English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
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Another amusing one is Mark Twain's plan:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld*Amusing though these are, they illustrate why spelling reform is hard in English: spelling correctly has become a status marker, and any changed spelling looks not merely wrong, but also stupid and deserving of contempt.
1. <https://allhomosapienswelcome.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/iorx-...>
2. <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70/pg70-images.html#cha...>
Who developed a terrible cough.
She drank half a pint
Of warm honey and mint,
But, sadly, she didn’t pull through.
It’s kinda a joke, but would be kinda cool. They’d only have to negotiate with Ireland, so hopefully wouldn’t get too bogged down.
Same article written in Interlingua: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
It's essentially a modern, cleaned-up Latin that any European can pick up quickly.
*cries in Hungarian*
You mean like the French who don't pronounce the final consonant?
Anyway, fixing the orthography simply privileges the group whose pronunciation matches. And the pronunciation continues to drift anyway so you have to keep on adjusting the spelling.
If people want English to have a stronger connection between spelling and pronunciation they can simply go for it, there is no authority that tells you how you must spell a word. Just be prepared for people to not understand what you write and to ridicule you.
And be prepared to defend the spelling of homophones that have now also become homonyms, such as straight and strait (strate?), might and mite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform#English
'On the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. For example, for "debt" early Middle English wrote det/dette, with the b being standardized in spelling in the 16th century, after its Latin etymon debitum; similarly for quer/quere, which was respelled as choir in the 17th century, modelled on Greek χορός chorus; in both cases, the pronunciation was not changed.'
Why at-om and not a-tom?
As years pass I get a better intuition and can somewhat translate that to better pronunciation but I don't think I'll ever really grok it.
Her, being Italian, puts all the intonation at the beginning so it becomes "AFF-ee-yet AWL-soohn" and it just sounds like gibberish. Sometimes even if I know what she's trying to say, it still comes across as alien.
It's insane how intonation can completely change a language, and even a well defined language like German, a phonetic language just like Turkish, still sounds really bad if you don't get the intonation right (see: Trey Parkers attempts to speak German in South Park episodes)
In Norwegian, vovels have drifted so that the letter "o" is pronounced mostly like what other countries would write "u", and there's the extra vowel "å" which we pronounce like what most other countries write "o". Except... not always. In common words like "for", "og", "som", or in "Norge", the "o" is indeed pronounced in the international manner, like we would write with an "å" if we were consistent. And the rules for long or short vowels are inconsistent too. You can be confident that vowels before a double consonant are short, but not that vowels before a single consonant are long. "For", for instance, if pronounced with a long u-sound, means "fodder", but with a short o-sound it is the preposition "for" (more or less the same as the English one). That should have been written "får" if the phonetics made sense, but "får" (long o-sound) is already a word for sheep.
Some people actually write "fôr" for fodder and "fór" for rushed (another meaning of f - long-u sound - r), introducing letters that aren't part of our official alphabet.
In the English speaking world some places moved away from phonics for teaching kids to read but are moving back since the change was considered a mistake. I think I saw a breakdown saying something like 60% of English words can basically actually just be directly sounded out phonetically, another 20% need some knowledge of rules for the type of exception, 10% are from another language (like French) so you need some knowledge of the source language’s pronunciation rules, and then only the last 5 or 10% are actually true exceptions that need to be specifically learnt (I can’t remember the exact percentages but it was something around those stated). I’m sure it can feel a bit inscrutable (as I’ve said in comments I’m learning French so having similar but slightly different frustration) but it’s not as bad as people make it out to be.
I'm not sure that's true. There are still underlying patterns to it, even if it's very convoluted. The exceptions are in the core language that native Anglophones know well. For vocabulary in the periphery, I think native Anglophones (with the same accent) will tend to come up with the same pronunciation for an unknown word because they apply the same patterns.
For example, someone from the UK will infer the language the word was borrowed from, and then apply the rules of that language combined with the same system of English pronunciation butchery that has been applied to it to come up with the same result.
But otherwise, that's just a prescriptivist/descriptivist argument. What's "correctly"? You'll note though that there are only a few variations - native English speakers still generally agree, even if in multiple classes, and usually one class is a clear majority.
But quite clearly there are lots of soft rules that should never be learned directly, but indirectly people do pick up (not only natives, I am not a native English speaker, yet I can probably guess an approximate pronunciation for unseen words that won’t be statistically too bad) — like how an ML model might do.
The number of non-native speakers of English is twice the number of native speakers. At that point, there's no such thing as "an original pronunciation".
Johnson did the best he could but a word was pronounced radically different in different areas of England. There are still jokes about not being able to understand anyone from the rural areas.
Still, he and Webster have a lot to answer for!
It’s almost impossible to reform and I don’t think most people really care to have it reformed. And it’d eventually change in unexpected and irregular ways anyway!
My native language is Dutch. For Dutch there are spelling reforms every so many years. English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think.
The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced, and that it's much more standardized. The disadvantage is that older texts become hard to read much sooner. It's amazing how English from the 19th century (like _Three Men In A Boat_) is effortlessly readable, whereas Dutch from before WW2 is noticeably old.
Is that so? I'm pretty sure everybody pronounces pannenkoek as pannekoek.
Don't get me started on conjugation of loanwords such as "gedeleteted" (I hope I got that one right)
The UK uses a form of written English based on Samuel Johnson's dictionary. The US uses a form of written English based on Webster's dictionary. Both Johnson's and Webster's spelling reforms post-date Shakespeare.
For example, Shakespeare's grave contains the inscription:
GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES.
You can see we are not using English spelling from Shakespeare's time.
1. the writing of English was (let's call it) standardized
2. not long after (in historic terms) society decided to majorly shift/change pronunciation of a good part but not all of the language
=> so now part of the language fit's it's spelling, and part is shifted away from it in various degrees
By re-fitting the spelling to match the pronunciation it could be mostly fixed. That just is sadly not really doable.
Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same because French loves silent letters.
Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.
The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.
Why is "güisqui" an abomination, but "whisky" not?
A way to see how a (more) phonemic orthography would look like in English is to have a look at BBC Pidgin[1], though the increased "phonemicity" isn't the only difference.
But those exceptions you listed are either rare exceptions (h is always silent, but with a handful of exceptions, normally loanwords like hámster or hachís; x is always "ks" except in old/historical words like México or Quixote), or just follow more or less complex rules.
In general if you read and know basic rules, you know how to pronounce 99.9% of the time, if you listen you need to have some deeper level of orthography/etymology/grammar knowledge to write correctly.
No such thing as dialect or regional variation in pronunciation in Spanish then? What about Mexican Spanish?
Spanish considers 'll' a different letter from 'l' and a couple other examples, but they can do that because they have about attackany sounds as the latin alphabet (I don't remember the exact number, but Spanish doesn't use some letters at all so counting would need some effort)
What we need is if you see a sequence of letters there is exactly one consistent way to pronounce it, and if you hear a new word there is exactly one way to spell it. There are many ways to pull that off.
English has some notably easy parts and some notably difficult parts. It's a language with remarkably simple grammar, but the orthography is notorious (see OP) as well as the very large vocabulary makes it difficult to master (although of course a high ceiling in a language isn't too much of a problem if you want your language to spread easily, as long as the floor is low).
All languages of highly developed cultures are equally complex, but English is definitely one that gives new learners a leg up. Its orthography is inconsistent, but we don't read through phonetic transcription. Chinese, OTOH, makes the start as a second language difficult, in all aspects.
The obvious reasons to me that English took over the world are because the British Empire forcibly killed other languages (often literally), and then the US's global financial and cultural influence aided it further.
I don't think it's due to English that Britain and the US had such vast linguistic influence, and just as easily if the British spoke a different language, that would be the lingua franca.
In short, there are too many factors in reality to really be able to say "so many people speak english, so obviously it's easy". No, rather, we can observe many people speak english, and perhaps that's because the internet and TV are dominated by english due to tech and hollywood, perhaps it's because the britsh rolled high on the "slavery and racism" stats a long time ago, and perhaps it's because it's easy to learn. My money's not on "easy to learn" being a leading reason there though.
For example SoundSpell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel
Here is an example:
> It was on th ferst dae of th nue yeer th anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that th moeshun of th planet Neptune, th outermoest of all planets that wheel about th Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then, a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in th reejon of th perterbd planet.
As in:
I love to réad. Shé read all my books. I watched the gáme líve. Shé lives at hóme. Eurydicé had a fíníte supply of pátience.
Etc.
It wouldn't change any of the ASCII-only spelling rules, and would be a tremendous help to English learners. Since most text is written on smartphones nowadays, the new accented spellings would be immediately widely adopted as soon as the three OS vendors in the English world (Microsoft, Apple, Google) turned them on in their autocorrects.
Of course there's no instance or process that could push through a change like this because English, unlike French and German for example, is not a language whose evolution is actively managed by a national committee.
But if we sneakily added entirely optional accents to the existing spelling, then in another hundred years maybe the vestigial hint letters could be cleaned up. (Probably not — see French spelling which is 50% silent letters from ancient orthography and Latin roots. But even the French system, despite its complex rules, is internally consistent unlike English.)
The fixed word-final E that marks "long vowels" has the special name "silent E". (If it's not word-final, it won't appear at all. Thus "mating" has a silent E overridden by the -ing that follows it, and in order to spell a "short A" in the same context you need to divorce it from the following syllable by doubling the syllable-final consonant: "matting".)
But you can't use this as a basis for English spelling reform, because - to choose only the most obvious problem - English uses a lot more than 10 vowels.
So, when you write réad, am I supposed to understand /ɹi.æd/, a two-syllable word with a long E followed by a short A? When you write "had a", am I supposed to understand that both words are pronounced with identical vowels? When you write "lives", am I supposed to understand that this is a two-syllable word in which the first syllable contains a short I and the second contains a short E?
What problem are you trying to solve? How would you spell "put"?
I actually like this proposal
But it would be possible to add minimally invasive context to the ambiguous spellings which are a big road block to the billion+ people learning English as an additional language from mostly text-based sources.
This could be done by adding a single accent and not modifying any existing spellings, so that accented words can always be cast down to ASCII only and they’ll still be valid pre-reform spelling. It wouldn’t solve the question of phonetics but it would help non-native speakers understand how words are meant to be pronounced because there’s almost always just two reasonable options for a given word or syllable in its context.
So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.
It sounds like your reform is specifically targeted at people who already know English and are therefore aware that "lives" has only two candidate pronunciations, neither of which is more than one syllable long.
But people like that don't need help. The reason there are only two pronunciations of "lives" is that one is the regular plural of the noun "life" and one is the regular pres-3sg form of the irregularly-spelled verb "live". Anyone who's aware of the two words should have absolutely no trouble determining whether a word in an English sentence is a noun or a verb!
But your scheme will do nothing for people who aren't already very familiar with English, because it does nothing to indicate the pronunciation of the word being spelled. It limits itself to reminding the reader which of two options was desired. The spelling isn't what was restricting you to two options. (Also, you added an accent to the word "she", where there was only one option to begin with.)
Note also that an accent is already used in formal written English to disambiguate between written vowels that might or might not be pronounced at all: thus you have learned and blessed (one syllable, verbs or participles) and learnd and blessd (two, adjectives).
> So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.
Of course there is. "Put" does not use any of the ten vowels traditionally described as "short" or "long". It still has a vowel in it. It still theoretically needs to be disambiguated from the vowels of "hut" and (according to you, though English spelling rules don't really allow for ambiguity here) "hoot". Accents can do whatever you want.
And those spellings from the mid 17th century were influenced by spellings that arose with the introduction of the printing press to England in the late 15th century.
I will make the example of German to show the difference: The German normative dictionary Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache was released in 1880 and abolished variant spellings then. It compiled the spelling that was developed since the mid 18th century.
I will make another example showcasing Turkish: its writing system was developed only in 1928.
In Turkish we have a 100 year old spelling and a 100 year old norm.
In German we have a 140 year old spelling and a ca. 200 year old norm.
In English we have a 270 year old spelling and a ca. 370 year old norm.
That’s what you see and only that. Language drifts away from the spelling over centuries.
You do get dialectical differences in Irish and there's some spelling reform stuff, but at least for the most part there's some internal consistency (to the dialect) in how stuff should be pronounced.
But I still made a fool of myself trying to say Portlaoise and Dun Laoghaire a few times. In conversation with my neighbour Eoghan no less.
By the time we had a daughter the name Maeve was in serious contention and I admit I was pretty enthusiastic about going with "Méibh" or even "Medb" but we ended up going with something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_languages
One of those languages is Irish. It used to be written in its own type - which I personally find beautiful.
Someone who knows English but not Irish will have no idea how to pronounce "Niamh", because it's not a word from the English language. As you say, it's an Irish name that follows Irish orthography.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccough
> Hiccough is a later spelling, and an example of folk etymology.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiccup#English
> Alternative forms
> hiccough (old-fashioned, hypercorrection)
...and see the etymology for more info.
An archive.org search found plenty of texts from that era using hiccough, though often with some hiccups as well.
This one from 1886 is interesting: https://archive.org/details/b21699331/page/n1/mode/2up?q=hic...
> No doubt many of my professional brethren are well acquainted with the Hippocratic aphorism <Greek transcription omitted> "Sneezing occurring after hiccough removes the hiccough,” or, as it is rendered by Adams, “Sneezing coming on, in the case of a person afflicted with hiccup, removes the hiccup.”
The 1886 author uses hiccough while quoting the older Adams reference, from 1849, as using hiccup (primary reference for Adams is at https://archive.org/details/genuineworksofhi02hippuoft/page/... )
Kanji has more radicals but some of them only on top, some on bottom, some on left or right. And you don't even need to learn them all - rare radicals remembered as "this strange thing that appears only in X"
This is how I deal with a lot of words.
https://sites.google.com/site/phoneticallyintuitiveenglish/w...
— A nun from a Franciscan order from Minnesota who taught us English (and some Japanese) at school