> the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling
It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.
In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g. Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than English - in English the best you've got is a guess.
Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.
Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some other languages.
The spelling of English words gives you two separate clues:
1. How it is pronounced.
2. Its etymology and what it means.
Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to etymology and meaning.
For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that "native", "nation" have related meanings because of the shared "nat". If we made the spelling follow pronunciation and did "naytiv" and "nayshun", some of that is lost.
Ideally, pronunciation would be fixed across time and place so that a language's spelling reliably reflected both meaning and sound. But that ain't how humans work.
In written languages that do this "better", it's mainly through some combination of:
1. The written language is simply younger than written English and thus has had less time for pronunciation to diverge.
2. The language is used by a smaller, more homogeneous community.
3. Elites exert political force to prevent pronunciation or meaning from changing and to reject loanwords at the loss of expressivity.
English does none of those things. It's been around a long time, has spread throughout the world across widely disparate communities, and is happy to absorb any good idea it finds in any other language. It is the Perl of written languages, for better or worse.
The spelling of English definitely doesn't give enough clues about how a word is pronounced.
Me, and millions of other speakers of English as a second language, will vehemently disagree with that point.
The rest of your comment reads like a detailed attempt at rationalization of this untrue affirmation.
As a counterargument, take Spanish. Spanish is not younger than English, pronunciation has diverged and for example someone from Cuba and someone from Argentina pronounce many words differently.
The Spanish-speaking world is by no means small, or homogeneous.
And we absorb loanwords like madmen. Mostly from English, but also French, Japanese, Italian, etc.
The point is: Spanish is a much more phonetic language in its written form than English, so much that we have no spelling bees.
English simply fucked up itself with the great vowel shift, that's all.
Spanish is in fact younger. The language was standardized and normalized by royal edict about 500 years ago. While strongly based on Castilliano, it was not the same. "Spanish" as a single cohesive, consistent language did not exist before then in Spain or anywhere else.
By comparison, the rules and structures of English (such as they are) were not altered significantly following the great vowel shift in Chaucer's time. Mostly minor spelling changes and word choice.
All languages adopt foreign words unless there is an active body attempting to prevent it, such as the French Language Academy.
French words are not however just loaned to English. It was thoroughly baked in following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the nobility all spoke French for hundreds of years. Basically every "fancy" word in English came directly from French while "plain" words came from Anglo Saxon (Germanic) or other related sources. Incarcerated vs jailed. Debris vs trash. Magnificent vs great. "The player regarded his opponent." vs. "The player looked at his opponent." (French for "He looks" is "Il regarde".
The great vowel shift didn't mess up English; the lack of concerted normalization of English is what did it in. English is the greatest pragmatist without design of all world languages.
The usual argument against spelling reform is that it isn't possible to do it in a way that is compatible with the language of more than one region. For example, in Australian English they have a system of phonemic vowel length. This does not exist in other varieties of English, so the options you have in a spelling reform are (1) ignore the Australians and set spellings that are ambiguous in Australia, or (2) placate the Australians and include their vowels in the reformed spelling system, despite the fact that this leaves everyone else in the world mystified as to why certain words are spelled with doubled vowels and certain words aren't.
Start small, and use compromises. Don't try to be completely phonetic, which won't work for the reasons you mentioned.
You can start by undoing misguided spelling reforms of the past. "Debt" used to be spelled "det" but due to incorrectly inferred etymology it was changed to be non-phonetic. There are many words like these.
Then look for major inconsistencies where a cluster of letters is pronounced more than one way, and simplify one of them. For example, "ough" is pronounced as in "tough" more often than as in "though". Change "tough" to be spelled as "tuff" and "rough" as "ruff".
Going further, embrace text/informal writing and use tho, altho, nite, tonite, etc. Although the last two are not necessary since "ight" is pretty consistent. Keep common clusters of letters so that it still looks like English. Do it in in stages over a 100 years , making changes every 15 years or so. I'm mostly aiming at ease of reading vs ease of writing.
Every other major language had a recognized central authority to do its work. Spanish, French, written Chinese, etc. all had a monarchy/dictatorship of some sort to mandate the change and enforce its use.
England could have done it perhaps in Shakespeare's time or shortly thereafter, but once English spread across the globe in its modern (lack of) form with no recognized central authority with the power to force the change, it's not going to happen.
You couldn't get three states in the United States to agree on a universal spelling/pronunciation let alone the three countries in the United Kingdom. You think you'll have any more success over continents and across oceans?
> Spanish, French, written Chinese, etc. all had a monarchy/dictatorship of some sort to mandate the change and enforce its use.
There is no central authority over the Spanish language since the days of Bolivar and San Martin (1810s or so). Modern e.g. Argentinians would laugh at the idea that Real Academia Española has any say on how they should use their language. And indeed, there are differences not just in vocabulary and pronunciation, but also in grammar: "vos hablás" instead of "tú hablas".
Nevertheless, I can pick pretty much any written Spanish word and know how it sounds both in European and Argentinian Spanish.
It is specifically English which failed at the task of not being like Chinese.
Well, that’s a strange statement. Hangul is not just better by accident, it’s designed to be an advanced phonetic system making it possible to write many languages. You can learn in a few evenings, no need to know Korean, and you will be able to read Korean perfectly out loud without understanding what you are saying.
Hangul is phonetic, but doesn't have the capability to represent all phonetic sounds of a language. For example, Hindi has 4 distinct letters and consequently sounds for the each of D and T (D: ड ढ द ध, T: ट ठ त थ), which all correspond to the single Hangul letter diot (ㄷ). I have Korean friends who write their names in the Chinese script because they don't have the necessary letters to represent the sounds.
I don't think that's right. One example would be the words with the same spelling which are pronounced differently depending on meaning (e.g. dragonfly and sleeping spot), you have to know what you are saying to pronounce it correctly.
bluesmoon is right. Hangul doesn't solve all problems ever, anyways, here is some miscellaneous trivia. I have Korean friends. You're welcome Max-q. Please don't try to appreciate things around bluesmoon. You know how they get.
> It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.
"Most of the time" is an exaggeration. English is (sadly) less strictly phonetic than many other languages, but still highly phonetic. Nearly every word in your own comment can be pronounced phonetically.
"Most" like "cost", or like "ghost?" Also, only now I checked the transcription for "exaggeration", and "gg" is not "g", like in "blogger", but ʤ like in "Jason". TIL.
If this is not "most of the time", than I don't know what is.
> In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent.
OK, but... the position of the word stress in Russian radically alters the pronunciation of all the vowels in the word. Missing the stress means mangling the whole word. That's not something to just dismiss.
I wasn't claiming English is the best language. I was saying non pictographic languages are one of humanity's most important inventions, which is one reason they've spread so rapidly everywhere.
Too bad non pictographic languages weren't paired with simple orthogonal grammars and consistent spelling rules. Learning different languages always feel like choosing whether I want to beat myself up with my left fist, my right fist, or my feet.
English has had a long trip to the language it is today. It doesn't help that at the latter stages of its development writers disagreed on or disregarded the rules of spelling.
It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.
> It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.
This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.
Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.
There's something to that argument in Japanese. According to [1] Japanese has 643 distinct syllables, while English has about 6949.
There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji.
I was originally thinking about names that have intended meanings "Target", "Burger King", "Taco bell", "Pager Duty", "DuckDuckGo", "Texas Instruments", "Aperture Laboratories" etc.
I am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.
It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.
In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g. Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than English - in English the best you've got is a guess.
Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.
Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some other languages.