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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

#51

Post by vintermann »

markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

While English is especially bad, few languages don't have the same to some lesser degree.

In Norwegian, vovels have drifted so that the letter "o" is pronounced mostly like what other countries would write "u", and there's the extra vowel "å" which we pronounce like what most other countries write "o". Except... not always. In common words like "for", "og", "som", or in "Norge", the "o" is indeed pronounced in the international manner, like we would write with an "å" if we were consistent. And the rules for long or short vowels are inconsistent too. You can be confident that vowels before a double consonant are short, but not that vowels before a single consonant are long. "For", for instance, if pronounced with a long u-sound, means "fodder", but with a short o-sound it is the preposition "for" (more or less the same as the English one). That should have been written "får" if the phonetics made sense, but "får" (long o-sound) is already a word for sheep.

Some people actually write "fôr" for fodder and "fór" for rushed (another meaning of f - long-u sound - r), introducing letters that aren't part of our official alphabet.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#52

Post by kwhitefoot »

bonoboTP wrote: post #18
markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.

People always seem to forget that English isn't one language, it is composed of vocabularies from multiple languages all used together. Quite a few words that people think of as English are taken from languages far away, such as shampoo, pyjamas, bungalow.

If people want English to have a stronger connection between spelling and pronunciation they can simply go for it, there is no authority that tells you how you must spell a word. Just be prepared for people to not understand what you write and to ridicule you.

And be prepared to defend the spelling of homophones that have now also become homonyms, such as straight and strait (strate?), might and mite.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#53

Post by buovjaga »

bonoboTP wrote: post #18
markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.

It's worse than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform#English

'On the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. For example, for "debt" early Middle English wrote det/dette, with the b being standardized in spelling in the 16th century, after its Latin etymon debitum; similarly for quer/quere, which was respelled as choir in the 17th century, modelled on Greek χορός chorus; in both cases, the pronunciation was not changed.'

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#54

Post by yorwba »

fer wrote: post #29
mytailorisrich wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest way to use the alphabet is to do it like Spanish does: It is purely phonetic so you write the way you pronunce and you read the way it is written. Simple. That's how they end up with "fútbol" for "football": That's how it's pronunced in Spanish so that's how they spell it, and anyone can immediately read it as well. Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same be…

In case someone's curious, it's not only Spanish, and it's certainly not unusual[0]. A way to see how a (more) phonemic orthography would look like in English is to have a look at BBC Pidgin[1], though the increased "phonemicity" isn't the only difference. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography [1] https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

True phonemic orthographies are actually fairly unusual, e.g. your [0] lists exceptions for Spanish: "(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)" and in general people tend to have an easier time emulating someone's orthography than emulating their pronunciation, so a standardized orthography is often adopted even by people whose phoneme inventory is different.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#55

Post by stephen_g »

markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

That’s not exactly true though - although I believe technically in all languages if you know it well enough, you do tend to read by looking at whole words basically as images, that’s beside the point.

In the English speaking world some places moved away from phonics for teaching kids to read but are moving back since the change was considered a mistake. I think I saw a breakdown saying something like 60% of English words can basically actually just be directly sounded out phonetically, another 20% need some knowledge of rules for the type of exception, 10% are from another language (like French) so you need some knowledge of the source language’s pronunciation rules, and then only the last 5 or 10% are actually true exceptions that need to be specifically learnt (I can’t remember the exact percentages but it was something around those stated). I’m sure it can feel a bit inscrutable (as I’ve said in comments I’m learning French so having similar but slightly different frustration) but it’s not as bad as people make it out to be.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#56

Post by kwhitefoot »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #20
gampleman wrote: post #4

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).

The simplest way to use the alphabet is to do it like Spanish does: It is purely phonetic so you write the way you pronunce and you read the way it is written. Simple. That's how they end up with "fútbol" for "football": That's how it's pronunced in Spanish so that's how they spell it, and anyone can immediately read it as well. Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same be…

> It is purely phonetic

No such thing as dialect or regional variation in pronunciation in Spanish then? What about Mexican Spanish?

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#57

Post by joshlk »

There are many proposals to change the English spelling so it's more phonetical, unfortunately they don't get much attention.

For example SoundSpell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel

Here is an example:

> It was on th ferst dae of th nue yeer th anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that th moeshun of th planet Neptune, th outermoest of all planets that wheel about th Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then, a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in th reejon of th perterbd planet.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#58

Post by tetris11 »

dalmo3 wrote: post #44
markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

As a native Portuguese speaker, the most mindblowing aspect in English for me is how words are split in syllabes. Why at-om and not a-tom? As years pass I get a better intuition and can somewhat translate that to better pronunciation but I don't think I'll ever really grok it.

My girlfriend's learning Turkish, and one of the customs that one says after being thanked for cooking a meal is "afiyet olsun". That is, "aff-ee-yet awl-soohn" with the relatively little stress on any particular part.

Her, being Italian, puts all the intonation at the beginning so it becomes "AFF-ee-yet AWL-soohn" and it just sounds like gibberish. Sometimes even if I know what she's trying to say, it still comes across as alien.

It's insane how intonation can completely change a language, and even a well defined language like German, a phonetic language just like Turkish, still sounds really bad if you don't get the intonation right (see: Trey Parkers attempts to speak German in South Park episodes)

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#59

Post by offices »

dalmo3 wrote: post #44
markjonsona989 wrote: post #12

(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…

As a native Portuguese speaker, the most mindblowing aspect in English for me is how words are split in syllabes. Why at-om and not a-tom? As years pass I get a better intuition and can somewhat translate that to better pronunciation but I don't think I'll ever really grok it.

Tha'ts the thing: it is a-tom where I live

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#60

Post by vintermann »

rob74 wrote: post #3

Things 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.

I always mentally read Cr-ich-ton, as in German "ich". No need to worry how it's actually pronounced until i actually have to use it in speech.

This is how I deal with a lot of words.

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