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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

#71

Post by gdprrrr »

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.

The syllables are a-tom, but word breaking at the end of a line doesn't follow syllables in english.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#72

Post by dmurray »

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.

Most English speakers are flexible on where syllables get split, especially unstressed ones. Both a-tom and at-om sound fine to me. I could also see ay-tom in some North American dialects (if this seems ridiculous, ay-tomic is more mainstream, ay-tonal is standard).

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#73

Post by bluGill »

raincole wrote: post #15
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).

No, modern English would have been better off taking, uh, almost any other European language's spelling system.

No other language has exactly the same systems of sounds and so we wouldn't really be better off. Now the ideas could fit. We could add 30 more letters and then assign each letter a unique sound. We could make longer sequences of letters be one sound and each sound have one unique sequence of letters. We could adopt some accents on each letter to indicate which sound it represents. (Those are the 3 answers I know of from Europe, though they are sometiems combined. There may be other options I don't know of) however it still needs to be unique to English. Though we could agree with the other language on where to start and add sounds that they agree.to use out changes if they ever adopt.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#75

Post by bluGill »

pavlov wrote: post #17
sharikous wrote: post #9

Sometimes even the entire word is pronounced differently: read/read

IMO this long/short vowel ambiguity is the #1 broken feature of English spelling, and could be reliably fixed by adopting an acute accent to mark long vowels (where a double letter isn't already doing the job). 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…

Gám doesn't need the following e anymore as it is only there to indicate long A.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#76

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

cprecioso wrote: post #39
ajb wrote: post #25

A good description Another amusing one is Mark Twain's plan: A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling,…

I can't decipher what "doderez" is in the passage "bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez"

G. "Tattergreis"

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#77

Post by the_gipsy »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #32
the_gipsy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard of someone tying a cow onto a car's roof rack? Sadly, it doesn't go the other way 'round. Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.

It's not an 'abomination' at all, it's a phonetic transcription within the language. You could argue that writing "whisky" in a Spanish sentence would equally be an abomination. The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.

It's something that would make sense centuries ago. Nowadays it's just awkward/annoying/pointless that there are a handful exceptions finger-appointed by the RAE, and everything else is treated like a proper/foreign name.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#78

Post by Ingaz »

Pure truth. When somebody says that Chinese/Japanese is hard because of kanji - just show them that English is crazy on almost the same level.

Kanji has more radicals but some of them only on top, some on bottom, some on left or right. And you don't even need to learn them all - rare radicals remembered as "this strange thing that appears only in X"

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#79

Post by whatisyour »

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…

A big reason for English being what it is in terms of pronunciation is exactly because of non-Anglophonic influence on English.

The number of non-native speakers of English is twice the number of native speakers. At that point, there's no such thing as "an original pronunciation".

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#80

Post by teddyh »

ajb wrote: post #25

A good description Another amusing one is Mark Twain's plan: A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling,…

Not Mark Twain! It was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899².

1. https://allhomosapienswelcome.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/iorx-...>

2. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70/pg70-images.html#cha...>

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