The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh

    with
    lang_sounds as (
    select
        lang,
        unnest(string_to_array(ipa, null) ) as sound
    from world_dictionary
    ),
    totals as (
    select
        lang,
        count(sound) as sound_count
    from lang_sounds
    group by lang
    )

    select
        lang,
        totals.sound,
        count(sound) / totals.sound_count
    from
        lang_sounds join
        totals on
        lang_sounds.lang = totals.lang
    where sound = 'θ' or sound = 'ð' or sound = 'θ̠' or sound = 'z'
    group by lang, sound
    order by count(sound) / totals.sound_count

<q> is only one of the clicks in Bantu languages! The letters <c> and <x> are used for other kinds of clicks too (for dental and lateral clicks, respectively).

And then of course there are the Khoisan languages, which use a completely different set of click letters: <ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ>.

"I speak a number of languages, but I'm not a linguist. How could I get a list of sounds that aren't included in the languages I speak? Would be interesting to hear what sounds I'm not used to hearing"

<Long blurb about what a great idea I had, and an intro to how to do it>

If you’d like, you could just tell me the languages you speak, and I can give you a first-pass list of major sound types you’re probably missing (like clicks, ejectives, tones, pharyngeals, etc.).

Would you like me to sketch a concrete example with your languages?

"Sure, here's my list: <my list>"

And then it gives a list of sounds you know, and sounds you don't. Pretty cool. It even has links to a sound map site so you can hear them.

If you like, I could generate a concrete list of IPA symbols that are not in <my list> — a sort of “negative phoneme inventory”. Would you like me to build that for you?

"Yes please. Also what additional language would cover the most ground?"

One language that covers the most new ground

Amharic (Ethiopian Semitic) is a superb single add-on because it gives you, in one go: • Ejectives (tʼ, kʼ, qʼ, sʼ/tsʼ), • Pharyngeal consonants (ħ, ʕ), • Uvular stop (q), and • True gemination (contrastive long consonants).

If you want a two-language combo to “max out” the world’s rarities, add Zulu (or Xhosa) for clicks alongside Amharic.

I'm in. It would also clear up some ambiguity over the pronunciation of "gif" ;-)

even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!

In English, it would frustrate me if every time I read marry it would be spelled the same as merry, because I say those differently, even if most Americans I come in contact with daily do not.

Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English, but one thing I admire about it is when things are correctly spelled, you can adjust the text for accent based on spelling. The only area I can think of where spelling does not denote contrast in any accent is between b and v. (Edit: and that h is silent.) There are some contrasts that are only kept by a minority of speakers (Ll is merged with Y for most people, but maybe not in Bolivia or parts of Spain; s and z are merged in Latin America), but it's still a meaningful contrast for somebody.

These samples are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which isn’t really designed for the purpose of being a practical orthography — it’s used as a language-independent transcription method which can represent any sound. (That’s also why the British and American versions are different: different accents use different sounds, so they’re transcribed differently.) So this isn’t really a ‘phonetic spelling of English’, though it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.

You're changing the definition of "better" so you can have your cake (admit X is better than Y) and eat it too (prefer Y over X). It's ok to like fun things! It's ok to like Imperial and weird grammar, but then you can't also claim that you agree it's worse.

There is no reason why English would be more interesting to native speakers than German, Spanish, Finnish or Bulgarian to their respective native speakers.

I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.

Lots of divisible factors.

There are a wide variety of accents in Britain alone - ‘wahtah’ isn’t recognisable to me for example. It’s a cliche to say brits don’t pronounce “r”, but all you have to do is watch Harry Potter to see all the different accents that do.

Or the "pin=pen" merger of some accents, or "caught=cot". No one speaks "English", it's an ugly compromise of an army of dialects.

--James D. Nicoll

But good luck getting the UK or India to adopt it.

By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.

But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.

Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.

But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"

Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.

One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).

Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.

OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.

It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.

If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.

It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.

That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.

How is it that you can say these words without confusion?

Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.

practice / practise licence / license

Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.

The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".

The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].

In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.

Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.

People have an extremely distorted perspective on European history for many reasons, but the late industrial age nation state probably had the biggest impact on that mental model people still have today in many ways. By all evidence I’ve seen, the cultural exchange in the distant past was far more organic than most people can easily imagine today for many reasons. Trade and cultural communion, religious exchanges and defensive unions all made that possible in a world that was not at all as controlled and authoritarian as we even experience today. It all waxed and waned over the centuries and regions of course, in a rather organic manner; but due to practical limitations a lot of the authoritarian restrictions we are all subject to today simply did not exist.

In some ways the USA until about 1960, is probably the most similar analogue of how Europe seems to have generally been for the longest time leading up to the Industrial Revolution. It was a land of general regions of self-regulating, cultural clustering with local levels of varying jurisdictions and power structures which to a large extent kept most people in their home region, if not their place of birth. By the latter part of that period the identity with one’s state and region and local culture had already largely succumbed to the oppressive force of the centralized dominating power of the federal and global power, but your region was still largely your cultural identity as a person and community.

That of course has all been totally razed and destroyed now and the USA effectively exists in name only today, which has been the case for an even longer time, but that’s a different topic altogether.

And AFAIK Georgian alphabet predates Insular script by a few centuries.

It's not uncommon for otherwise unrelated alphabets to come with similar symbols simply because the trend over time is towards simplification of letter shapes, and there are only so many basic elements. So even originally quite different characters can end up looking very similar when reduced to a few squiggles.

And OTOH even modern English spelling often doesn't distinguish differences that are there in most dialects (e.g. "bear" vs "near"), so this isn't even a new problem. Realistically I suspect there's some "minimal reasonable set" of phonemes that need to be distinguished to reflect the most prominently distinct pairs in all major dialects, even if some subtle dialectal distinctions might not be reflected in spelling.

Korean Hangul is not ideographic (I think what you meant by pictorial?). It's a morphophonemic alphabet that just happens to organize the basic phonemic units into larger graphemes representing whole syllables - but in a completely predictable way. And it is another example of this playing out: the original Hangul was entirely phonemic, but over time pronunciation diverged from spelling, and today it's morpho-phonemic, and even then not perfectly so. So they preserved the history at the cost of some mismatch between the spelling and the sound.

Chinese' pictorial writing completely obfuscates the historical state of the spoken language, to the extent that in order to reconstruct older phases of the spoken Chinese language, scholars have had to inspect old Chinese loan-words in foreign languages that do preserve the old phonetic structure.

An example of this is the discovery that Chinese tones developed from earlier final-consonants, which were lost in Mandarin, but are preserved in Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. i.e: Mandarin "guó" compared with the early borrowing into Japanese : "koku", both meaning "country".

Tibetan, Mon-Burmese and Thai scripts, as an example, all derive from the Brahmi script (through a long and sometimes windy ancestry), but neither reflects the modern pronunciation, hence mind numbing transcription systems.

Tibetan and Burmese languages are particularly notorious for codifying the archaic pronunciation of respective languages that has been frozen in time for centuries. It is a treasure trove for linguists that have got a time machine for free, but I don't think that the same can't be said modern speakers of both languages.

Indian languages are generally rich in phonemes though. My mind boggles at the notion of [n] [ɳ] [ɲ] [ŋ] all being distinct. I mean, I can reproduce each one of them on its own, but doing that in rapid speech, and worse yet, recognizing the same in others' speech...

I don't think that's true. From the northern Indian languages schwa deletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_l...) to the extreme divergence between the standard formal and spoken forms of languages in Southern languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia), it's a stretch to say the scripts mirror what is spoken.

It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English.

Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).

There are certainly differences, but if you place current English spelling next to something like Shavian (or some other language with near-pure phonetic spelling), I'd say that Modern English learning patterns are closer to Kanji than the pure phonetic alphabets.

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words.

From around 1060 to 1360, French was the official language of England. It wasn't normal French though as William the Conqueror spoke Norman French. Both French dialects mixed in what can only be considered English style. For example Norman French said Warder while other French speakers said Guarder. English adopted both Warden and Guard, but gave them two different meanings. Overall, some 30% of our words are French though over 800 of the most common 1000 words are English in origin.

> would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?

ITA (International Teaching Alphabet) shows the benefits and problems.

ITA students rocketed ahead the first couple of years and could read way more words than their traditional counterparts. The problem was the transition. Learning both systems seems to have evened things up or maybe even caused a net negative for ITA students. I believe this was because they had to learn two sets of spelling for everything. If you would like to see the difficulty in learning a new way to read/write and have a bit of fun, try learning Shavian script.

In an ideal world, they would have phonetic spelling only. I believe under those conditions that their advantage would continue to grow all the way through school. The problem is that this study is unethical to conduct because even if it is correct, the students would graduate and be unable to read traditional English which would permanently harm them.

This leaves the tricky problem of bridging the gap. This can't be done too quickly or the older generations get left behind. There's also an issue of transcribing everything into the new spelling. Technology has made that easier than ever, but it would still be a very hard proposition.

The first and easiest step is cleaning up the spellings using the letters we currently have. Stuff like all those -ough endings get rewritten in sane letters as an accepted alternative spelling. Silent letters start going away. We start moving toward consistent vowel and consonant digraphs. This will take time for older people to adapt to, but more consistent rules will mean they will have an easier time sounding them out.

After this, we start adding back letters. Maybe eth and thorn come back for the two "th" sounds. We certainly need a new letter for the S in "treaSure" and maybe bring back the elongated S to use for SH. At some point, we then start working on slowly adding new characters to stand in for the vowel digraphs.

I don't think you could convince adults to do more than a couple of steps at a time each generation. Such a plan would likely take decades to maybe even a century or two. Until the creation of the printing press, such slow changes were considered normal. Only in recent times have we attempted to gate-keep what "real English" is. If we allow the language to grow more organically, I think it could be guided into something far better than we have today.