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"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more different hill, but one I would die on is: as the l
by samgutentag 1y ago
"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise
- arkensaw 1y ago> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage). that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
- pessimizer 1y agoAlmost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.
- jleyank 1y agoThe food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
- onestay42 1y ago"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)
- magarnicle 1y agoUsually English will try to come up with a single, Latin-or-Greek-derived word for compound ideas like this, which is another bad habit. So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.
- 1718627440 1y agoMedicine terms in German also use Latin or Greek, since this is the subject language, so this is a bad example.
- bmacho 1y agoMaybe in speech they are similar, but not in writing. The underlying construction is as different as it can be. English puts " " between words, and German does not.
- arkensaw 1y agoEnglish gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse. I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
- detaro 1y agoa) the title of the regulation is not equivalent to the law (unsurprisingly), onestay42's translation is clunky but a lot closer b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.
- arkensaw 1y agoI'm not a German speaker. Why would someone use such a long word as a convenience?
- 1718627440 1y agoI am. It is a semantic difference. Single entities get referred to by a single word. If you use a word group to describe it, it means you don't consider it a single "thing", but a "system" described by the relations of single "things". The composed word also has a specific meaning that the same words with space between doesn't. For example "das rote Kraut" – "red herb" and "das Rotkraut" – "red cabbage". Also suppose "red cabbage" was grown in abnormal conditions, so it doesn't have the color pigments, it is still "red cabbage", but not "red" "cabbage". This is awkward to state in English, but no problem in German.
- 1718627440 1y ago> I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language? Maybe, but more due to the spelling of numbers and long sentences. Compound words are not an example of this, since Germans can parse these words just fine as different things. It just means that the lowest "tokenization" in everyday use is not the word, but subcomponents of them. Do English native speakers "tokenize" expressions in words? Do you see it as '(labelling) (of) (minced)' or '(label)l(ing) (of) (minc)(ed)' ? I can't speak for most Germans, but the algorithm I think I use is just greedy from left to right. This is also consistent with how mistokenization in common puns works, so I think this is common. In primary school we trained to recognize syllable boundaries. Is that just a German thing, or is this common in other countries? You need to know these for spelling and once you know these, separating word components becomes trivial.
- usrnm 1y ago> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions. Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
- 1718627440 1y agoDoes that mean, that "compound word" counts as a single word? And how do I distinguish between "a" "compound" "word" and "a" "compound word"?
- usrnm 1y agoDepends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually. Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
- 1718627440 1y agoI don't know, I think German laymen have a unambiguous understanding. "der Schiffskapitän" = 2, "des Schiffes Kapitän" = 3 Sure, linguists can dissect everything and should, but how does the English laymen perceive it?
- arkensaw 1y agoTouche
- normie3000 1y agoCall me a douche, but the e in "touche" is silent, whereas that in "touché" is voiced.
- arkensaw 1y agoI was lazy, I didn't do the accent.
- ochrist 1y agoIn Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.
- user982 1y agoBut which "ch" sound? "Ch" as in "church" is just "tsh". "Ch" as in "charade" is just "sh".
- cwnyth 1y agoSeconding this. C should be the ʃ sound, and then TC should be the "ch" in "church." The fact that there's no one letter for ʃ is the real tragedy.
- bee_rider 1y agoI imagine integrals would make a loud static-y burst of noise.
- int_19h 1y agoPost-alveolar affricates are phonemic in English and deserve their own characters. (To put it another way, most native speakers treat "ts" as two sounds but not "ch") Luckily there are other wasted characters, like "x" and "q".
- zcdziura 1y agoI completely agree with you. I've taken an amateurish interest in linguistics over the past couple of years, and I've often thought that it might be a fun exercise to come up with a phonetic alphabet for the English language. Use the letter 'c' to represent /ch/, 'x' to represent /sh/, etc. Maybe as a fun pet project someday!
- murderfs 1y agohttps://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm 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, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
- the_lucifer 1y agoI remember a version which ends with how we'll end up speaking German.
- SamBam 1y ago> fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"
- yatopifo 1y agoWe'll just make it g'jif
- mixmastamyk 1y agoRecommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”
- normie3000 1y ago
- o11c 1y agoI've played around with respelling quite a bit; one of the most difficult adaptations is forcing yourself to correctly use "dh" (few-but-common words, "thy", "either", "teethe") vs "th" (most words, "thigh", "ether", "teeth"). j -> dzh is more weird than anything. Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.
- emmelaich 1y agoBring back þ!
- o11c 1y agoThe problem with þ is that it dates from a time when /ð/ vs /θ/ were allophones. That is, none of the minimal pairs I listed above existed (mostly due to more words having additional syllables - often, inflections at the end).
- int_19h 1y ago"ð" was also a thing at that time, so we can bring them both back and use them to distinguish.
- int_19h 1y agoI kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words. Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa. One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention). Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent. OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.
- Swizec 1y ago> as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound What’s the ch sound? My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh. Somehow that got spoiled into k in most English words. Every c in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. C is a silly letter.
- microtherion 1y ago> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.
- 1718627440 1y ago> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.
- shemtay 1y agoWords of Latin origin are identifiable at a glance, and homonymic collisions are thereby avoided -- Caeser, seizer of the day
- user982 1y ago"Caesar" was pronounced in Latin with a hard C, which is preserved in German ("Kaiser").
- magarnicle 1y agoAnd v is pronounced like w, but people look at you funny if you pronounce vice versa "wikay wersa".
- sapphicsnail 1y agoI made someone with a veni vidi vici tattoo when I told him that.
- tbrake 1y agoChanging "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.
- nicoburns 1y agokyube or kyoob would definitely be the way to go. It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.
- normie3000 1y agoRegional variations are available! I think the BBC would have had it pronounced tyoob. And don't Americans pronounce it "subway"?
- mcny 1y agoMost Americans sadly never get to ride one anyway.
- smegger001 1y agoNo but they do eat at them.
- xyzzy3000 1y agoIn the north of England it is still commonly 'tyoob'.
- cvoss 1y agoWell, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoEnglish's spelling irregularities help with disambiguating homophones: cent / sent / scent ceiling / sealing cite / sight / site colonel / kernel carrot / karat cue / queue
- jleyank 1y agoWhich, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.
- smegger001 1y agoAlso read (future tense) and read (past tense) being pronounced differently despite the same spelling.
- madcaptenor 1y agoAnd present present (to pull a gift out of, well, a bag)
- hajile 1y agoIf you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either. How is it that you can say these words without confusion? Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.
- normie3000 1y agoAnd cause confusion with needless heterographs? practice / practise licence / license
- jraph 1y agoOnly in writing. The disambiguation is already needed when spoken and the context does this.
- jmyeet 1y ago"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does. Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word. There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school). "Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that. But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair". "Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
- jacquesm 1y agoIn Dutch and German Ch is pronounced as 'g'.