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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet".

That's not really how alphabets work. English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had.

It sounds like what Fulfulde was lacking was a standard orthography, not an alphabet of its own.

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Koreans used the Chinese characters, then one of their kings decided they should use their own writing system and commissioned one. That's how the Hangul alphabet was born in 15th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

This is very similar to what happened to this African language. A people using someone else alphabet, developed their own. Old English people could have done the same for their language. They decided not to, maybe because it fit English well enough.

I also think about the Polish language. Its alphabet is based on the Latin one but letters are modified with signs that multiply the available characters and make them fit the language. Even Italian (geographically very close to Latin) has more sounds than characters and compounds multiple characters to express some sounds. Example: sc, for the English sh.

check out the shapes of the hangul characters: they attempted to make the letterforms suggest the shape your mouth makes when you make the sound.

My native language is Portuguese. When I learnt the Cyrillic alphabet I realised it would be perfect to have letters for diphthongs in Portuguese. It would simplify and obviate many diacritics.

Take "simpatia" and "ânsia". In the first case, the last "ia" is not a diphthong. In the second it is and you need the diacritic over the a to make it the tonic syllable (Spanish is more clever in that the general case is that the "ia" ending is taken to be a diphthong unless you put an acute sign over the i - ía).

But, when diving further into Russian, I soon found out that they do weird things like pronouncing a G as a V (его - his).

So, my conclusion is that even if you have the perfect alphabet, it will soon become obsolete.

In a way, we already have the "perfect alphabet" -- the International Phonetic Alphabet[1] that linguists use to describe the sounds of all languages.

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

Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes.

But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english!

Heavy glaswegian can be murder for me. Heavy geordie (newcastle) is a struggle. And that's even when they are using the same words (ignoring differences in vocabulary and idiom that have developed, because that isn't an alphabet issue).

Words that have the same spelling in the English alphabet but different intonations due to accents or dialects would have different spellings in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The point of the International Phonetic Alphabet is that you can stumble across any new word you haven't heard before, and be able to pronounce it correctly. If you master the International Phonetic Alphabet and, say, stumble across a Mandarin or Russian word spelled using that alphabet, you'll be able to pronounce it.

The International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique "key" (letter) for every sound that the mouth/tongue/throat can produce basically. (Or at least it tried to, it seems extensions to the IPA have been released to account for other "qualities of speech", like tooth gnashing, lisping, sounds make with a left cleft lip and cleft palate... I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... right now).

PS. It's how the pope sends his message in all languages :)

> Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes.

> But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english!

Do you mean accent like stressing a vowel or accent like the way people sound when they speak the language?

If the latter, which alphabets allow for expressing that? I'm not familiar with any that do.

Replying to both:

throwaway9281: Which means written english will diverge along with the pronunciation. Well, I can't say it isn't happening already...

"Breetish Prime Meenister Theresa May (picturt), unmer pressur ower her haundlin o Brexit, annoonces her intention tae resign."

"Did ye ken... (Frae a collection o Wikipaedia's airticles): ... that the hairst moose (picturt) is aboot half the weight o the hoose moose?!

"In 1642, while still a teenager, he stairted some pioneerin wark on calculatin machines. Efter three years o effort an 50 prototeeps, he biggit 20 finished machines"

above from current https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

vageli: Well, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7G4z5uEQnE for an example and that was not heavy!

This is heavier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_9FHihGD2Y but certainly not the worst I've met. FYI anyway.

Scots is not a dialect of English!

Funny thing, to me Russian sounds like Bulgarian with a Portuguese accent.

Try the Bulgarian alphabet. Not only they invented Cyrillic, but it is also more phonetic than the Russian version.

Well, Bulgarian is not very phonetic either to be honest.

Give me some examples.

Coming from native Spanish it actually sounds very phonetic to me.

Russian alphabet is pretty close to perfect. Apart from relaxed unaccented vowels and very rare exceptions one of which you mentioned if you see Russian word you have never seen before you can almost be sure you can pronounce it correctly (apart from accents, that you have to remember). There are no things like head/heat/heed.

Bulgarian alphabet is perfect. There are no things like хорошо, where the first vowel is an 'a' and the others are 'o'.

I can read all words, even if I don't know what they mean, or what accent they have.

It’s grammar, not alphabet. Weird things are dialects and simplified forms. You can still say “ego” as it’s written and that will be correct. Eventually the language grammar will allow writing “evo” (Alphabet will stay relevant)

No, it will not be correct, but of course you will be understood, no problem. I had a friend that pronounced these words with г for ironical purposes.

The modern pronunciation of “g” as “v” in certain words appears not earlier than in XVII century in Moscow dialect of Russian. It eventually spread across the empire and became literary norm, but in the church and in some regions you may still hear old spelling sometimes.

Where in a world you pronounce г in его as г and not в?

If you need a specific place, church is a good example. Priests tend to use “г“ in common speech, because they use it in prayer.

> So, my conclusion is that even if you have the perfect alphabet, it will soon become obsolete.

Hangul seems to hold up pretty well, though I guess expressing a simple phonology helps.

Hangul isn't completely phonetic, and when learning Korean you need to learn all the transformation rules to pronounce it correctly. For example Wangshimni, a subway station in Seoul, is pronounced waŋʃimni but is spelt 왕십리, i.e. ŋoaŋ sib ri. Also, Korean has long and short vowels and that distinction isn't represented in the script.

It's also a lot younger. Hangul has ~600 years of history, which isn't that much in language terms, compared to Cyrillic which is more like 1500 years, IIRC.

But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language, so inventing an alphabet may have its merits. Keep in mind that even among the languages using Roman alphabet there are variations, so that the english alphabet is different from the french alphabet which is different from the italian alphabet

> But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language

why do you say that?

The relationship between a letter[0] and the sound is entirely arbitrary - I could write 'A' and pronounce it as 'T'. Why would one set of charcters be less fit than another?

[0] or symbol, more broadly eg. in welsh 'dd' and 'ff' are letters, even though 'd' and 'f' also exist in the alphabet. And in english we have sounds not represented by a single letter eg. 'th' sound

While in theory the relationship is arbitrary (in the end we just need the letter "0" and the letter "1") I think that there are practical reasons, such a conciseness (I don't want most of my sounds to use two or more letters, especially those that are used a lot), similarity between similar sounds, and similarity with other languages using the "same" alphabet (I hope nobody will every use the letter "a" to sound as a "t").

"A" is derived from the Phoenician consonant ʾālep, which is the glottal stop represented by ʾ in that transliteration of the letter's name. The Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the vowel sound instead, probably because there was no glottal stop in Greek. So on a very long timescale, it's possible that "a" will end up being pronounced as "t".

Upvoted for that nugget, but incidentally I noticed your name before and wondered if it was a ref to Yoruba the language?

The opposite actually. A long time ago, I came up with "yoruba" as my username for various forums. (I think I was going for a vaguely Japanese look.) Some time later, I noticed "Yoruba" in the language selection sidebar of a Wikipedia article, so I decided to swap out a letter to make my username distinct.

> why would one set of charcters be less fit than another?

Because one might already have phonetics associated with it. I literally have to read out messages aloud, have my wife read aloud other parts of the message so we can figure out what the sender meant. My favorite is a Berber from Tanger: amazight, arabic, spanish, some french, no formal education but also no inhibitions to write...and all in one alphabet. The only way to understand the text is to read it aloud once for each language, mark the parts that make sense in o e of the languages and then assemble all findings...

"English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had."

Forgot about the Futhark? English is written with the latin alphabet because the bibles were written in latin.

Bibles were written in Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_languages

Ye, I meant the copies the English priests had was literally written, as copied by hand, in Latin. Not the originals.

For what it's worth, English learners are tortured by the lack of stanard orthography. Imagine the situation if English was rendered in Cyrillic half the time, with equally abysmal orthography.

You want to fix this situation. Do you keep one alphabet or both, and impose new phonetics; or do you avoid the hodge-podge and propose a new alphabet. I can appreciate the clean design.

Wouldn't the International Phonetic Alphabet be a good starting point ?

IPA is useful for expressing phonetics, but the phonetics for a given word in English shift over time and space. Written language is useful for expression that is durable in time and space.

If you read English texts from the wrong side of the pond, there's some spelling divergence, and if you read old enough texts, there's more. And of course we have new words, and new uses of old words, such as literally which now means figuratively.

But if you read old books of rhymes, you can see that spoken English has diverged a lot more -- many clever rhymes of the past no longer sound rhyming.

Absolutely not. Slavish adherence to phonetics means you need to standardize a dialect for your orthography, include extraneous changes (like shifts in vowels caused by adjacent words) and isn't done by any writing system I know of.

Sure it is, just look at the various phases of German spelling reform. The most recent one was implemented via international treaty.

German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.

Sure, if you're bikeshedding with an outsider's perspective, that could totally work

Look at the Vietnamese alphabet, which is basically hacked together from Portuguese, colonialism, a massive amount of diacritics and bits of French. The most common surname in Vietnam, for example, is Nguyễn, with both a circumflex and a tilde on the e. One alphabet isn't always the best at expressing a particular language.

> That's not really how alphabets work

Might want to have a look at the story of Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets before speaking so categorically.

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