Hacker News Reader

Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

'sproeiauto' is still legal, one of the few Dutch words using all vowels in a row.

One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spelling means that for most Dutch words (not loan words), you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English that never really changed their spelling of words, despite some shifts in pronunciation. Readings older Dutch texts is takes slightly more effort, because the spelling of some words can be completely different from what it is now.

View on HN

> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English

I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on where in the UK one grew up. Which one is the spelling supposed to represent?

It seems to me that Dutch would be just as likely to have regional variations in pronunciation as any other language.

If Shakespeare had written phonetically he would be all but unreadable now.

Of course there are regional variations, but when speaking Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) they are relatively small and consistent, nothing like Norwegian. With consistent meaning that the same syllable will almost always be pronounced the same way within that region. Not like English, where "bread" and "great" have completely different ways of pronouncing the "(r)ea" sound, despite being written the same way. Poems rhyme usually, wherever you go within the language region.

Local dialects have larger differences, but if they are written (relatively rare), it usually uses some form of phonetic writing, and those aren't standardized anyways.

That's certainly how we'd like to look at it, but it's only true by defining "standaardnederlands" fairly narrowly. Plenty of regional accents change phonemes, like 'ij' -> 'ie', hard 'g' to soft 'g', and some of those changes don't happen the same way across all words. Dutch is certainly not the big mess of inconsistency that English is, but it still has some inconsistencies.

For example, the word "lijk" is pronounced different from the suffix "-lijk". And then there's the difference between "een" and "een".

Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.

But British English could have. I mean it desperately needs reform, it's a mess.

I guess the problem is the momentum of such a large population of speakers means this risks breaking British English off in such a way that it may eventually become too non-standard and British people become disadvantaged somehow.

The first ten years after a major spelling reform can be a bit of a mess, but as long as the changes aren’t too big or unrecognizable, it should be doable. The Commonwealth should be able to do it, if the political will is there.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem with French or Spanish, arguably also quite popular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com