How to pronounce the trickiest English words
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I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.)
English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day.
I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific.
But it is quite easier to push this with a language governing authority, and even with one it does not always work, as they always come with standardization after usage is widespread (a particular one that I liked that failed was cederrón for CD-ROM).
Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess. And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English. Where an "a" is more often than not an "e" (or even an "o" like in "ball"). Where an "e" is usually an "i". Where an "i" is pronounced as if it had an "a" in front of it, and where "u" for some fucked up reason has a "y" or "j" in front of it. Granted, "o" is fine as long as you don't double it ("oo") and it becomes an "u". And that's regular British English. American English makes things even worse.
English is more like Visual Basic.
Yeah, english is a lot like PHP.
This creates a lot of English accents, which fundamentally disagree about the pronunciation of different vowels. Even if the accepted spelling accurately represents how the writer speaks, it could be absolutely different from how the reader speaks.
It also creates a tendency to let unemphasized vowels slip into a generic "au"-ish sound, which is where the "o" in "ball" comes from.
But that also makes the language extremely flexible, forgiving, and adaptable. English contains a vast number of (mostly) mutually-intelligible dialects, each with its own rich history, beauty, and shibboleths.
You’ve got to take the bad with the good, I guess.
Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k. The other 2 are french imports.
That red octagon sign in France will say “STOP”, but in Quebec, “Arrête”.
initial “kn” consistently has a silent “k”.
“kn” in the middle of a word, is less consistent: “unknown” has a silent “k”, “pyknotic” does not.
If you're coming up with words I have to Google, I'll stick with my "quite consistent"
Most are compounds where the “k” and “n” come from separate component words, or cases where the “k” is from the root word and the “n” from a suffix, or cases where the “k” is part of a “ck”...
English is a mongrel of a language with more special cases than most of my code. But I don't think the silent k in kn is an example of that.
Flammable/inflammable Foxes/oxen. Tomato/potato (one thing I will begrudgingly admit the Americans got right) Where/were/here.
Those are actual rough edges.
One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics
I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner.
Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks")
Ils / elles parlent ("they speak")
Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural.
Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.
Qu'un verre en verre vert de vers
Puise en vous, puis en vous puisse envoûter vos badauds au bas dos.
"She" is also "they" in both stressed/unstressed forms (ze/zij).
"His" is the exact same word as the infinitive form of "to be" (zijn).
The formal "u" can mean "you" or "you all" and it always has the same accompanying verb form, even for plurals.
The only way to tell them apart is context, like you said.
While English does have these examples as well, they tend to be with homophones and less with verb forms and pronouns.
Side note: before learning a second language, did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker? Personally, I never thought about it AT ALL until I started learning a second language as an adult.
I guess I don't know if it's similar in other languages, but at least in all of the Germanic flavors, these verbs are crucial and dictate literally every single aspect of the language. Now that I've seen this distinction, English has become more novel to me as I notice these constructions in the writing of others.
I think it says a lot about our culture that we place so much emphasis on these ideas of individualism and property that they are codified into our writing and speech so heavily. Moreover, I'm curious if there are other languages that do not emphasize these verbs and if that also plays a role in the general sentiments of people and their thoughts on collectivism and community?
I can't wait to start learning my 3rd language once I have Dutch fully under my belt! :)
Definitely not to the extent that I'm having to for French! At the moment I don't have a lot of spare time to think (eek) and reflect on this, but regarding those verbs, French definitely has some different usage of them when compared to English including sometimes using "have" where we'd use "be", and vice versa, which is a little jarring at first.
For example, in some forms of the past tense, you must start the sentence with 1. subject, 2. modal verb, rest of the sentence, and then the verb infinitive.
Ik _ben_ naar de supermarkt gegaan.
"I _am_ to the supermarket gone." - is the literal translation. The correct translation would be "I went to the supermarket."
But for a different verb, say, "Zitten" (to sit), you have to create the past tense with the verb "to have"
Ik _heb_ op de bank gezeten.
I _have_ on the couch sat. You get the idea.
There is a rule for when to use "be/have" and it relates to what I've been told is "a sense of movement or change". This could be literal, like a change of location, starting/stopping, or it could even be a _change of mind_. In those scenarios, you use "to be", which I think makes logical sense! You are literally changing yourself, changing your state of being, by literally moving or thinking about something in a different way.
In all other scenarios, you use "to have". It makes less logical sense on it's own, but is fine when you contrast it with "to be."
It is by far the hardest part of grok-ing a vital part of the grammar, but I am thankful that it at least follows some sort of logical rules when I compare it to English. Being native speakers, we take a lot of those things for granted.
Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.
But it could be worse. At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn't match what French had.
But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh.... It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can't be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff.
It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.
I write, “learnt” rather than “learned”. Past perfect and past imperfect from a Germanic view.
“I learnt” and “I have learned”. “I learned” sounds wrong.
Source: Yorkshuh.
Source Yorkshuh and Scottishland!
Admittedly, I’d not use “telt” though I understand why it is used.
My Yorkshuh is (now) soft Wetherby. It wasn’t as a lad but I had to learn English, as a second language, when I lived abroad (NL/BE/US).
It was embarrassing to have someone translate my English to an American boss.
During a policy session in Zaandam with some Dutch, UK, Spanish and US peers we had a moment when our Dutch hosts had an excited conversation in Dutch but since it was a tech conversation both myself and the UK member blurted out at the same time that our Dutch must be getting better because we understood most of what they just said and didn't need them to translate it for us.
Latin was the first official language in the UK, back when Celtic and Brythonic language was widespread.
The Normans were in the UK, viking there way up our rivers and establishing the Danegeld before Normandy was Normandy and, well, before French was French.
Old French was Gallo-Romance and Middle French, AIUI, emerged with the Norse influence as the Scandinavians moved down past Britain and into Europe. Modern French, ie French, came long after the English court took on the language of the Normans (1066, and all that).
Out of this melange English was born, the next official language of England famously legislated as such by the Welsh-speaking Henry Tudor in the late C.15th.
It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new ones and how linguists can reconstruct old languages that have no written records.
Meanwhile English seems to have spelling set mostly in stone hundreds of years ago, and any shifts in pronunciation since then are just ignored (barring minor reforms like the ou->o thing that part of the world adopted)
I mean, look at Carnegie's attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
some wins, but didn't go anywhere, really
"wear", "where", "were-" (as in werewolf), "weir" (in some regional dialects) can all be pronounced identically in modern English. If we map them all to a single spelling, is that an improvement to readability and understanding?
If you "cleaned up" English spelling, the same would happen with wear, where and were-. If the distinction were important for understanding, it would be equally important in spoken language and the pronunciations wouldn't have converged.
One advantage of the disconnect between spoken and written is old English literature since the great vowel shift is still readily accessible. Go back 500 years and the spoken language would be difficult but written would be easy.
US customary units aren't English (or Imperial) units; even the ones that share names sometimes aren't the same, and not just because of the minor adjustments when the US customary system was redefined in metric terms.
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s to see what our best understanding of Shakespeare actually sounded like. It is surprisingly easy to understand.
They also found that he had some bawdy jokes that rhymed for his audience which no longer do rhyme. :-)
Look at the shifts going on right now in the great lakes area. Lots of vowels are changing around.
Charlie Berens is a comedian that focuses on great lakes and midwestern life. His accent, though suped up for views, is somewhat representative of the state of the vowel changes going on right now:
Ha, nice :)
For me the worst part is that my last name, Clough, was originally spelled that way to indicate it used English's guttural sound before that sound got dropped from the language and all the words with that sound got their own new pronunciations. E.g., "Though through rough boughs I push my way."
Would you mind elaborating on this?
I know almost nothing about the topic, but IIUC from Wikipedia, Olde English only had 3 genders: [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Gender
But reading https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html, there were also 2 weak neuter nouns, eage and eare. Which are now eye and ear. Not sure how that fits with what I was taught.
As a native speaker it might not be so bad. But as a second language it means that at some point you're taking a class that consists largely of learning to beg your betters for favors. Which I don't think is ever going to sit well with students of quasi-democratic nations. Doubly so for more stereotypically cantankerous ones.
Kind of ironic, in that English lost the ability to make formality distinctions because its speakers were so consistently formal to each other that the language lost its informal second person singular pronoun and associated conjugations.
I've only passed the N4 exam so far (about the skill of a Japanese elementary school student), but I fear the polite speech rules I've already learned. It's easy to conjugate verbs a little politely (-masu at the end, or desu for "to be"). Being more polite is a beast. There are different verbs to tack on depending on the basic verb, your relation to the person you're speaking to or speaking about, and whether it's a request, offer, or statement.
Then there are polite pronouns, polite particles (those are like prepositions), and it's usually polite to refer to things obliquely.
All that, and I'm sure I'm missing or misunderstanding a huge portion of the style.
And when the spelling was largely fixed by William Caxton, who pronounced the words with a 15th century Kentish accent
Basically the American South did not get the memo about changing English accents.
IIRC, the element of truth that begets the lie here is that the Southern accent does have some elements in common with older British accents. But it's not clear whether those elements are retained from those old British accents, or whether they've simply been added into the accent later. And even then, we're talking about very specific features - I think the rhotic R is one of them? - and not the accent as a whole.
So you get ham from a pig, beef from a cow, and mutton from a sheep.
Except for ships, which are always feminine in English. It feels very weird to me because gendered noun categories are unusual for English and ships are just about the only counterexample that remains.
Of course, you can use "it", your choice.
Mind you I find the forced overlaying of sex onto language absurd, my late mother was chairman of many committees and always complained when people started calling her "chair"; I agree.
The tradition refers to some sort of mother / goddess protection the sailors are hoping for.
Are you suggesting that England, the very definition of imperialist settler colonialism, is itself the product of imperialist settler colonialism?
So any talk of "the original peoples" in the British Isles is just about as meaningless as it is anywhere outside of some parts of Africa.
Also Jews were expelled for a few centuries, and made to wear particular clothing prior to that.
I'm sure you could find many other examples that we more readily associate to some other country (or in some other direction) today, and they may be different again in centuries to come.
But what are the dumb things English doesn't have? Noun genders (why?). A hundred different suffixes for regular verb conjugations (ugh). Subjunctives all over the place (maddening). A character-based script that isn't phonetic at all (e.g. Chinese). Insanely complicated grammar. Word forms that change based on the social status of the speaker relative to the listener. And so forth.
Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. And while learning pronunciation is annoying, it turns out it's actually not a big obstacle in practice at all. In terms of what students struggle with in ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, it's basically bottom of the list. Students struggle way more with the present perfect, for example (when to use "I've eaten" instead of "I ate").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs#Distingu...
The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible.
Like, you can transliterate spanish or french (or any number of languages) into english, and it will be perfectly understandable in most cases to a native speaker.
(Unless that's the joke)
I suppose that doesn't disqualify your point either.
For me, the greatest strength of "English" currently is that it's widespread adoption means that native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common. This goes to your point as well about transliteration.
By contrast, I am learning Dutch and it's a bit of a meme that Dutch people will switch to English if they detect a hint of an accent (excluding regional dialects of course). My theory is that they do not have an ear for it _because_ most Dutch nationals tend to also speak English at a B2+ level.
Contrast that to native English speakers, where the 3 major nations are home to a huge number of immigrants from all around the world, and it makes sense. If English speakers refused to talk with anyone that didn't have a perfect British/American/Australian accent, then nothing would ever get done.
In countries where the local population is tolerant of individual accents, I think the native language tends to thrive (Germany, China, Brazil, etc).
Edit: article link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
Interesting to read this; I had developed exactly the same hypothesis about French speakers: that they're less accustomed to a variety of accents (with the obvious caveat that it's even more risky to generalise from an anecdote than from data!).
So you assert.
Obviously it will differ per person as well, but as a whole, in my experience, this tends to be a trend amongst homogenous language countries. I suspect it could also be true for countries like Luxembourg and Belgium where it's normal for many people to speak 2-4 languages all within a very close proximity to each other. These people need to listen to competent speakers whose home language may differ from that used by their neighbors and business contacts on a daily basis.
At the end of the day, my hypothesis is that proximity breeds tolerance. Based on other social experiments and observations, I don't think I'm too far off, but thank you for (validly) checking my bullish assertions.
I suspect it depends upon the type of language; consider the difference between "I fell" and "I fall". There's a different word there for doing something in the past. (Obvious examples are run/ran, pay/paid).
In other languages you might use a suffix on the same root-word. So in English you need to learn more words. You can't have a simple rule to say "I read" vs "I read in the past". The word you use is .. different, and you have to know it if you want to be correct.
Irregular verbs are not unique to English, but I guess there probably are more of them in the common lexicon. This is probably true is lots of language with irregular verbs. The irregular ones are irregular because the sounds have been adapted to flow better in everyday parlance.
The nice part of most irregular verbs however is that they are also common. If you read regularly or consume lots of content in the language, they will come up over and over again.
Is this something that non native English speakers struggle with early on in the language or does it feel more like a constant battle even past B2?
In Dutch, I’ve largely just accepted that I’m going to screw up irregular verbs until I can start reading novels on my own. I assume at that point the exposure will help drill them into my brain like reading as a young child did in English.
This is basically an urban legend.
Comparing vocabulary sizes between languages is essentially impossible, as what counts as a word is measured differently. (Think those long compound words in German, for example.) And using things like "total dictionary size" is similarly unhelpful because most of the words are technical or archaic, and it mostly depends on how deep a dictionary wants to go into rare words.
It's true that English has two main historical roots for vocabulary, but that doesn't mean native speakers use more words in terms of everyday normal speech. There are a handful of classic examples ("cow" and "beef", "pig" and "pork"), but they're very much exceptions rather than the rule. (There aren't dual words for "head" or "feet", or "apple" or "orange", or "chair" or "table", and so forth.)
There's zero evidence that vocabulary size is a difficulty for learning English.
(On the other hand, English does seem to overload words with multiple definitions more often than a lot of other languages -- so that definitely can be a minor difficulty for language comprehension, especially at the beginning.)
There aren't two words for "feet", but the medical specialism that deals with "feet" (germanic root) is "podiatry" and if you want your feet beautified then you get a "pedicure" (both latin root). In some cases both roots are commonly used.
Unless you count "chef" and "director"
How much it takes to learn how to properly read, write, listen, and speak in English? It took me about 20 years in total, but I still cannot talk properly.
When you learn a second language you have the baggage of the first language hindering you (talking about orthography here), and you normally don't start by speaking the language exclusively for 6 years before learning how to read. If you don't know what the language is supposed to sound like, of course it's hard to understand how to read in it.
English? A word like "night" turns into "nig-hut" which kinda makes sense, but is also completely wrong. There are so many times when I have to say "No, actually you say XXX".
Speaking is fine, mostly. Though there were a few *years* where I had to say "Mommy is a woman, so you say 'she' not 'he'." as Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns. "Your friend is a girl so you say 'her ball', not 'his ball'". That took a long time to sink in, even though he was fine when people spoke to him he'd almost always get it wrong when women/girls were involved - and even Finnish adults make those kind of mistakes quite often. ("I have a girlfriend, his name is Sally".)
Let me introduce you to the "order of adjectives" rule: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/grammar-bizarre-weird-rule-...
Talk about bizarre! Every native speaker has this internalized, but they never teach it in school.
It's a weird one, but also pretty easy to internalize just through experience. It's not like anybody's usually stringing together five adjectives in regular speech. If you just learn a single prototype phrase like "ugly little green wool sweater", that will probably get you 99% of what you need in daily usage.
That's why at a certain point you just need to get experience using the language.
Like, if someone messes up the order of adjectives, a native/fluent English speaker would still understand what they're trying to say.
The author also introduces Cambridge, Oxford, whatever, when the first ordering is pretty standard.
For example, the common term for an tiny, aged woman in the US is, "little old lady." Size, then age, then the rest.
Edit: I see that even the article calls out that this rule is not ironclad.
Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.
- Terry Pratchett
Thankfully it was taken well.
I was using my normal “consultant voice” with some clients in Tennessee and as I started talking to them, I naturally without thinking started being less careful and throwing some “y’all’s” and southern twang came out.
I heard second hand that they thought I was mocking them. I had to explain I was born and raised in South Georgia and that was my natural voice.
"bureaucracy" is the English word, but the French word is "bureaucratie" (which is closer to the Norwegian spelling than the English is.)
Brr…
(Karaoke is not a gotcha or a complete fluke; it’s discussed all over the thread)
And of course, not all sounds even exist, "Hummus" has a Het sound, not an 'h' and is pronounced as khoomoos, not haamas. Gaza is closer to being Raza than Gaza, etc.
Should it, really? The concept of Israel dates back millennia; which was the original prononciation? Should we all say it as it was in Aramaic back in the day? The h/g cases you mention are a good example: many languages just don’t have these soundsIn cases like bilingual countries, which of the prononciation is supposed to be canonical (bearing in mind that the linguistic borders shift significantly all the time)?
Arguing about the prononciation of proper nouns always seems foolish to me. There is no solution to these questions.
I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually quite far from how they would sound in their original language. There is a simple reason for that: foreign words have sounds that do not exist in English and that English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce without training, about which most people don’t bother. English words sound weird in Japanese, but the opposite is also true.
> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc
This is no different than many other languages. In fact, Karaoke and tsunami are used exactly the same way in French, German, Dutch and Spanish.
> Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.
It is not really. English is completely inconsistent because of its history as an amalgamation of very different languages, but apart from that it is not really remarkable in the way it treats loan words.
The word "consonant" would probably have to be pronounced "konsonantu" in Japanese.
Oh god no. I am Spanish guy living in Japan, our languages have very similar sounds, so much so that we can usually get the pronunciation right on the first try, much to the surprise of Japanese people. English speakers on the other hand tend to butcher the pronunciation so heavily that the words become really difficult to recognise.
But to be fair, the same happens the other way around. All languages adapt foreign words to their own phonology.
I dunno what you mean by "have to" here, but English, like most languages, has both a limited set of phonemes and unique patterns of how they are combined and how stress is distributed, and, like most languages, loanwords will usually have their pronunciation changed to fit that phoneme inventory and construction patterns.
English, because any phonetic interpretation of its spelling is more what you'd call guidelines (or may be just jokes) than actual rules is probably less likely to change the spelling of loan words from other languages that use the same alphabet or one with a well-established transliteration, but the actual pronunciation is a different story.
While Portuguese? Welcome to full sets of conjugations for past subjunctive, present subjunctive, and future subjunctive. And everybody uses them in regular speech, they're not like a formal writing thing or something.
Sure …when, as native, you don't have to spent years leaning it that easier language …like others.
Oh wait, you dunno toki-pona nor esperanto :(
That’s a feature though. Makes reading much easier.
A common argument against removing kanji from Japanese and just use kana is that it removes the written difference between homonyms.
Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.
Are you suggesting that language is /not/ man-made?
I mean, these views can be debated, but are probably what was referred to here.
The Latin alphabet is very poor and is composed of only 26 letters. And many sounds in Germanic languages do not have their counterpart in Latin. People started to use combinations of letters to represent their own specific sounds, which were pretty unique to each country. For instance, you cannot read Dutch if you apply English rules to it.
In the case of English, the problem is even more complicated. For one, the official language of England up to the 15th century was French, which explained why 40% of a text in English is composed of French words. Second, when people started writing in English, there was no government body to enforce a common spelling. So, printer shops all over England came up with their own ways to spell out words, and the result is this hogwash of spelling that is English today.
The last problem, which is a problem that many international languages, such as Spanish, German, French and Portuguese are faced with, is that every decision to change the spelling of your language should be the result of international comities. And since, there are so many different accents today, it has become quite difficult to come up with a regular pronunciation, and hence, a regular spelling for any of these languages. I can tell you that as a Frenchman, speaking Parisian French, I would have a hard time convincing Belgian or Quebecers that my accent is the right one... :-)
Now, a language usually becomes an international language when the country who speak it reaches some kind of dominance, it has nothing to do with any qualities this language might have. In Europe, this was the case for Greek, Latin, then Italian, French, German and now English. Machine translation might change this situation, but I doubt it, since English is so much ingrained into science and technology now. And the US, and most English speaking countries, have little interests to see their language loosing their prominence. We French speakers went this route after the Second World War... So we know the drill... Economically, this is a real bonanza, you can attract the best students, the best researchers, the best journals etc... You can impose your movies, your literature and of course your values... Why do you think Paris was the capital of arts and literature during the XIXth century? Language... Now it is New York or London... Language again.
Also as I recall those are each unrelated languages so the letter/sound congruity dropped markedly at each transition.
(I'm not sure if that's the correct way to put it. Also I tried to sound really smart in writing it.)
Your use of comiti reminds me of this "joke" that committees often make things much worse:
'Committee' was the spelling decided upon by the first Komiti.
Hindi, like my native Romanian, is part of a relatively small group of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...
Indonesian is the best language I’ve come across in this respect, it’s very simple and entirely phonetic. It’s so phonetic that the casual written form basically doesn’t even have the concept of “correct spelling”.
I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grating.
> I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)
IMHO, the only dumb thing about English is the cultural tendency of its speakers to not modify spelling of foreign words as they are imported, even when those languages have completely different sound assignments (see Pinyin).
However, once a word has a standard spelling, it makes sense to keep it even as pronunciation changes.
> You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.)
That's the remnant of an old grammar rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut. It's from Proto-Indo-European and was apparently still present in Sanskrit.
> Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.)
There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing.
Most spelling reform proposals for English ignore this. Many would-be reformers try to cut directly to some particular phonetic spelling scheme, which throws away a key benefit of having homophones.
Disclaimer: like many English speakers, I too have my own spelling reform scheme, with the key difference that mine is better than all the others.
It's not like English avoids words that have very separate meanings spelled and pronounced the same way.
It is not more unnecessary than any other part of the spelling reform.
Consider tho that if English is nowadays a lingua franca, we submit its learners to a lot of mental torture, including vast amounts of rote memorization of both spelling and pronunciation. English may not be quite as obnoxious as its up-and-coming main competitor, Mandarin Chinese, but it's a difference of degree not of kind. My 0,02€; YMMV.
Start with common words that are one-offs that are assertively misleadingly spelled. Lose, gross, broad, height. There are many more.
Except you can't do that. You're working on distributed legacy protocol, not some thing that you can successfully force roll-out arbitrary changes.
I think you'd have less success with your proposal than getting everyone to finally migrate to IPv6.
My original comment is in the context of spelling reform.
Think of someone lingering on a punned word to emphasize the joke, for example.
English grammar is fairly simple as these things go. If you want to see some serious linguistic complexity, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs
Syntactic complexity isn't as easy to notice at first glance as morphology, especially if you're a native speaker. This leads to the common misconception that analytic languages like English are necessarily simpler overall.
But the widespread irregularities of English are part of what gives it a knack for incorporating foreign words, phrases, and idioms. All kinds of weird alien things can be made to fit. Bizarre neologisms and imports can be deciphered relatively easily. Secondary to the accidents of history, this adaptability seems to be a part of why its been "chosen" as one of the main global commerce languages. When Hindi, Arabic, etc need to pick up chonky Germanic words or convey the tonal detail of Mandarin, it disturbs their elegance. But when English has to do it, it just adds the hodgepodge stew that we're used to.
1) "you" as a concept: nobody at all can do this.
2) "you" as a specific person: only one person can't do this. Other people can do it.
3) "you" as a group: Nobody in the group (or the group as a whole) can do this.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Tom saw it happen and he's the one who said she stole my wallet.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. You're making up something I never said.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Maybe I suspected her, but I never actually said it.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Someone stole it, but I don't know who it was.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She took it, but for safekeeping after I forgot it at the restaurant.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. I did see her steal a wallet, but it wasn't mine.
- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She stole my money but left the wallet exactly where it was.
It's a great example of how written speech doesn't capture all the nuance of spoken words. Well, italics helps, but hearing it makes a bigger impact.
(It's a bit more interesting, or at least more example-dependent, in the negative.)
Slavic languages are generally like this. Almost 100% phoenetic. If you can say the alphabet, you can read anything out aloud and everyone will understand what you’re saying.
Unsure if there’s even such a thing as a Russian or Serbian spelling bee.
Family that has moved from there to North America generally have atrocious spelling in English.
And when I read/speak (bad) French, people think I must be Russian because I default to over pronunciation of everything.
I wish people would stop calling what is unknown dumb. It stinks.
Majority of the global decisions today are made through political, and by extension, military dominance. If we resorted to scientific debate in making grand decisions, imagine what kind of a place our world would be!
It is precisely because English is the language of business that it is such a mess of rules and exceptions. The complexity of English is due to all the loanwords and influence it gets from other languages, when native speakers of those languages start using English and put their own spin on it.
If the world had chosen some other language instead of English, that language would be equally confusing and English would be much simpler than it is today.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment...
I thought to check because if you look into Spanish for example, it is often thought to be phonetic but it really isn't 100% phonetic either.
For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t".
Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v].
* Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography.
Voice Alveolar Taps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...
Voiceless Alveolar Plosives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
w/v allophony in Hindi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony...
Yes schwa deletion is a counter example, although it's a solid rule so you could easily say 'well that's just one thing to learn on top of the script, that it's written but not pronounced in that placement'.
A better case for 'no not 100%' IMO is the behaviour of the 'h' sound, which converts 'aha' ('a's around it) it to sound something more like 'ehe'. बहन for example means sister, if you transliterated according to IAST it would be bahan, but most would write behen, and that's how it's pronounced (or something between e and ai anyway).
x has the most different sounds (as an example for going from writing to sound)
Going from sounds to writing, I'll focus on one writing difference (but there are more in the above link): For the /k/ sound, it's "qu" before e or i but "c" in other words. (ignoring the letter "k" in borrowed words)
Examples: queso. casa.
https://spanishroute.com/podcast/stage-10-letters-c-z-k-x-qu...
However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.
It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).
Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
Loan words/all new words/complex grammar rules brought into languages aren’t done for fun, it’s because there’s a concept that they need to describe. (Or a class divide they need to define)
No commonly spoken language has ease-of-learning its priority. Just not as important as building on the language you have now.
The American English is an infinite source of pride for me, because of how different it is from other related languages. Where everyone else is using 'ss' to stress the need for the sound 's', we proudly say 'z' when we see 'ss'. Scissors: 'sizerz'! I even hear 'azum' (assume) once in a while.
You have different words for those meanings?
row: a fight
bonus (to) row: verb meaning to propel a boat with oar(s)
(a) sow: female pig
(to) sow: scattering seeds for planting
bonus (a) sow: block of metal ingot
Cool username btw. A buddy of mine is from there.
Pretty much every one of your criticisms is true for every human language. Calling any of them “dumb” is more a reflection of yourself than of the language.
Eg Hindi has grammatical gender, which could be pretty wtf to say, Bengali speakers, or speakers of Hungarian, but that doesn’t make Hindi “dumb”.
> better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific
“Scientific” … sigh. Human languages are not scientific. All of them have quirks. All.
You want a “scientific” (ish) language, learn Lojban. Then you can speak with other Lojban speakers.
English isn’t “special” by any means, and history and politics — and also the history of technological progress — have played a role in what it is today. Arguably many other languages could have played this role: French, Mandarin, anything.
But what matters is that people can, and do learn it as a second language enough to make it useful as a de-facto link language.
If you’re actually interested in learning why English is the way it is, I recommend the “History of English” podcast. It starts with PIE so you may even learn something about Sanskrit and Hindi along the way.
I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead - For goodness sake don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother, And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, come, I've hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!
Other languages do this. French spelling is heavily informed by etymology. Whether it is c or s depends how it was spelled for Latin. But more! The Latin word for finger is digitus. Today the French word for finger is pronounced something like /dwa/. But because Latin spelled it 'digitus', French spells this as "doigt". The g and t are both silent.
Japanese before the mid-20th century reforms, used kana spellings based on medieval Japanese pronunciation. So you would write the kana, which if read individually would have the value Tōkiyau - but you pronounced it Tōkyō.
The writing system for the Tibetan language is an abugida, another off-shoot of the Brahmi script, a sister I suppose of Devanagari. The spelling of Tibetan was fixed over a thousand years ago. Modern Tibetan has lost almost all its consonant clusters, yet written Tibetan includes clusters like བསྒྲུབས "bsgrubs" (i think pronounced just /tsup/ today?)
The Tibetan or French historical etymologies might be a bit more elegant than English, really. But same idea.
I don't completely understand this. It's not a constructed language; it's a language that evolved and continues to evolve like other natural languages according to pressures exerted by a host of factors, practically none of which are consciously-decided. Exceedingly complex in some ways, vague and ambiguous in others; it's a stretch to classify English as "dumb" For natural languages, the idea of better and worse languages seems like asking whether a maple tree is better than an oak tree. Every natural language has its quirks. For English, pronunciation, as you point out is the most notable. But take Russian: its pronunciation is much more predictable, but the non-native speaker has to contend with declensions, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, etc. Chinese orthography is daunting. Trade offs abound...
If you take the distribution of writing systems, I'm not sure English is particularly bad (the modern version has spaces and punctuation! Not bad, right?). It's not great either.
I don't know if a language can be "dumb".
Accents, on the other hand...
And Esperanto would probably be a better choice for an universal language, but no one really "chose" to use English. The US being the big winners of WW2 combined with the UK being a major colonial power at the time international trade developed probably helped.
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...
While I agree English can be inconsistent and weird (esp. pronouncuation), I doubt any other language could be more expressive or “scientific”, whatever that means. Unless by “scientific” you mean regular.
Just as an example, did you know that the placement of a comma can change the pronunciation of a word? It can, and that poem has an example where it does!
¿qɹǝʌ ɐ ɹo lɐɯᴉuɐ uɐ ,,sǝop,, sI
Ԁɹ uᴉ ʇᴉ ƃuᴉpɐǝɹ ǝq oʇ pǝsoddns ǝɹ,noʎ ʇǝƃ noʎ ǝɔuo ʎsɐǝ sʇǝƃ ʇI ¿ʇsǝʇ lɐǝɹ ɐ ǝq oʇ pǝsoddns ʇᴉ sᴉ
I've been following Julien Miquel for most of this year. Not _actually_ following him, but occasionally checking out how his youtube channel has progressed. It started with my gf showing me one of his videos for a word that I had never even heard of. What struck me at first was how inadvertently sensual he had made that specific video. And then, how in a 30 second video he butchered incredibly common pronunciations of "this" (thaaas) and "word" (werd).
Not that it's a problem. I'm in awe of his ability to chunk up and produce so many videos. He's found a niche and is filling it. I wonder if it actually pays him that much. I'm not sure, since most videos have only tens of views.
He does troll pronunciations too, like for the word "XXXXXXXXXXX", where he just says the letter X over and over. Maybe that was a test video.
I'm so in awe of him and I was hoping to learn more, and this article doesn't actually contact him or interview him or anything. What a tease! And they even get the lead wrong. Do people _choose_ Julien Miquel? Or has he SEO'd his way into the top of google results? I argue the latter. To this day, I would not choose Julien's choice of how to pronounce any English word. I might let him be a part of many different informed options..
I recently saw the website on here for YouGlish. That's the same niche, solved so much better.
But for now, Julien Miquel is probably my favorite 2023 performance artist, whether he's trying to or not.
(Is pronunciation pronounced "pro-noun-see-ation" or "pro-nun-see-ation"?)
Every joke is funniest when it's explained, so:
It can be, I think, pronounced equally correctly either way. So, no matter what the first user of the word says, you can always say that they are incorrect; not only that, but in reference to another, different, word that they said.
study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
words like core, corpse, horse and worse ...
Dionysus is pronounced nothing like the Greek Διόνυσος, particularly because of the English diphthongs. If one letter representing one vowel by itself simply made one sound, a whole host of pronunciation challenges in English would disappear altogether!
The film adaptation on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164