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Comment by markjonsona989 | Hacker News Reader

(non-native here) I've been saying this for as long as I remember. Non-Anglophones often get frustrated in attempt to (de)construct a word in English like they would in other European languages only to find that it doesn't work and they don't understand why. I often say you'll have a much easier time accepting English if you consider it to be more like Mandarin; a collection of images. The only difference is that unlike an image of a drawing (of a house or a tree), a word in English is an image of letters. But it's still an image! It's not a word with individual letters, you can't break it apart; you have to memorise it instead. So don't feel bad for not knowing how something is pronounced, because native Anglophones will not know either.

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That’s not exactly true though - although I believe technically in all languages if you know it well enough, you do tend to read by looking at whole words basically as images, that’s beside the point.

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.

While English is especially bad, few languages don't have the same to some lesser degree.

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.

> because native Anglophones will not know either

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.

In my experience, this is not very true. I hear lots of pronunciations for words like gnocchi, usually until people are shamed into saying it correctly.

I agree that it's not universal amongst all native English speakers.

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.

Because it is an Italian word, which is perhaps not as common a source for words as to have it ingrained into people’s brain, say compared to French.

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.

As a native Portuguese speaker, the most mindblowing aspect in English for me is how words are split in syllabes.

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.

Most English speakers are flexible on where syllables get split, especially unstressed ones. Both a-tom and at-om sound fine to me. I could also see ay-tom in some North American dialects (if this seems ridiculous, ay-tomic is more mainstream, ay-tonal is standard).

And soon you learn that when it is an adjective it is a-tom-ic and not at-om-ic

My girlfriend's learning Turkish, and one of the customs that one says after being thanked for cooking a meal is "afiyet olsun". That is, "aff-ee-yet awl-soohn" with the relatively little stress on any particular part.

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)

The syllables are a-tom, but word breaking at the end of a line doesn't follow syllables in english.

Tha'ts the thing: it is a-tom where I live

The anatomy of an atom.

That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.

It's worse than that:

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.'

People always seem to forget that English isn't one language, it is composed of vocabularies from multiple languages all used together. Quite a few words that people think of as English are taken from languages far away, such as shampoo, pyjamas, bungalow.

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.

But then no language is one language in that sense. For example Hungarian is a mix of Uralic, Turkic, Slavic, Germanic etc. vocabulary. This doesn't make English unique. The somewhat unique aspect is then reluctancy to respell loanwords according to their pronunciation.

Yes, precisely. A language isn't a thing as such. - Chomsky, probably.

> the discrepancy is smaller.

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.

English and French are the two main well known exceptions. Basically all other languages of Europe are mostly written letter for letter as pronounced.

Now GB has left the EU, maybe Europe should create an “international written English”?

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.

Have a look at Interlingua, it would make a great official language for the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Same article written in Interlingua: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Way better than Esperanto at first glance

And English and French...

It's essentially a modern, cleaned-up Latin that any European can pick up quickly.

> any European

*cries in Hungarian*

You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English

A big reason for English being what it is in terms of pronunciation is exactly because of non-Anglophonic influence on English.

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".

I doubt (heh) this, unless you're referring to old and middle English.

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!

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