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Comment by abustamam | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago.

Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?

I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.

That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.

>But most words are spelled as they sound.

English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.

The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?

An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet.

Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.

Interesting! So what’s the abc’s we learn then?

Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.

...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.

The issue is that the language can never render that collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h together.

Perhaps you misheard.

That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.

Chinese kids manage with 6,000 character. Just because we normalize child abuse doesn't mean its right.

And English speakers learn tens of thousands of words, and eventually read almost all of them by sight. I don't see where any abuse is happening.

OTOH, those 6,000 characters sound rather like child abuse to me.

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