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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

What language is more regular?

I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?).

All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

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Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written.

English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.)

Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)

So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?

Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.

In my version of English, a router that passes packets rhymes with root, and a router that carves wood rhymes with out.

Is that typical UK English?

Yes :-)

There’s a nice list of other heteronyms at https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-p...

It is. A "rooter" is a piece of network equipment; a "rauw-ter" is a machine for finishing a hole in a piece of work, such as a drill-hole.

I'm perfectly willing to accept american pronunciation of technical terms in IT; IT tech-talk is a kind of jargon that most non-techs are bewildered by. There's little benefit in clinging to customary pronunciations.

But the machine for cleaning holes isn't in that category. If I were talking to e.g. a woodworker, and referred to a "rooter", I expect that would result in some mirth at my expense, for exposing my ignorance.

That's also my pronunciation of the two terms, and I'm from the US (Boston area)

> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.

My favourite example: "banana" has three a's, no two of which are pronounced the same.

I think I pronounce the first and last a's the same (specifically, as /ə/)... it must be a dialectical difference (mine is General American English).

I think you are right.

For me the first a is reduced to almost nothing, the second is a long vowel and the last is a schwa.

I've think I've heard bina:na:, bina:nɚ, and binænə, in addition to bənænə.

That's a good example. I am amused by "record" being pronounced differently whether it's a verb or a noun.

They're called heteronyms, and there are a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

panorama is similar.

"The Chaos" is an excellent demonstration of the irregularities of English's spelling/pronunciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

I have recently been pulled-up by a fellow native speaker over my pronunciation of the word "poor" ("poo-uh"). She pronounces it the same as "pore" or "paw". Many other words have exhibited the same shift: e.g. moor/more, boor/bore. My natural accent is RP, but I think the distinction I like to draw is not RP. Most of the people I meet that draw this distinction are from the North. Scots, in particular, seem inclined to draw the old distinctions more than southerners.

I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.

Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.

Polish grammar is terrifying.

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.

Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.

Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.

I'm glad to have my ignorance dispelled :-)

I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.

Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.

I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.

I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.

> I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?).

Wrong, Korean writing is morpho-phonologic and has complex rules for transforming letters to actual pronunciation. And those rules applies at three different level (whatever position in the syllable, across syllable boundaries or not, or just within syllable).

I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.

But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound.

Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.

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