Tibetan is also in pretty desperate need of spelling reform. I’d love to hear replies about other terrible writing systems.
As far as Indo-European languages go, languages like English and French are quite conservative in spelling and underlying meaning, which means they do diverge from pronunciation but retain semantic clues which help the reader unlock the meaning of unknown words. While languages that continuously reform to try to match pronunciation shifts (e.g. German) discard this info. In addition they have to pick one canonical pronunciation, and themselves typically retain various homophonic issues (e.g. how many ways can you write the sound of ä (I don't mean "ae")).
Even as a kid (should be "easy to learn", right?) I struggled far more with the variants of the devanagari alphabet even though it was so phonetic. But hundreds of millions of people use it every day without thinking about it.
For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method.
English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.
It can’t really be called part of English in any meaningful way anyway.
If people who speak Chinese want to use pinyin, more power to them. But English speakers need to stop just copying other people's romanizations even when the romanizations do not connect to our spelling system at all.
This is objecting to the .01%--I find it hard to take seriously.
English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. It's not always one-to-one, and it's sometimes really weird, but it's generally there.
So, if someone sees Xi Jinping in writing, the utterance out of their mouth will be close enough for me to know what they are talking about.
However, even when someone completely botches the spelling of a word, there is almost always enough logic behind the error for the person looking at it figure out the actual word meant. That's a really nice feature in a language. (For example--I have seen phlegm or subtle spelled in all manner of ways, but I generally could tell what was meant.).
By contrast, lots of the articles talking about Chinese highlight all the really common words that native speakers can't even cough up the kanji for because there is so little phonic correspondence.
It's absolutely not the case and it's actually one of the most mocked feature of English on the internet. The pronunciation of the name of “Sean Bean” is a good example. As a non native speaker, I have had a lot of pain learning the pronunciation of words I've only seen written.
In American English, you have at least one direction easy (from pronunciation to spelling) but not in British English. And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects.
But you can try. And it will kinda work.
If you pronounce "Sean Bean" as "seen bean" (most likely), "shawn bawn", or "say-an bay-an" (that's gonna require some thought for a native ...) people will scrunch their brow, think a bit, maybe chuckle, and have an idea who you are talking about--especially if they've been around you for a couple days.
English is remarkably error tolerant. You may not get it right, but you will get your point across.
With kanji you can't even try. This isn't about whether English is easy. It's about that fact that the simple act of going from pronunciation to kanji or kanji to pronunciation simply isn't possible at all.
(And choosing a formal name as an example is just asking for exceptions. Japanese, for example, has a whole class of kanji used basically for nothing except names--good luck pronouncing those ...)
I don't want to defend kanji/hanzi as a writing system. It's also in debt to history in a crazy way. But as a non-native reader of Japanese, you can often figure out the pronunciation and meaning of unfamiliar characters based on how they look. A large majority, maybe 90%, of characters have a meaning-part and sound-part, and once you know the common roots, you can get pretty far by just looking at things. You can also move to Korean and Cantonese pretty easily because those preserved the pronunciations of old Chinese pretty well. Ironically, Mandarin did a pretty bad job of preserving old Chinese, so it's harder to match up.
E.g. 楽 (music) is old Chinese nguk, Japanese gaku, Cantonese ngok, Korean ak, and Mandarin yue(??).
I don't know what's your primary language, but as a French person I can tell you that no, English isn't that error tolerant and people don't understand what you mean if your pronunciation isn't good enough.
I still have traumatic flashback of my younger self desperately trying to buy water (pronouncing “wa” as in waffles and “ter” as in territory) in Canada when I was 15 (and really thirsty)… I think I spent a whole 5 minutes before a French Canadian arrived and saved my day.
Don't agree US English makes it easier, it's just differently idiosyncratic.
Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p
If I hear in the US "cull err" and go to spell, I don't end up at color, hearing "sell fone" doesn't lead me to cell phone, etc.
Half the problems of English spelling are the three (four in US English, with Webster) significant attempts to simplify spelling over the centuries, and outsourcing some temporarily illegal printing to the Dutch.
Initial 'gh' can never be pronounced 'f', final 'ti' can never be pronounced 'sh', and 'o' is only pronounced 'i' in one word.
Indeed. Fixed, thanks
> Don't agree US English makes it easier, it's just differently idiosyncratic.
I found it easier when learning, but YMMV.
Just a lot I might have thought American English would take the opportunity to clean up, remain. Like all those silent h's from having printed the first English bibles in Holland. Ghost, aghast etc. There used to be a lot more - ghospel for one!
Well, even native speakers need to learn it the hard way as a child! As far as I'm concerned, I really struggled with French spelling when I was younger ;).
> Like all those silent h's from having printed the first English bibles in Holland. Ghost, aghast etc.
That's a really cool story. Thanks!
But the other way around isn't really bad: a spelling almost always have an unambiguous pronunciation. (There are exceptions but they are few and far between)
At least if you don't count ancient French, which is still prominent in places name's, and have a totally arbitrary pronunciation. As a little game for French speakers, try pronouncing the name of the city of «Meung sur Loire» ;).