Hacker News Reader

Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.

View on HN

The writing system of English is far more phonetic than logographic writing systems such as that of Chinese. That's the relevant difference here. It is true that English's writing system is one of the least phonetic alphabets, but alphabets are always, by definition, quite phonetic. Most writing systems are alphabetic and not logographic, so if you rank them all ordinally, English is going to have a similar rank to Chinese, but the absolute difference between English and Chinese is quite large. Here is a very impressionistic assignment of percentages of phoneticity to various systems, which will hopefully make clear what I'm getting at:

Phoneticity 20% (Chinese)

--

Phoneticity 75% (English)

Phoneticity 80% (French)

Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing systems)

You have to distinguish different types of phoneticity. Can you pronounce what you read vs. spell what you hear? Can you pronounce an unfamiliar character?

With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com