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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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