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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#91

Post by everybodyknows »

Umofomia wrote: post #34
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

Changes to written representation of languages tends to be much more conservative compared to the changes in the spoken languages they're based upon. This is often due to the desire to preserve continuity in the ability for people to gain literacy without having to relearn a new system and retranslate all works that were written in the previous system. This generally lasts until the difference between speech and writ…

The other side of that coin being that the more the script is reformed, the less accessible to non-specialists become a culture’s great works of literature. Shakespeare being the obvious example.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#92

Post by supergarfield »

irrational wrote: post #78
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.

This might be somewhat subjective, as I don't know how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written, but French seems to have a much higher match between written and spoken language than English.

Going from spelling to pronunciation in French follows (admittedly complex) rules that are rarely broken except for common words (or endings such as -ent). Vowel pronunciations for a given spelling are far more variable in English, and often depend on the etymology of the word. Plus, English has word-level stress that is not marked in writing (French has none, and it's marked in Spanish), and moving the stress will usually make a word unintelligible! That alone makes writing => pronunciation very difficult.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#94

Post by KineticLensman »

mason55 wrote: post #62
KineticLensman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In British English, one problem with any sort of spelling reform is that the pronunciations of many words have significant regional variations. For example, in a Southern English accent, words like Bath and Castle are pronounced with a long vowel (almost as if they were spelt 'Barth and 'Carstle') compared with the much shorter Northern English versions ('baf', 'cassl'). To pick a particular pronunciation-based…

There are a few changes that I believe are universal. I'm thinking hard/soft "c" becoming "k"/"s" and soft "g" becoming "j". I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a word as hard or soft. But then again, those rules are pretty standard (c/g before e/i [the "skinny vowels"]) are almost always soft and they are hard otherwise. If you need a soft "c" sou…

> I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a word as hard or soft.

Um, yes, I can't think of regular words where a "c" changes.

Place names. Place names - at least in England - can have significant differences between spelling and pronunciation, and the locals will often use or be aware of a local pronunciation that isn't obvious to outsiders. Examples include Bicester ('bister'), Leicester ('lester'), Salisbury ('solsbry'), Tottenham ('totnam') and many others. It's not quite the same effect as with dialects but it certainly complicates spelling reform.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#95

Post by gecko »

supergarfield wrote: post #92
irrational wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.

This might be somewhat subjective, as I don't know how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written, but French seems to have a much higher match between written and spoken language than English. Going from spelling to pronunciation in French follows (admittedly complex) rules that are rarely broken except for common words (or endings such as -ent). Vowel pronunciations for a given spelling are far more varia…

French spelling is unidirectional. I can comfortably say any French word (albeit with a couple key exceptions, such as "et" or "clef", that break rules), but I can't reliably go from someone talking to how to spell it. "Eaux", "eau", "au", and "aux", or alternatively e.g. "ou", "oux", etc., all have identical pronunciations, but different spellings.

Unsurprisingly, we can vaguely quantify this by looking at dyslexia amongst languages. English and various Southeast Asian languages that rely on Chinese ideographs are by far the worst, followed by things like Arabic, French, Hebrew, and German that have fewer exceptions but less guidance, and then followed last by things like Spanish, Cherokee, and so on that are truly one-to-one.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#96

Post by tialaramex »

ajuc wrote: post #61
gxqoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to mas…

> especially its very large vocabulary Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO. The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to write it and how to say it) - is. I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still pronounce any German word I see. I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36 now. I stil…

So, the good news is that lots of native English speakers don't know how to pronounce things either. Of course I know how to say all the words I speak frequently and hear others using - but if I use a word I haven't heard there's a risk I'll say it wrong. You just learn not to worry about it (the biggest problem really is when you unconsciously try to correct somebody else and realise you've got not basis for your assumed pronunciation).

For example I'd seen adenovirus written down, but never heard it said out loud, I was describing the vaccine I'd had to friends, one of whom works in medicine (a doctor, but not of medicine) and she corrected my pronunciation because she's used that word plenty of times so she (presumably) knows how to say it correctly.

Even for a completely native immersed speaker, there's just no clue in English how to correctly say a completely new word you've only seen written down, so you're at no disadvantage there. For "real" words there may be an etymological clue, but those aren't reliable. In fiction it's anything goes. Hearing fictional words I've read pronounced out loud in movies is as weird for me as seeing the (inevitable) transformation of a woman described as plain in the books into a beautiful Holywood actress...

It's obviously a bigger problem with some common English words - either where they are actually two separate words with different pronunciations but the same spelling, or worse, one word but with different stress patterns. But once you've got a fair-sized vocab the new words you're learning won't have that sort of weirdness.

It's definitely true that if you're not confident pronunciation can really be an obstacle, fortunately the huge vocab helps again - a (non-English native but UK citizen) friend of mine will carefully choose to talk about liking the "seaside" never the "beach" because she's concerned she'll manage to make people think she said "bitch". She has a few other words like that, in each case English provides convenient alternatives.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#97

Post by bluGill »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #35
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

> So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually. It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English will probably o…

To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but it seems reasonable).

There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and written languages: kids need to spend more time in school learning basic reading skill - time that could be spent either learning something else, or playing.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#98

Post by adamrezich »

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late?

I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since noticed this in other younger Americans as well, and for other words I cannot recall right now but with the same general pattern.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#99

Post by TheLocehiliosan »

adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I'm 46, also grew up in midwest, and I say "BUH 'in".

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#100

Post by skywhopper »

adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I don’t think it is a new phenomenon in the language. I associate this with Northeast US accents and many British accents. It may be that regional accents which use a glottal stop for this pattern are leaking into younger people’s accents around you simply because YouTube and TikTok are making less common accents heard more widely.
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