Why are some bilingual people dyslexic in English but not their other language?

Yeah but do they? It doesn't seem to me like a standard of this kind is anywhere near a priority for anybody. I'm not even a native speaker and I never felt the need of it. Why are we trying to fix something that's clearly not broken?

Traditionally, begging the question is the logical fallacy of assuming the consequent: proving that something is true conditionally on the fact that it is true and then deducing that it is true.

It is a mistranslation because it’s origin is a poor translation of assuming as begging and the consequent as the question.

On the other hand any direct translation (and initially translations were direct translations through several languages which is worse) of any early works of philosophy or logic (say Plato) will have this problem as the vocabulary Plato had to use just didn’t already have words for all the things in logic and philosophy that we now have words for.

I don't see how the situation would be different with English (especially given that French was not as international in the 1600s as English is today -- so that ship has long since sailed). Not to mention that English spelling reforms have been tried many times in the past and rarely caught on within a single country let alone worldwide[1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

Surely there is an happy middle ground.

* as most well known things without strong factual basis

It's actually the other way around, the standard languages are very similar, but spoken language differs greatly, even between different areas of one country, to the extent of not being mutually intelligible.

The point here is that for many words in English, there is no actual link between the letters in the spelling and the sounds in the spoken word.

I've been learning German for a few years. The spelling is easy. I spell 90% of words right first try. If I hear a word I can spell it well enough to look it up in a dictionary and learn what it means.

The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know. Does a work starting with an "n" have a silent "k" in front (or worse, words like honest that start with an "o" sound but are spelt with an h)? No way to know. Does a word end -ite or - ight? No way to know.

There are a lot of surprise complexities that serve a purpose (when you have 2+ words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) or that are just sytlistic (colour vs color). I don't object to that.

But we should stop pretending you can spell out words or that written and spoken words are linked, at least 25% of the time they're not. Just look at that last sentence: there is no W in written and no L in should. No wonder kids struggle with this crap.

What’s interesting about English is the relative lack of dialects outside the UK. It’s already a very standardized lingua franca because of how it spread.

And what’s left is solvable with the BBC/Hollywood English. Similar to how germany has hoch deutsch – an invented standard dialect everyone learns in school.

You can have a standard form of English taught in schools without demanding say-to-day stabdardization in common use. And we kinda already do. Just unofficially.

"From my experience, English is a dog of a language, its grammar is hither and thither, its spelling and punctuation are all over the place, and I really feel sorry for a non-native speaker who has to learn it.

I've never been a good speller nor a particularly good reader so reading a passage aloud in public is not something I particularly relish. On the other hand, my partner is not only an excellent reader and speller but also she can do cryptic crosswords with great ease—which is a task that's always eluded me. (It's always seemed pointless to me to deliberately increase the entropy of what one is saying by choosing cryptic words and meanings. One could just use clear text to avoid confusion.)

I put my lack of ability down to both my marginal aptitude for languages and not having much interest in learning them when I was at school. (Whilst it's possible I'm on the edge of being dyslexic I don't consider my reading handicap sufficiently large to bother me.)

My spelling was always worse than my grammar and the ways we were taught at school didn't help. For instance, spelling tests were marked out of 50 instead of 100 with two marks taken off for every spelling mistake. I cannot remember the total number of words in the test but it was well in excess of 50 and that meant one could score negative marks for spelling, which I did on occasions (but I wasn't the only one, there were also quite a few others). It seems to me that giving negative marks wasn’t the most productive way to engage students' interest.

There's no doubt that words such as 'pint', 'lint', 'through', 'though', 'thorough', etc. are a major problem for bad spellers but it's the sheer number of them that's the problem, add the large number of 'strange' English proper names to this and we're in big trouble. Whilst the correct punctuation of words like 'Wycombe' and 'Warwick' are comparatively well known to native speakers there are many others of that kind which aren't—and I reckon those two words would be very problematic for those learning English as a second language.

That long intro leads to my main point, which is to ask a question I've asked many times before without ever having received an even partially satisfactory answer. That being why doesn’t English use accents/diacriticals marks to help resolve many of its peculiar spellings and wayward pronunciations. It seems to me that if ever a language needs diacriticals then it has to be English. The problem of how to pronounce 'pint' and 'lint' correctly would be solved instantly if a diacritical were to be applied to one 'i' and not the other (for instance 'ì' 'í' or 'î' could be used).

From my experience, if you ask those who are knowledgeable in English and competent in using it (such as English teachers or those who run grammar or spelling websites) about potential usefulness of using diacriticals in English then their responses are nearly always negative or at best nonchalant. As they have already mastered English without the need to resort to them, they never see any need to ponder the matter further—and those who would have actually benefited from their use have never had sufficient knowledge or wherewithal to push for their introduction, hence the complicated mess that we have today.

Moreover, both native speakers and those with English as a second language face significant problems when they first come across written words that are not common in everyday usage. For example, I recall that I first came across the words 'chiral' and 'enantiomer' in textbooks well before I heard them being used by professionals who knew how to pronounce them correctly, again diacriticals would have quickly solved the problem. One may well ask why not consult a dictionary and use the IPA references. Correct, one can do that but if one is bad at pronunciation and spelling then one finds so many such words it becomes a never-ending tedium, thus one just skips over them none the wiser.

It seems to me that people with dyslexia and or those who are having difficulty with pronunciation and spelling would be much better served if English used diacriticals; I base this on my own experience from having learned other languages. I studied French at school and like English, I was never particularly good at it, similarly, for some years I lived in Austria, so I've a smattering of German. What's relevant here is that when I was learning French it was drummed into me that it was essential to understand the differences in pronunciation of 'e', 'é', 'è' and 'ê', etc. Thus, I've not much difficulty in pronouncing words like 'd'être' or proper nouns such as 'Tahère' and 'Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre'—a name certain cognoscenti will no doubt recognise (sorry the circumflex is missing, so three will have to suffice; right, I don't know any names that use all four pronunciations of 'e'). ;-)

What I am saying is that I could mount a reasonable argument to say that my pronunciation of certain French words that contain characters with diacriticals is better than it is of many English words whose characters are missing them! <...>"

The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.

In many languages, standardisation means that the language actually survives because without it loses its utility and will replaced by a dominant language.

Not an expert in that matter, I only try to replicate what I've heard.

Basque did standardise quite late. To my understanding, people had difficulty to understand one another when they came from another valley. That limited the utility and Castilian (aka Spanish) was often used which put pressure on the language. And what words do you learn then at school? And what do teachers learn? And what is used at the university? And all the media, in which form will it be?

Romansh didn't standardise (or better said the standardisation didn't took hold) and faces that difficulty.

I bet you'll find a similar story in Irish Gaelic.

You are basing your assumption on languages using Roman writing system which actually isn't capable of expressing all sounds used within the language. All language systems doesn't suffer this. For example most Indian languages have accurate sound to letter mapping even to the level of defining short and long sounds of same alphabet differently. In order to speak correctly you just have to say the individual sounds together. There is no weirdness involved.

edit: And arguably even spoken language eventually gets standardized through the written word. There's tons of regional German dialects without High-German, a more or less randomly chosen dialect, people from different regions would have a hard time even talking to each other.

As far as merging, Mandarin borrows phonetically sometimes but isn't nearly as eager as Japanese, which has found quite a bit of loanword usage. Which is to say, I think it's possible.

Surely Mandarin is not making much leeway into India, Korea, Japan, or most other countries in the east.

English is my second language. At first I found English quite easy: non-gendered nouns, simpler tenses, etc. But, after 25 years of using it it still shocks me at times. If you see a word for the first time you can have a guess how to pronounce it, but you could never be certain without consulting a dictionary.

> Only since the 1850s has the Japanese borrowing of loanwords really took off, and those are mostly limited to English words[...]

Are you sure you meant to say English? [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary - though even the article you linked specifically says it has a large portion of Chinese loans ]. Though Chinese borrowing started in the 4th century into Japanese, so - are you saying Japanese borrowings from Chinese particularly accelerated in the 1850s (If you could find some source for this claim, it’d be appreciated - I wasn’t able to find one and it seems unlikely, given that this was the point at which it started to lean more European in terms of its borrowings)? To my knowledge English borrowings in Japanese are modern (after WW2). I’m confused!