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English does not have a simple set of rules for pronunciation or dictation. Spelling bees don't exist for most languages, but it's a thing for English.

So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually difficult language in this respect.

Understanding different accents of spoken English is sort of beside the point, I think.

This is so true. It's even worse than spelling bees though. Dyslexia is less of a problem for non-english speakers because our writing system is so messed up. We we have letters that not only represent multiple sounds, but redundantly duplicate the sound of other letter combos (c->k,s; x->z,ks; q->kw). We have multiple letter combos for single phonemes (ch, sh, th). "th" actually represents two phonemes--compare "there" to "through" and you'll see they are two different sounds (try to say through like you would say there). English is a mess.

I'm usually the first one to jump on the English-spelling-is-atrocious bandwagon, but you're not presenting very convincing arguments here:

* c being pronounced either /k/ or /s/ is a perfectly common process called assibilation [1]. Compare Italian "centro" /ch/ as in change, vs. "casa", /k/, as in can't. The general rule is /s/ before e, i, /k/ otherwise. English is relatively regular here.

* x as /z/ is probably some sort of assimilation process when the /s/ in /ks/ would be +voiced. Another reason to pronounce it that way is that anglophones dislike complex onsets (try pronouncing "Dvorak." It's very difficult for English natives not to insert a Schwa /ə/ between /d/ and /v/.

* q as /kw/ is from Latin and most languages using the Latin alphabet retain it in some form.

Letter combos for single phonemes are common as hell. Compare German 'sch', or 'st', Italian 'sci' etc.

"th" representing both voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives is what's called an "allophone" [2]. Again, this is super duper common, and, off the top of my head, I can't come up with a language without allophones, and I'd require serious proof for the claim that there exists one.

English spelling is a mess, though. But mostly because it's terribly inconsistent. There are several poems about it, which illustrate the point nicely, for example, the Chaos Poem [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assibilation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

[3] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

The letter overloading trait is not exclusive to the English language as it's featured in numerous other languages but the problem with English is there's no clear rules governing the pronunciation of these letters. It's totally arbitrary.

Take for example, "charity" and "charisma", the /ch/ combo here would fool any beginner in pronouncing the latter as the regular sound and not as a /k/ and there's no solution for this problem but to memorize the words as you encounter making the whole experience of learning a new foreign language tedious and horrible.

A reform of English orthography is long overdue esp. if it's going to stay as a lingua franca for quite some time to come.

> English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German

Just curious, in what order did you learn them? That's a pretty diverse set.

Based on the language list metafunctor is Finnish, so the only language standing out is Japanese. Finnish and Swedish are first and second languages (or vice versa). English and German are typical third and fourth school languages and Japanese is most likely something picked up in college.

Metafunctor: how did I do? :)

Spot on – looks like you're intimately familiar with the Finnish school system yourself. Are you Finnish?

Finnish (mother tongue), English (almost pass of as a native speaker), Swedish (get by), German (basics), Japanese (basics). The last two I'm rapidly forgetting, though.

> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.

ough:

Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up)

That's broken.

"Hiccough" is spelt "hiccup" by nearly everyone nowadays. In comic books, "though" is often spelt "tho", and "through" spelt "thru". The US and UK should get together and create a small language spelling reform group to suggest more such changes to the 20% of words that cause 80% of the problems, e.g. changing "thorough" to "thuruh", "rough" to "ruff", and "cough" to "coff".

It's happening by default anyway. Schools now encourage "inventive spelling" rather than correct spelling, so you have kids in 8th grade who can't spell basic words correctly but rather they write them how they sound.

For a historical anecdote, this sort of simplified phonetic spelling was championed in the early 1900s by Andrew Carnegie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

Moon Joon? bedrum?

And don't forget words that are pronounced differently with identical spelling, for added hilarity:

* Polish people live in Poland.

* Polish your boots.

Obligatory link to Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos": http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

New to me, thanks for sharing.

Some great examples there, such as "minute" and "minute". heh.

'Feoffer' is probably the worst word there. But just maybe the worst snare in English is 'positive' — the other 'positive' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_organ . Yes it's obviously some kind of loan-word, but then so are most English words...

Another example:

* I read this book whenever I feel lonely.

* I read this book many years ago

A friend of mine coming from Scotland once told me that he phoned Twinings (the English tea maker) in order to understand how to pronounce it ("twain..." or "twin...").

So, don't make us go to sleep without knowing how to actually pronounce Twinings! I have no idea and now want to know.

Twine-ings. As in twine/string. Rhymes with wine. The 'ings' is pretty standard, like in 'things'.

Twinings is a name, though - and all bets are off when it comes to name pronunciation.

"Polish Remover"

A bottle of solvent or leader of the Nazi party?

That's just etymological spelling reflecting an old pronunciation. Whether such spelling is "broken" is purely a matter of opinion.

There's no phonetics there; just orthography.

Spanish here. One of biggest differences is that spanish vowels always sound the same, that's why spelling contests aren't a thing here. It's pretty confusing at first, until you embrace the fact that there aren't shortcuts: you hear the word or you don't actually know how to pronounce it.

See http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/04/spanish-vowels-vs-english-... for a comparison.

And vice versa, you read the word or you have no idea how to write it.

by "phonetically broken" I think he means that there is not enough consistency regarding what you write and what you pronounce. I give you some examples: door and tool. The same two letters 'oo' are pronounced differently. 'en' in 'broken' and 'en' in 'enough'. I suspect Italian, Romanian and Spanish inherited some consistency from Latin where AFAIK 'a' is pronounced the same everywhere and even in combination with other letters it's still very predictable and the same is valid for nearly all the vowels and consonants. I don't know Portuguese but French is definitely "broken" too ('o' = 'au' = 'eau' = 'aux' = holly cow !)

It's interesting that you chose the word 'enough' but didn't talk about the end of the word. Because the 'ough' construction in English is perhaps the best example of what you're talking about. There are 10 [1] ways to pronounce those 4 letters, though only 6 in American English.

My Spanish teach was fond of telling us, "There are no Spanish spelling bees." It was his lighthearted way of telling us to memorize the few pronunciation rules of the language so that we could easily parse what we were hearing and pronounce what we were reading. But inherent in his comment was a reference to the lack of consistency in English. This lack of consistency means that speakers need to memorize more. If we were talking about a programming language, we'd say that the language has unnecessary cognitive load. Similarly, Spanish and the other romance languages add unnecessary cognitive load by differentiating between masculine and feminine words. Still, of the major European languages, English is probably the one with the largest unnecessary cognitive load, so I can definitely sympathize with those who have difficulty learning it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

P.S. As an aside, I always thought Antirez was much better at written English communication than he appears to be. There's something about having corresponded with people online for the past 2 decades that has leads me to turn off my inner proofreader until something like the subject matter that was being discussed brings it to the fore.

The problem with Romance languages is that they shifted the burden of complexity from orthography to grammar with all the verb conjugations that a speaker has to memorize in all tenses and moods such as the bloody subjunctive :)

I find that french is fairly consistent with how to pronounce written words. It's the other way, how to write pronounced words, that is broken. English is just broken either way, IMO.

Actually English has a defective phonemic orthography system [0] that makes mastering the language an unpleasant and daunting experience esp. for beginners. In a nutshell, English language is high-maintenance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography

In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible).

In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.

You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html

French isn't as deterministic as you make it sound.

For example many letters are silent and it's not always obvious why. Contrast the last sounds of these words: grec (ɡʁɛk) and tabac (ta.ba), chef (ʃɛf) vs nerf (nɛʁ), six (sis) vs prix (pʁi), etc. There are also some heteronyms, for example, les poules couvent (ku.v) but les soeurs restent au couvent (ku.vɑ̃).

I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.

Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

> I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken?

No, it just means that you need more exposure. That very same thing happened to me while learning english (as my 3rd language after Spanish and Catalan [0]). I started to interact and shared flat with people from USA, England, Wales, Australia, Ireland, etc... For instance I wasn't able to differentiate between Scottish and Australian, only between American English and non-American English. Now I'm quite good at it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

> I wasn't able to differentiate between Scottish and Australian, only between American English and non-American English

I've spent quite a bit of time in New Zealand, and a common complaint I've heard is that when they travel to the U.S., people often ask if they are from Australia. When I first rocked up to NZ I couldn't tell the difference either, but now the two accents are like night and day. Beyond that, every country has its own regional accents as well.

And to be fair, I reckon a good number of Americans who haven't traveled can hardly differentiate accents beyond American English vs non-American English too.

Spanish speaking people tell me they find the Cuban accent difficult. Of course, it's all inter-comprehensible, but you're not refuting the OP's point.

A kind-of-rule based in personal observations, is that spanish people closer to the sea talk FASTER than the rest.

We have somebody in the family that is know as:

"Blah ahk guak fiuya sdsds caramañola ñame!". And " caramañola ñame" is the only thing you will understand 100% of him ;) -- the other text is not a perfect rendition. In fact, nobody agree how exactly him talk when left him at full speed!

How fast is the talking is not the only issue. Is the slang. We can have the same language... but, o boy! the slang is diverse even in the same country.

And some words have reverse meanings, or don't make much sense.

For example:

"Esta haciendo sereno"

"Is doing serene (???)"

If use this dictionary, you could get it wrong:

http://www.spanishcentral.com/translate/sereno

Instead, despite the fact "sereno" is exactly "serene", this in colombia mean "colder wheater".

Is so funny when we teach the slang to outsider. Is crazy fun for them ;)

Oh man, don't get me started. I'm trying to learn Spanish, and if I watch a movie from Spain, there's no "v" sound, everything is "b". If I watch a movie from Mexico, it's the other way around! Trying to get the accent right on my trips to Spain are pretty frustrating to me, although it's a pretty minor difference, so it ends up fine.

Surely both sounds exist in both vatieties? Mexicans don't pronounce 'bueno' with an initial fricative, and people from Spain don't pronounce 'estuvo' with a plosive at the beginning of the final syllable.

I don't know enough to know, I thought the Spanish did pronounce it "estubo".

Probably it has to do with socioeconomic classes and level of education. Usually uneducated people or people from rural areas sound, for the lack of a better term, "crude" to big city or urban ears in universally all languages and Spanish is no exception. You have to judge a language or dialect based on how they communicate in official mass communication media like Radio or TV and not some guy you met on the street.

I think Spanish, English and Portuguese are broken languages (French less, because France dominates it) because they were spread during era of colonial empires and now there a big countries which use it as main language, they have evolved since.

I speak French and Portuguese, both as native languages. I wouldn't characterize any language as broken, but what most people seem to be describing here is the divergence between the spelling and the pronunciation, as well as the amount of redundant spelling. In this regard, French is unquestionably worse than Portuguese.

Basically, French and English follow the same orthography "school", which is the etymological one. The idea that spelling reforms should be few and far in between and that the way specific words are spelt has to do with how they were either spelt or pronounced in other, older languages.

This makes it so that they're both to a great extent languages whose writing system feels ad hoc.

Languages such as Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, are such that if one gets taught the sound of each letter one can start accurately sounding out words immediately.

Portuguese does not follow the etymological school, instead adopting a more phonological spelling. It has, however, a far from 1:1 phoneme to grapheme ratio, and more complex rules governing how to pronounce words. Perfectly regular complex rules, though.