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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

#91

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

I don't really understand what you're proposing. It is indeed traditional terminology to identify 5 "long" and 5 "short" vowels in English. They are the sounds that are regularly spelled _VC and _VCE, where V represents the particular vowel you're talking about, C is any consonant, and E is the letter E. (For example, you have a "short E" in "bet", which ends in _eC, and a "long E" in "mete", which ends in _eCE.)

The fixed word-final E that marks "long vowels" has the special name "silent E". (If it's not word-final, it won't appear at all. Thus "mating" has a silent E overridden by the -ing that follows it, and in order to spell a "short A" in the same context you need to divorce it from the following syllable by doubling the syllable-final consonant: "matting".)

But you can't use this as a basis for English spelling reform, because - to choose only the most obvious problem - English uses a lot more than 10 vowels.

So, when you write réad, am I supposed to understand /ɹi.æd/, a two-syllable word with a long E followed by a short A? When you write "had a", am I supposed to understand that both words are pronounced with identical vowels? When you write "lives", am I supposed to understand that this is a two-syllable word in which the first syllable contains a short I and the second contains a short E?

What problem are you trying to solve? How would you spell "put"?

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#92

Post by bluGill »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #90
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm calling ll a different letter from l above. This is semantics.

What we need is if you see a sequence of letters there is exactly one consistent way to pronounce it, and if you hear a new word there is exactly one way to spell it. There are many ways to pull that off.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#93

Post by dghf »

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.

But "whisky" is just an Anglicisation of Gaelic "uisge".

Why is "güisqui" an abomination, but "whisky" not?

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#95

Post by sharikous »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #91
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…

I don't really understand what you're proposing. It is indeed traditional terminology to identify 5 "long" and 5 "short" vowels in English. They are the sounds that are regularly spelled _VC and _VCE, where V represents the particular vowel you're talking about, C is any consonant, and E is the letter E. (For example, you have a "short E" in "bet", which ends in _eC, and a "long E" in "mete", which ends in _eCE.) The…

I think they tried to make a compromise with the closer to phonetic transcription they could get with the least invasive spelling change they could impose. Not something 100% accurate

I actually like this proposal

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#96

Post by ajb »

teddyh wrote: post #80
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... >

Ah! Thanks for the correction.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#98

Post by fer »

yorwba wrote: post #54
fer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If by true phonemic you mean 1:1 relationship between sound and letter, sure; not all the letters sound the same all the time, and not all sounds are always represented by a single letter. It's a natural language so it's bound to have some irregularity.

But those exceptions you listed are either rare exceptions (h is always silent, but with a handful of exceptions, normally loanwords like hámster or hachís; x is always "ks" except in old/historical words like México or Quixote), or just follow more or less complex rules.

In general if you read and know basic rules, you know how to pronounce 99.9% of the time, if you listen you need to have some deeper level of orthography/etymology/grammar knowledge to write correctly.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#99

Post by pavlov »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #91
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…

I don't really understand what you're proposing. It is indeed traditional terminology to identify 5 "long" and 5 "short" vowels in English. They are the sounds that are regularly spelled _VC and _VCE, where V represents the particular vowel you're talking about, C is any consonant, and E is the letter E. (For example, you have a "short E" in "bet", which ends in _eC, and a "long E" in "mete", which ends in _eCE.) The…

Phonetic spelling reform in English seems intractable due to regional accents and resistance to change. There’s no point in trying.

But it would be possible to add minimally invasive context to the ambiguous spellings which are a big road block to the billion+ people learning English as an additional language from mostly text-based sources.

This could be done by adding a single accent and not modifying any existing spellings, so that accented words can always be cast down to ASCII only and they’ll still be valid pre-reform spelling. It wouldn’t solve the question of phonetics but it would help non-native speakers understand how words are meant to be pronounced because there’s almost always just two reasonable options for a given word or syllable in its context.

So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.

Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

#100

Post by readthenotes1 »

whatisyour wrote: post #79
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".

I doubt (heh) this, unless you're referring to old and middle English.

Johnson did the best he could but a word was pronounced radically different in different areas of England. There are still jokes about not being able to understand anyone from the rural areas.

Still, he and Webster have a lot to answer for!

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