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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

#81

Post by pavlov »

bluGill wrote: post #75
pavlov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but that would change the ASCII spelling, to which there seems to be tremendous resistance in English-speaking countries.

But if we sneakily added entirely optional accents to the existing spelling, then in another hundred years maybe the vestigial hint letters could be cleaned up. (Probably not — see French spelling which is 50% silent letters from ancient orthography and Latin roots. But even the French system, despite its complex rules, is internally consistent unlike English.)

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#82

Post by rlpb »

CJefferson wrote: post #69
rlpb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because native Anglophones will not know either I'm not sure that's true. There are still underlying patterns to it, even if it's very convoluted. The exceptions are in the core language that native Anglophones know well. For vocabulary in the periphery, I think native Anglophones (with the same accent) will tend to come up with the same pronunciation for an unknown word because they apply the same patterns. For ex…

In my experience, this is not very true. I hear lots of pronunciations for words like gnocchi, usually until people are shamed into saying it correctly.

I agree that it's not universal amongst all native English speakers.

But otherwise, that's just a prescriptivist/descriptivist argument. What's "correctly"? You'll note though that there are only a few variations - native English speakers still generally agree, even if in multiple classes, and usually one class is a clear majority.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#84

Post by lynguist »

It is because the writing rules of English were frozen in 1755 with the release of A dictionary of the English language, and that dictionary normed the spellings which were already standardized 100 years prior to that in the mid 17th century.

And those spellings from the mid 17th century were influenced by spellings that arose with the introduction of the printing press to England in the late 15th century.

I will make the example of German to show the difference: The German normative dictionary Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache was released in 1880 and abolished variant spellings then. It compiled the spelling that was developed since the mid 18th century.

I will make another example showcasing Turkish: its writing system was developed only in 1928.

In Turkish we have a 100 year old spelling and a 100 year old norm.

In German we have a 140 year old spelling and a ca. 200 year old norm.

In English we have a 270 year old spelling and a ca. 370 year old norm.

That’s what you see and only that. Language drifts away from the spelling over centuries.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#85

Post by soco »

lynguist wrote: post #84

It is because the writing rules of English were frozen in 1755 with the release of A dictionary of the English language, and that dictionary normed the spellings which were already standardized 100 years prior to that in the mid 17th century. And those spellings from the mid 17th century were influenced by spellings that arose with the introduction of the printing press to England in the late 15th century. I will mak…

I can't tell about other languages mentioned but German spelling does have updates way more recent than 200 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#86

Post by CalRobert »

another-dave wrote: post #11
CalRobert wrote: post #6

Then you get Hiberno-English where "ough" _can_ sound like "ock" (Ballybough road in Dublin) and "Niamh" is "Neeve" and Siobhan is "Shu-vawn"

In fairness though, Niamh and Siobhán are names from another language! 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.

True, after a while living in Ireland it came without too much trouble. (consonant followed by "h" is close to "v", the "ough" thing, "oise" being like "osh", etc.)

But I still made a fool of myself trying to say Portlaoise and Dun Laoghaire a few times. In conversation with my neighbour Eoghan no less.

By the time we had a daughter the name Maeve was in serious contention and I admit I was pretty enthusiastic about going with "Méibh" or even "Medb" but we ended up going with something else.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#87

Post by kaba0 »

CJefferson wrote: post #69
rlpb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because native Anglophones will not know either I'm not sure that's true. There are still underlying patterns to it, even if it's very convoluted. The exceptions are in the core language that native Anglophones know well. For vocabulary in the periphery, I think native Anglophones (with the same accent) will tend to come up with the same pronunciation for an unknown word because they apply the same patterns. For ex…

In my experience, this is not very true. I hear lots of pronunciations for words like gnocchi, usually until people are shamed into saying it correctly.

Because it is an Italian word, which is perhaps not as common a source for words as to have it ingrained into people’s brain, say compared to French.

But quite clearly there are lots of soft rules that should never be learned directly, but indirectly people do pick up (not only natives, I am not a native English speaker, yet I can probably guess an approximate pronunciation for unseen words that won’t be statistically too bad) — like how an ML model might do.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#88

Post by karatinversion »

the_gipsy wrote: post #23
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…

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.

I think we would get used to it pretty quickly if it was adopted into English. No one thinks that we should write about Αθήνα or Владимир Путин or 東京都 in English, either.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#89

Post by CalRobert »

saalweachter wrote: post #27
barrkel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is less Hiberno-English and more Gaelic. Niamh and Siobhán are Irish names following Irish orthography.

I always felt like Gaelic spelling was the result of someone hearing about the written language, thinking it was a fantastic idea, and then rushing off to write down all the words without waiting to get all the details about how writing was supposed to work.

Worth noting that "Gaelic" is a group of languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_languages

One of those languages is Irish. It used to be written in its own type - which I personally find beautiful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#90

Post by mytailorisrich »

bluGill wrote: post #64
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…

English has more than 26 sounds, so we need more than 26 letters. There are many solutions to this problem, but all require learning a new way of writting and so will be hard to teach. Spanish considers 'll' a different letter from 'l' and a couple other examples, but they can do that because they have about attackany sounds as the latin alphabet (I don't remember the exact number, but Spanish doesn't use some letter…

You don't need more than 26 letters to represent more than 26 sounds. What you want is that a specific combination of letters is always pronounced the same.
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