English is at best my 3rd language. I have always found the huge discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling really nonsensical (keep in mind that I even speak French). But this article really helps see all that in a new light. Nothing is a-historical, not even phonetics. Newfound respect for the English language.
English isn't the only language that uses the Roman alphabet (which I'm pretty sure is named after the first two Hebrew letters and not old Greek).
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
Hungarian doesn't have that many letters with diacritic (only 9: á, é, í, ó, ú, ö , ü, ő and ű), they use digraphs (cs, sz,. ..) for some sounds. Maybe they meant Czech (15: á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ý, č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ě)? or Slovak (18: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ŕ, ĺ, č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ô, ä)
Blimey: That's a lot of fiddling with letters!
English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A
Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
If you aren't already familiar with it, the great vowel shift in English is also very informative about the discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
The TL;DR is that vowel pronunciation was changing in English between 1400 and 1700, and English spelling was becoming standardised between during 15th and 16th centuries. Depending on if the spelling of a particular word was standardised before or after the vowel shift means the spelling might or might not reflect the pronunciation.
Yeah but reforming a language is nigh impossible without a very expensive and long term effort from the government, and good luck selling that to those in power.
Plus, how do you decide what's changed and what's retained? To quote one Mr. Clemens,
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.
Generally, 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 rimeiniing 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” rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Since my lifetime I went through 2 language reformations, the ones that took part in German speaking countries, and those in Portuguese speaking countries.
Needless to say that outside children learning the new ways, and media that has to obey to the new rules, I know plenty of people, starting with myself that kind of don't care.
The amount of English speaking people is much greater than those two languages, and then there is even the question of which English speaking countries would even agree with the changes.
Note from my two examples above, not every country in DACH or CPLP agreed with 100% of the proposed changes.
While in French there is also a great discrepancy between the written language and the spoken language, when reading French the corresponding pronunciation is almost always very easy to predict. Only the reverse can be difficult, because many ambiguous pronunciations are differentiated in writing.
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
As a German, I always found French to be incredibly regular. At least in the sense that from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation. The other way around is trickier. At least compared to German, which tries to strike a balance between the two directions. Compared to English, French is still pretty reasonable on that front too
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
> from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation
Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").
Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).
Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
English is my first language. I have always found this discrepancy deeply unsettling. A personal problem on my part I'm sure.
I think the issue is that there are rules but they're really complicated. So nobody learns them. And then they teach kids by cultural taboo violation.
"The letter 'c' makes two sounds. An 's' sound and a 'k' sound."
Atlantic osean.
"Wrong! It's Atlantic oshean! Why are you wrong!"
Then iterate for 20 years.
YouTube videos talking about linguistics and history have been a significant eye opener about the source for half a lifetime of frustration.
vhantz · · focus · HN ↗
gerdesj · · focus · HN ↗
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
yread · · focus · HN ↗
gerdesj · · focus · HN ↗
English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
ErroneousBosh · · focus · HN ↗
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Tangurena2 · · focus · HN ↗
ErroneousBosh · · focus · HN ↗
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
nephihaha · · focus · HN ↗
"W" is alive and well in Manx Gaelic.
nl · · focus · HN ↗
The TL;DR is that vowel pronunciation was changing in English between 1400 and 1700, and English spelling was becoming standardised between during 15th and 16th centuries. Depending on if the spelling of a particular word was standardised before or after the vowel shift means the spelling might or might not reflect the pronunciation.
crossroadsguy · · focus · HN ↗
That’s rich coming from a speaker of French
But on a serious note, this discrepancy at this point is entirely unnecessary and wasteful.
krige · · focus · HN ↗
Plus, how do you decide what's changed and what's retained? To quote one Mr. Clemens,
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.
Generally, 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 rimeiniing 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” rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Needless to say that outside children learning the new ways, and media that has to obey to the new rules, I know plenty of people, starting with myself that kind of don't care.
The amount of English speaking people is much greater than those two languages, and then there is even the question of which English speaking countries would even agree with the changes.
Note from my two examples above, not every country in DACH or CPLP agreed with 100% of the proposed changes.
adrian_b · · focus · HN ↗
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
wongarsu · · focus · HN ↗
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
williamdclt · · focus · HN ↗
Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").
Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).
Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
Miraltar · · focus · HN ↗
poulpy123 · · focus · HN ↗
Verdex · · focus · HN ↗
I think the issue is that there are rules but they're really complicated. So nobody learns them. And then they teach kids by cultural taboo violation.
"The letter 'c' makes two sounds. An 's' sound and a 'k' sound."
Atlantic osean.
"Wrong! It's Atlantic oshean! Why are you wrong!"
Then iterate for 20 years.
YouTube videos talking about linguistics and history have been a significant eye opener about the source for half a lifetime of frustration.