4 ms·

English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.

by rarec 5y ago

Hokusai 5y ago
That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it. "So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other? The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system. “The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/ https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/
- bsder 5y ago
  What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.
    - dllthomas 5y ago
      Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent. Polish grammar is terrifying.
    - scythe 5y ago
      Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.
        DFHippie 5y ago
        Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.
        scythe 5y ago
        Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        I'm glad to have my ignorance dispelled :-)
    - nulbyte 5y ago
      I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.
      - caddemon 5y ago
        Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.
        nulbyte 5y ago
        I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone. I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written. English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.) Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
    - js2 5y ago
      Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk (Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.) So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF? Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.
      - fanf2 5y ago
        In my version of English, a router that passes packets rhymes with root, and a router that carves wood rhymes with out.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        js2 5y ago
        Is that typical UK English?
        fanf2 5y ago
        Yes :-) There’s a nice list of other heteronyms at https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-pronounced-differently/ https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-p...
  - tasogare 5y ago
    > I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). Wrong, Korean writing is morpho-phonologic and has complex rules for transforming letters to actual pronunciation. And those rules applies at three different level (whatever position in the syllable, across syllable boundaries or not, or just within syllable).
    - nulbyte 5y ago
      I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.
    - quartesixte 5y ago
      But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound. Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one You don't say! It's almost always not one-to-one. The "ghoti" joke parodies this. English language derives from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin vulgate, celtic languages, and colonial imports from e.g. the Indian subcontinent. The spoken language has moved beyond those roots, but the spelling hasn't. I appreciate those old spellings; I like to see the origins of words in their spellings. Sometimes these spellings become apparent in the way words are used and pronounced in regional dialects, and I deplore the steady homogenisation of English.

English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.

by rarec 5y ago

English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.

Hokusai 5y ago

That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it. "So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other? The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system. “The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/ https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/

bsder 5y ago
What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.
  - dllthomas 5y ago
    Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent. Polish grammar is terrifying.
  - scythe 5y ago
    Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.
      - DFHippie 5y ago
        Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.
      - scythe 5y ago
        Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        I'm glad to have my ignorance dispelled :-)
  - nulbyte 5y ago
    I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.
    - caddemon 5y ago
      Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.
      - nulbyte 5y ago
        I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone. I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written. English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.) Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
  - js2 5y ago
    Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk (Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.) So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF? Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.
    - fanf2 5y ago
      In my version of English, a router that passes packets rhymes with root, and a router that carves wood rhymes with out.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - js2 5y ago
        Is that typical UK English?
        fanf2 5y ago
        Yes :-) There’s a nice list of other heteronyms at https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-pronounced-differently/ https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-p...
- tasogare 5y ago
  > I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). Wrong, Korean writing is morpho-phonologic and has complex rules for transforming letters to actual pronunciation. And those rules applies at three different level (whatever position in the syllable, across syllable boundaries or not, or just within syllable).
  - nulbyte 5y ago
    I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound. Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one You don't say! It's almost always not one-to-one. The "ghoti" joke parodies this. English language derives from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin vulgate, celtic languages, and colonial imports from e.g. the Indian subcontinent. The spoken language has moved beyond those roots, but the spelling hasn't. I appreciate those old spellings; I like to see the origins of words in their spellings. Sometimes these spellings become apparent in the way words are used and pronounced in regional dialects, and I deplore the steady homogenisation of English.