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Then you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"
You do get dialectical differences in Irish and there's some spelling reform stuff, but at least for the most part there's some internal consistency (to the dialect) in how stuff should be pronounced.
Then you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"
Who developed a terrible cough.
She drank half a pint
Of warm honey and mint,
But, sadly, she didn’t pull through.
My 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).
My 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).
1. the writing of English was (let's call it) standardized
2. not long after (in historic terms) society decided to majorly shift/change pronunciation of a good part but not all of the language
=> so now part of the language fit's it's spelling, and part is shifted away from it in various degrees
By re-fitting the spelling to match the pronunciation it could be mostly fixed. That just is sadly not really doable.
Sometimes even the entire word is pronounced differently: read/read
As in:
I love to réad. Shé read all my books. I watched the gáme líve. Shé lives at hóme. Eurydicé had a fíníte supply of pátience.
Etc.
It wouldn't change any of the ASCII-only spelling rules, and would be a tremendous help to English learners. Since most text is written on smartphones nowadays, the new accented spellings would be immediately widely adopted as soon as the three OS vendors in the English world (Microsoft, Apple, Google) turned them on in their autocorrects.
Of course there's no instance or process that could push through a change like this because English, unlike French and German for example, is not a language whose evolution is actively managed by a national committee.
(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 unl…
My 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 so…
My 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).
Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same because French loves silent letters.