It's fun to hear how it's done in scripts that doesn't support our (as in the average HN reader) default way of doing it (which would be caps or italics/bold).
> Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases [...] so they can't be used to express anger.
It reads to me a bit like "the natural way to expess anger is uppercase, but they didn't have that, so they did the other thing instead".
Would you find a sentence like "English didn't have dots so they used uppercase to express anger" equally natural?
The comment is premised by how in japanese there are "two" sets of "letters" with slightly different uses but differently from lowercase/uppercase the difference does not translate in emphasis.
Uppercase letters are linguistically related to emphasis independently form net-speak (proper names, I, beginning of sentences), so to me it reads as "the thing that naturally works here is impossible there, so they have a different solution to the problem".
It is fine to take the perspective of your own cultural situation.
They contain vowels that go beyond the basic 5 "aeiou" of the English language (eg. see [0]). These suffice to let the speaker know how exactly to say the word unlike in English where it has to be learned case by case based on whatever is popular or acceptable pronunciation.
A subset of of these languages are tonal languages which also have special characters to additionally allow the speaker to set the pitch of the word correctly which then changes the meaning of the words [1].
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.sh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
Even English itself has vowels that go beyond the basic "aeiou" of "the English language".
* the letter Y
* vowel pairs, like ‘ou’
* accents, like in ‘précis’
Is that what you mean?
But, you say, that's 20 lexical sets, not 13–15? Well, no dialect distinguishes all 20. My idiolect (a slight variant of General American) realizes TRAP and BATH as [æ], PALM and LOT as [a], CLOTH and THOUGHT as [ɔ], KIT as [ɪ], DRESS as [ɛ], STRUT as [ʌ], FOOT as [ʊ], FACE as [ei], GOAT as [ʌu], FLEECE and HAPPY as [i], GOOSE as [u], PRICE as [ai], CHOICE as [ɔi], MOUTH as [æu], and COMMA as [ə]. That's 15, or 12 if you leave out PRICE, CHOICE, and MOUTH, which are diphthongs made of vowels that also occur isolated. (GOAT is debatable, usually analyzed as [oʊ] or [ou].)
Different dialects draw the boundaries in different places; for example, dialects with the "trap–bath split", such as RP, famously realize TRAP and BATH differently ([æ] and [a] in RP). Some dialects have fewer vowels; if we consider Indian English to be a single dialect, it may have more speakers than even GA, and most varieties of Indian English have fewer vowels than 12. I haven't found a good phonological analysis, but if you know any Indian English speakers and also know phonology, you know what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_differences_and_diale... goes into some detail.
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† The historical gap might be much larger than this. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs date back about 5300 years, and they provide evidence that spoken language was considered to be universal among humans at the time—there is no suggestion of tribes that lacked language anywhere in the written record. Today there are still peoples without written language, and a few who only acquired written language within the last generation. So we have good evidence that it has taken at least 5300 years. But Homo sapiens has been around for sixty times that long, over 300 millennia, and stone tools date back 2 million years. It strains credibility to imagine that the authors of the Lascaux cave paintings or the Denisovans who invented sewing were so unlike us as to lack speech; the origin of spoken language is usually dated to before 40kya. Unfortunately, no tape recorders have yet been found from that epoch, so the uncertainty of the antiquity of spoken language ranges over nearly a factor of 100. Maybe spoken language is a million years older than written language, or five million. Probably not ten million, though, or we'd be studying chimpanzee folklore.
This is more due to how widespread English is, and how vowels/pronunciation have shifted over time. For example, The Great Vowel Shift. [0]
Korean has exactly the same issues, albeit to a smaller degree. There are plenty of words that aren't pronounced like how they're spelled, due to grammatical rules. 종로 as an example. Or cases where words sound exactly the same and you just need to know the context/spelling- 쫗다, 쫒다, 쫃다, 쫏다, 쫓다.
Then there's regional slang/pronunciation/dialect. Busan dialect is fairly different from 표준어, or the "official" standard language. This phenomenon is not unique to English in any way. Any language scaled up will develop these issues over time.
At least you can try to pronounce "cough" or "종로", instead of not being able to pronounce "願" at all because you don't already know the pronunciation.
I'd go so far as to say that english is now spoken by so many people in so many different regions, all of whom can now be heard by each other on a reasonably frequent basis, that it has forced english speakers to become so adept at vowel-reconstruction that one could pronounce words with completely arbitrary vowels and still be understood.
This was still occurring before people were able to widely hear other regions' speakers, though.
However things like cough, plough, although, thorough, etc having different, -correct- pronunciations are due to English taking in words from other languages.
You can have three things:
1. A spoken language that evolves over time.
2. A writing system that accurately describes pronunciation.
3. A writing system that indicates history and etymology.
But you only get to pick two. English went with 1 and 3, which is arguably the optimal choice.
1. Because it's more important to know what words mean than it is to know how they sound.
My daughter reads a ton and learns a lot of words from reading. Fairly often, she mispronounces them, and that's OK. What's more valuable is that she can often infer the correct meaning of the word both from the surrounding context and from the parts that the word is made of. If we normalize spelling to match pronunciation, much of the latter gets lost.
It's easier to see that "mean" and "meant" are related than "meen" and "ment". "History" and "story" versus "histery" and "story".
2. Because pronunciation changes over time. If we continuously change spelling to match, it means older printed works get harder to read. In the worst case, they can appear to be saying different words than they intended.
3. Because pronunciation isn't uniform across regions.
Should "lawyer" be spelled "loyer" or "lawyer"? Is "crayon" spelled "crayon", "crayawn", "cran", or "crown"? Is it "caramel" or "carmel"?