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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Growing up, speaking US English natively, I never realized how messed up English is. Then I learned Spanish (and lived in a Spanish speaking country for 2 years). Wow. Now that is a sane language. Once you learn the alphabet and a few pronunciation rules you can read anything in Spanish correctly. Try doing that with English. Ha!

This has become even more reinforced as I've helped my children learn how to read English. Trying to explain to a child why a certain word is pronounced the way it is, even though it looks nothing like how we are pronouncing it, usually falls back to "that's just the way it is" unless I want to try explaining to them the niceties of Old French/Latin, Old English, Old Germanic, the great vowel shift, etc. Eh, that's just the way it's pronounced.

There are so many people who already speak Spanish and it is such a nice sane language that I think it is a real shame that it did not become the universal language.

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Meh, each language has its quirks. I am a native Spanish speaker, and while English pronunciation is a clusterfuck, Spanish has its own share of issues for non-native speakers - like the need to memorise the useless the gender of words that refer to non-gendered things. Nobody cares that a table is female, but you won't sound native if you don't know it.

I'm told that some of the advanced forms of verbs (like the subjunctive) are real trouble for non native speakers, although at least learning that isn't a fruitless task.

I don't need to memorize table is female. I need to memorize it is "mesa" and I always use la with words than end in a. Spanish needs to fix el mapa and a small number other words that break the rule.

There is no reason for two different words for the depending on how the noun ends, but since the rule is easy and there are only two I'm fine with it - it is exceptions and complex rules I'm against, not rules.

I'm currently learning Spanish, and have to say that I don't find noun gender to be a huge problem, as generally (apart from some exceptions) if it ends in 'a' then it's feminine, and if 'o' then masculine. Compare that to German, which has no general and easy mnemonic for guessing a noun's gender, adds an additional gender, has a grammatical system where the article attached to a noun changes to that of another gender depending on case, and then to top it all off has no standard rule for creating a plural from the noun singular...

Apply that masculine/feminine rule to 'wing'/'wings', or 'sea', or 'eagle'/'eagles' in spanish :)

I know those are exceptions. The thing is... there are a lot of exceptions.

La foto, la mano, la radio. El dia, el mapa, el sofa. There are plenty of words that are exceptions.

English’s main issue is spelling, but every language has its quirks.

As a native speaker of a romance language, I do not find English particularly insane. It is quite straightforward as a language. That is, written English is a sane language, and spoken English is a sane language as well. The problem is that they are two unrelated languages :)

>That is, written English is a sane language, and spoken English is a sane language as well.

What's your definition of "sane" here?

>The problem is that they are two unrelated languages

Sounds like Chinese/Mandarin to me. :)

I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before. I can make up a word in Spanish and I know everybody will pronounce it the same way.

> I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before.

I do not understand what do you mean here. In spoken English, the only way to know about one word is by having heard it, so you know how it is pronounced. Illiterate people can speak perfectly correct English.

But literate people can't speak all the words they know in an agreed way. It's like the whole "how do you pronounce Linux" thing.

Then you move, and local people (in UK, say) pronounce the word differently (eg bath, heard).

That is exactly my point. If you've never heard a word you can never know how it's pronounced. That's not the case with Spanish where I can make up a word and everybody will pronounce it (almost) the same way.

This is not exactly true. There are some fundamental differences between spanish dialects. For example, "yo", "calle", are pronounced in an unrecognizable way between Argentina and Spain. But I agree that the mapping from written to spoken spanish is mostly deterministic (like that for French, Italian, and other romance languages). The mapping from spoken to written, of course, is not deterministic at all, which you can verify by looking at how illiterate spanish-speakers try to write.

Curiously, Polish is apparently spelled phonetically. Know the sound of the letters, you can read out a Polish newspaper and sound pretty much like a native speaker.

Same with Hungarian (Magyar). Spelling is over by grade 2.

I actually agree wholeheartedly.

My 5 year old is learning to read and write in English; his spoken English is quite good (his pronunciation is way better than mine of course), but I'm at loss of how to teach him properly to map the written to the spoken word (and the reverse mapping is even harder); he seems to be learning fine anyway.

This is an absurd view to hold. English accepts an extremely wide range of pronunciations for almost all words, allowing it to be easily used (ironically) as a linuga franca.

Re: 'That's just how it's pronounced' --> In your regional dialect of the language, which can probably still be understood, with >99% certainty, by anyone else in the world who is also a native speaker, and probably by almost anyone who speak English as a second language...

If you want a phonetic English, you'd need an alphabet with about 40 characters in it. And for what gain exactly...?

And suddenly dialects are writing the same word completely differently, because the sounds are different..

Communication can only happen when the people involved get the same internal mental model on what a given sequence of sounds/letters mean.

To that end dialects need to die. They harm communication. Even when they are close enough to each other for understanding they slow down the speed of communication.

I don't care if we need 100 characters in the language, one sound per character would greatly aid English. Enough of this to/too/two nonsense: one pronunciation, one and only one spelling. (if we could reform word definitions to get rid of those issues so much the better)

Dialects should not die! That would be a shame in my opinion. We should just all speak a „common dialect“. I guess what the speak on US TV (Friends) is the most likely candidate.

As a simple example, please consider live and live.

>Trying to explain to a child why a certain word is pronounced the way it is, even though it looks nothing like how we are pronouncing it, usually falls back to "that's just the way it is" unless I want to try explaining to them the niceties of Old French/Latin, Old English, Old Germanic, the great vowel shift, etc.

I want an ELI5 about this, please. I'm sure there's room for swords, dragons and secret treasure maps somewhere in that story. :)

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

Give https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley a listen

Not the OP, but consider the following...

Of course, you know of odd plurals such as house -> houses vs mouse -> mice.

why is womb pronounced "woom" and tomb "toom" but bomb is not "boom"?

gh: tough and laugh (as f) vs thigh (silent) vs ghost (hard g)

Why is tear (crying) pronounced the same as tier (levels) but spelled differently when tear (ripping) spelled the same as tear (crying) but pronounced differently?

The list of weird English oddities just go on and on. English is just plain weird.

Thanks for the list of oddities, all of which I'm aware, but I was hoping OP could work on an explanation.

You're absolutely correct that phonetics are really bad in English, but that's not the only metric of sanity in a language. English is pretty simple when you compare it to other languages, even considering our nightmarish spelling issues.

I bet you're from Utah... just a guess.

No... Oregon. But I grew up in South Florida. Why would you bet I'm from Utah? Do they have some sort of English fetish?

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