Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedryk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com