English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
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English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
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Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#2"Radicals" in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#3Things get even funnier if you consider names - for instance, I was convinced that the name of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton (RIP) was pronounced Cr-itch-ton, until I actually heard it was pronounced Cry-ton.
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#4My teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you have all the drawbacks (i.e. you need to memorise a whole lot of pronunciation) but none of the benefit (i.e. faster reading speeds, more compact representation).
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#5[dead]
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#6Then you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#7My teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you have all the drawbacks (i.e. you need to memorise a whole lot of pronunciation) but none of the benefit (i.e. faster reading speeds, more compact representation).
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Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#8My teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you have all the drawbacks (i.e. you need to memorise a whole lot of pronunciation) but none of the benefit (i.e. faster reading speeds, more compact representation).
Rather than going to that extreme, English spelling could be made easier.
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.
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#9Sometimes even the entire word is pronounced differently: read/read
Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#10Hiccough is very out of date. Even my mother doesn't write it like that. She thought about a rough drought in Loughborough though...