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Comment by michael_j_ward | Hacker News Reader

It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word (like Chinese or Japan).

Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".

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> Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English (...)

I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.

Japanese is phonetic, unlike English. In Japanese spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent. Words sound like they look and look like they sound. Even someone who’s never studied Japanese before could read a text written in romaji and be understood without trouble (unlike someone studying French, for example).

Nit, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. But, largely Japanese is not phonetic in written language, as they also have a logographic set which makes up a large portion of most texts.

English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The distinction wouldn't mean much.

It's entirely possible for a distinction that contrasts a large majority with a small minority, or even an actually-existing totality with a hypothetical set of counterexamples, to be meaningful.

If it is not phonemic, what is it? It is not necessarily "regular" or "uniform" in the phonemes that are represented, but you can't consider it anything other than phonetic, as the characters represent phonemes. Pretty much period.

As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.

And in the context of discussing "whole word" vs "phonetic" systems of learning the English language, it seems like outright deception.

I'm assuming it isn't deception as much as it is a bit plain ignorance. I confess I have harbored the thought that English is not phonetic in the past. Is a common thing for folks to say; especially when trying to point out that English is hard.

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