusters with more examples)
> [1]
It's funny I just started reading and understanding the first paragraph, before recognizing that this is a foreign language, I don't know at all.
Those are funny!
I've heard that Knecht (servant in German) is the same word as Knight in English
Reading all the comments in this threads sounds like English needs a GitHub repo with pull requests.
> Sometime in the deep prehistory of the English language, the ‘g’ sound got pulled forward in the mouth to sound like ‘y’ whenever it was next to these front vowels.
My understanding is that a modern Greek gamma (γ) is the same way: actually a voiced version of "loch". So before "back vowels", it sounds to modern English speakers like a hard 'g', but before "front vowels" it sounds to a modern English speaker like a 'y'.
What you described did take place as Old English evolved, except it happened not just before front vowels but also sometimes after. However at some point late in Old English the palatalized allophones "broke off" and became phonemes in their own right, and most Old English texts are already at that stage, so it really was pronounced like modern "y" at that point, usually. What they got instead is "y" and "j" as allophones, which is partly why modern English pronunciations of most Biblical names are so weird.
Shameless plug for my homeland. The book titled Newzild [1] is the 1966 light-hearted "dictionary" New Zild and how to speak it, by author Arch Acker. The title mimics the broad New Zealand accent, which shortens the pronunciation of "New Zealand". It opens with 'Air gun?' (or 'Acid gun?', I honestly no longer remember) – a humorous pronunciation of the common colloquial greeting 'how are you going?'
[1] https://teara.govt.nz/en/document/40118/new-zild-and-how-to-...
Here's a curious thing I found when visiting government officials in Fiji a while back.
They all wrote the fancy 'g' rather than the simplified 'g' we use now. I assume they copied text from textbooks rather than (say) from teachers from England.
As a real young'un I used to attempt to do the same as an exercise but it's not easy to make it look good.
ot but i recently discovered that the latin alphabet western languages use has it's roots in the semitic languages of the middle east. It is of course obvious when you think about it, even the name alphabet is basically the same as aleph bet, the first two letters of hebrew. It's even more obvious when you look at the similarities in the names of the Greek alphabet which Latin is based off.
What happened in short was that the greeks copied the ancient and now virtually defunct phoenican script, varieties of which were used across the region and kept the names even though they made no sense in the context of Greek, added vowels and wrote it from left to right.
The russians adapted the script in one way, Latin in another, Hebrew and arabic took entirely separate paths and now the only thing they share in common is alphabets that follows vaguely the same ordering.
And Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic in turn derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Furthermore, most alphabets in the world derive from that same one source.
It goes to show just how powerful the idea of writing is - once you have a society where it's pervasive, all its neighbors acquire it from them in short order, and they usually do so by adapting the original writing script to their needs. I strongly suspect that the reason why alphabets (and to a lesser extent syllabaries) spread especially widely is because they are easier to adapt to a different language - usually, once you've learned a new alphabet, it's more or less readily obvious how to use it to approximate any language that you already know.
(Which is also how you get imperfect spellings even in brand new orthographies. Practicality usually beats purity.)
> has it's roots in the semitic languages of the middle east
In some way everything has it's roots there: language, numbers, math, philosophy, politics, religion. And earlier humans itself moved in the same direction. It's just were the large population and the high culture used to be. The last remnants were purged in the middle ages and now by islamic fundamentalists.
The Greeks used RTL and Boustrophedon (alternate directions) from the Phoenicians before switching to LTR.
If you had read the article, you would see this is on-topic as it's described at the beginning.
When I was in elementary school in the 70s in Albania, we had some older teachers who wrote z as ᵹ. I don't know where that came from, but it was not part of the official alphabet.
> English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
Quick reminder that writing != language. Even the highest fidelity writing systems are lossy encoding systems. In fact, the more phonologically accurate a writing system is to its language, the more it obscures the history of its words, especially words borrowed from other languages.
So from the perspective of someone interested in etymology, English writing's tendency to preserve old and foreign spellings is a good thing.
Plus, a more phonetic writing system is also problematic for dialectal variation. I pronounce marry/Mary/merry identically, as well as bag/beg, but other dialects distinguish them. I don't think the written standard would benefit from spelling them identically. That's relevant for everyday use, not just upsetting etymology enthusiasts.
Of course it also depends on how conservative the language is, like Finnish orthography is practically IPA, and yet Finnish is a freaking time capsule for words like borrowed Proto-Germanic *kuningaz and *wīsaz, which became king and wise in English, but kuningas and viisas in modern Finnish. So you can have both phonemic writing as well as etymological transparency if your phonology doesn't change much.
That is indeed a problem with English, but even then it is possible to come up with a morpho-somewhat-phonemic spelling that would be far more consistent than modern English - because the bar set by the standard orthography is really that low.
And OTOH even modern English spelling often doesn't distinguish differences that are there in most dialects (e.g. "bear" vs "near"), so this isn't even a new problem. Realistically I suspect there's some "minimal reasonable set" of phonemes that need to be distinguished to reflect the most prominently distinct pairs in all major dialects, even if some subtle dialectal distinctions might not be reflected in spelling.
Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare. This does npt preclude the existence of rich dialects and accents.
This increases the complexity of learning to write the language -- 56 letters in alphabet and each combination of consonant+vowel and consonant+consonant takes on a different letter form instead of just being a string of independent letters like English.
But reading / pronunciation is straightforward. (No we don't have spelling bees :) )
Indian languages, yes, but the story is more complicated with languages that use Indic scripts.
Tibetan, Mon-Burmese and Thai scripts, as an example, all derive from the Brahmi script (through a long and sometimes windy ancestry), but neither reflects the modern pronunciation, hence mind numbing transcription systems.
Tibetan and Burmese languages are particularly notorious for codifying the archaic pronunciation of respective languages that has been frozen in time for centuries. It is a treasure trove for linguists that have got a time machine for free, but I don't think that the same can't be said modern speakers of both languages.
> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare.
I don't think that's true. From the northern Indian languages schwa deletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_l...) to the extreme divergence between the standard formal and spoken forms of languages in Southern languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia), it's a stretch to say the scripts mirror what is spoken.
It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English.
Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).
Very interesting and informative - thanks for sharing.
Phonemic spelling does not require a syllabary, though. Several European languages are also written "as spoken" using the Latin alphabet, usually with a few extra digraphs or letter variants. Or you can make the syllabary itself compose regularly, like in Hangul.
Indian languages are generally rich in phonemes though. My mind boggles at the notion of [n] [ɳ] [ɲ] [ŋ] all being distinct. I mean, I can reproduce each one of them on its own, but doing that in rapid speech, and worse yet, recognizing the same in others' speech...
> My mind boggles at the notion of [n] [ɳ] [ɲ] [ŋ] all being distinct.
They are phonetically distinct, but not phonemically distinct, which is to say that in most places they occur, they aren't used to distinguish words or meanings.
In particular, the velar nasal "ङ" or "ng" always appears adjacent to a velar sounds (k/kh/g/gh) and similarly the palatal nasal "ञ" always appears adjacent to palatal sounds (c/ch/j/jh), both as allophones of the nasal phonemes "m" (bilabial) and "n" (alveo-dental), basically just like we speak in English under the exact same conditions (like the nasal in the word "English"!)
You perceive a difference with Indic language and English because the Latin script doesn't distinguish nasals for velar and palatal points of articulation - it only distinguishes by bilabial (m) and alveolar (n), whereas Indic scripts do distinguish those, even though they offer no additional information.
The unique nasal sound which is often contrastive in many Indian languages is the retroflex nasal "ण" (ṇ). That's the one that it's easy to confuse in speech if you are not a native speaker, so it's the only one you need to pay extra attention to when learning.
I don't actually perceive a difference. For that matter, my native language doesn't have [ŋ] at all (not even before velars), so it's actually tricky for me to distinguish it in English as well.
But, as far as I know, the different nasals are phonemic in some languages of India. Which ones depends on which languages, but I do remember seeing at least one in which all four of these were distinct.
> but I do remember seeing at least one in which all four of these were distinct.
None of the major Indian languages I'm familiar with have 4 nasal phones, from either the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language families.
In the Indo-Aryan languages, the convergence of the various nasals is so complete that they are all often represented with a single "dot" diacritic character when they occur at word junctions.
I'd be open to hearing examples of Indian languages that have 4 nasal phonemes, though.
It was Kannada, a coworker's language. Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph:
m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)
> Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph: m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)
There are 5 nasal glyphs, but like in other Indian languages, 2 (velar and palatal) are allophones of the others, leaving only 3 actual phonemes. Indian scripts are often overspecified, and not every glyph represents a phoneme.
How does that play out for languages that use characters that are pictorial.
eg. Egyptian Heiroglyphs, or Asian characters (esp. Korean which has a relatively young alphabet - which IIRC is phoneme based, or Chinese which has a very old set, which is used across multiple languages (eg. Mandarin/Cantonese/etc)
It plays out perfectly. E.g. Chinese is one of the least phonological scripts around, and this is precisely why old texts in it are more interpretable.
Korean Hangul is not ideographic (I think what you meant by pictorial?). It's a morphophonemic alphabet that just happens to organize the basic phonemic units into larger graphemes representing whole syllables - but in a completely predictable way. And it is another example of this playing out: the original Hangul was entirely phonemic, but over time pronunciation diverged from spelling, and today it's morpho-phonemic, and even then not perfectly so. So they preserved the history at the cost of some mismatch between the spelling and the sound.
> How does that play out for languages that use characters that are pictorial.
Chinese' pictorial writing completely obfuscates the historical state of the spoken language, to the extent that in order to reconstruct older phases of the spoken Chinese language, scholars have had to inspect old Chinese loan-words in foreign languages that do preserve the old phonetic structure.
An example of this is the discovery that Chinese tones developed from earlier final-consonants, which were lost in Mandarin, but are preserved in Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. i.e: Mandarin "guó" compared with the early borrowing into Japanese : "koku", both meaning "country".
That is very interesting, and along the lines of what I was wondering. Thanks
Time to get on the English/American spelling reform and alphabet reform soapbox. 54% of US citizens have a less than 6th grade reading ability and 21% are functionally illiterate. The cause of this is almost entirely non-phonetic/phonemic spelling.
We pretend phonics exists, but it's just a lie we tell little kids to kickstart their learning. In reality, English spelling is more like learning Kanji. The original meanings of the words is warped beyond belief and we tell the specific pronunciation of specific letter sequences based on the surrounding letter sequences (much like telling which Kanji reading to use based on the surrounding Kanji). Words aren't so much sounded out as memorized and because English has such a massive vocabulary, the memorization work needed to be proficient is very extensive.
The classic example of this is "ough" which has NINE different pronunciations for the same letters and no real rules to indicate which one should be used. Spelling reform would make such situations completely unnecessary.
Languages with more phonetic alphabets tend to have much higher literacy rates for the same education quality and literacy can be achieved much faster. This works because once you memorize the sounds the letters make, you can sound out any word or write any word (provided you pronounce it correctly). The memorization process slowly kicks in where common words are still sight-read, but that process can happen much sooner and the individual can start independent reading much earlier with a focus on comprehension rather than memorizing weird rules and exceptions.
English departments have done massive damage in this regard. English started finalizing how words would be spelled around the same time the great vowel shift happened and completely screwed up everything. We then mass-adopted words with foreign spellings that used completely different phonetic systems. Despite the issues, English departments insist that these bugs are actually features despite the great harm they cause students and not only codify them, but denigrate all attempts to fix the problems.
English departments aren't the only ones. Even 150 years ago when Webster was trying small spelling reforms (some stuck around and some did not), people complained that the writing was childish. When Teddy Roosevelt tried a further spelling reform of getting rid of unneeded letters, he was turned into a laughing stock for the same reason (again with a handful sticking around). Modern "text speak" is yet another unofficial attempt to simplify spelling so it is more consistent, but once again, better, shorter alternatives are derided as making someone look unintelligent.
This still doesn't deal with the more fundamental phoneme/alphabet mismatch though. English has 44 common phonemes and a bunch of less common and regional sounds (for example, the χ sound in "cloCK"). Our adopted Latin alphabet has 26 letters of which at least 3 are unneeded (C as K or S, Q as KW, and X as KS). This leads to a horrible situation where a lot of sounds no longer have letters (Futhorc didn't get all the sounds, but still did better with 33 letters of which something like 11 were vowels). Some English sounds like the S in "treaSure" seem to have no real, unique spelling at all. Others like th and th have no indicator if it is supposed to be voiced like "THen" or unvoiced like "THink" (we used to have thorn and eth for this). We have 18 unique consonants and 24 common consonant sounds.
The vowel situation is even more dire. We have just 5 vowels and around 20 common vowels leaving each vowel desperately overloaded with all kinds of weird phonics "rules" and almost all of them having either multiple rules or different pronunciations for the same word (eg, "reed" vs "red" in "I read the book"). There needs to be massive vowel reform (either a ton of stable digraphs, diacritics, or more letters) so that sounds can be differentiated properly.
Spelling reform could all but eliminate our illiteracy problems and open a whole new world of possibilities to more than half of all Americans. In a world dominated by ever-increasing volumes of information, these people would have much better lives if we lowered the bar of learning to read to something more attainable.
I strongly object to the claim "In reality, English spelling is more like learning Kanji." as someone who had to learn both Chinese and English characters.
Both rely on groups of characters. Both are non-phonetic. Both rely on multiple memorized pronunciations for those character groups based on surrounding character group context. Both preserve symbol shape for reason of historical context.
There are certainly differences, but if you place current English spelling next to something like Shavian (or some other language with near-pure phonetic spelling), I'd say that Modern English learning patterns are closer to Kanji than the pure phonetic alphabets.
If you ever tried to learn Chinese, you wouldn't be saying any of this.
The trouble is that most people can read English effortlessly and are completely unconscious of it's many, many inconsistencies. It's also not that hard for an average child to pick up. Also, i enjoy the sophistication of english because i've mastered it.
One thing that worries me is the widespread adoption of english words and nouns in many languages. The list is ever increasing, even though the word makes absolutely no sense out of the context of English, cannot be adapted by a mon english speaker to have anything more then a single, rigid meaning. It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words. I don't know how everyone else copes.
As for literacy, i find it hard to believe the true statistics are as dire as you say but i'm prepared to accept that it is. Firstly, what are the statistics for contemporary societies with more sensible spellings? And can better education help? A final point, you clearly know far more about this topic then i do, but would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?
> i find it hard to believe the true statistics are as dire as you say but i'm prepared to accept that it is.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
> It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words.
From around 1060 to 1360, French was the official language of England. It wasn't normal French though as William the Conqueror spoke Norman French. Both French dialects mixed in what can only be considered English style. For example Norman French said Warder while other French speakers said Guarder. English adopted both Warden and Guard, but gave them two different meanings. Overall, some 30% of our words are French though over 800 of the most common 1000 words are English in origin.
> would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?
ITA (International Teaching Alphabet) shows the benefits and problems.
ITA students rocketed ahead the first couple of years and could read way more words than their traditional counterparts. The problem was the transition. Learning both systems seems to have evened things up or maybe even caused a net negative for ITA students. I believe this was because they had to learn two sets of spelling for everything. If you would like to see the difficulty in learning a new way to read/write and have a bit of fun, try learning Shavian script.
In an ideal world, they would have phonetic spelling only. I believe under those conditions that their advantage would continue to grow all the way through school. The problem is that this study is unethical to conduct because even if it is correct, the students would graduate and be unable to read traditional English which would permanently harm them.
This leaves the tricky problem of bridging the gap. This can't be done too quickly or the older generations get left behind. There's also an issue of transcribing everything into the new spelling. Technology has made that easier than ever, but it would still be a very hard proposition.
The first and easiest step is cleaning up the spellings using the letters we currently have. Stuff like all those -ough endings get rewritten in sane letters as an accepted alternative spelling. Silent letters start going away. We start moving toward consistent vowel and consonant digraphs. This will take time for older people to adapt to, but more consistent rules will mean they will have an easier time sounding them out.
After this, we start adding back letters. Maybe eth and thorn come back for the two "th" sounds. We certainly need a new letter for the S in "treaSure" and maybe bring back the elongated S to use for SH. At some point, we then start working on slowly adding new characters to stand in for the vowel digraphs.
I don't think you could convince adults to do more than a couple of steps at a time each generation. Such a plan would likely take decades to maybe even a century or two. Until the creation of the printing press, such slow changes were considered normal. Only in recent times have we attempted to gate-keep what "real English" is. If we allow the language to grow more organically, I think it could be guided into something far better than we have today.
I find x, c and q strange:
x is k followed by s
c is sometimes k, sometimes s
q is k
So all of those could be replaced by k and s. Why are they needed? :)
I too would bet they would have spelled it ȝoȝ.
"Un ver vert va vers le verre vert" French for "a green worm moves towards a green glass"
If this was a serious article they would have used gif as an example of the g sound /s :)