So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually difficult language in this respect.
Understanding different accents of spoken English is sort of beside the point, I think.
* c being pronounced either /k/ or /s/ is a perfectly common process called assibilation [1]. Compare Italian "centro" /ch/ as in change, vs. "casa", /k/, as in can't. The general rule is /s/ before e, i, /k/ otherwise. English is relatively regular here.
* x as /z/ is probably some sort of assimilation process when the /s/ in /ks/ would be +voiced. Another reason to pronounce it that way is that anglophones dislike complex onsets (try pronouncing "Dvorak." It's very difficult for English natives not to insert a Schwa /ə/ between /d/ and /v/.
* q as /kw/ is from Latin and most languages using the Latin alphabet retain it in some form.
Letter combos for single phonemes are common as hell. Compare German 'sch', or 'st', Italian 'sci' etc.
"th" representing both voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives is what's called an "allophone" [2]. Again, this is super duper common, and, off the top of my head, I can't come up with a language without allophones, and I'd require serious proof for the claim that there exists one.
English spelling is a mess, though. But mostly because it's terribly inconsistent. There are several poems about it, which illustrate the point nicely, for example, the Chaos Poem [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assibilation
Take for example, "charity" and "charisma", the /ch/ combo here would fool any beginner in pronouncing the latter as the regular sound and not as a /k/ and there's no solution for this problem but to memorize the words as you encounter making the whole experience of learning a new foreign language tedious and horrible.
A reform of English orthography is long overdue esp. if it's going to stay as a lingua franca for quite some time to come.
Just curious, in what order did you learn them? That's a pretty diverse set.
Metafunctor: how did I do? :)
ough:
Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up)
That's broken.
* Polish people live in Poland.
* Polish your boots.
Some great examples there, such as "minute" and "minute". heh.
* I read this book whenever I feel lonely.
* I read this book many years ago
A friend of mine coming from Scotland once told me that he phoned Twinings (the English tea maker) in order to understand how to pronounce it ("twain..." or "twin...").
Twinings is a name, though - and all bets are off when it comes to name pronunciation.
A bottle of solvent or leader of the Nazi party?
See http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/04/spanish-vowels-vs-english-... for a comparison.
My Spanish teach was fond of telling us, "There are no Spanish spelling bees." It was his lighthearted way of telling us to memorize the few pronunciation rules of the language so that we could easily parse what we were hearing and pronounce what we were reading. But inherent in his comment was a reference to the lack of consistency in English. This lack of consistency means that speakers need to memorize more. If we were talking about a programming language, we'd say that the language has unnecessary cognitive load. Similarly, Spanish and the other romance languages add unnecessary cognitive load by differentiating between masculine and feminine words. Still, of the major European languages, English is probably the one with the largest unnecessary cognitive load, so I can definitely sympathize with those who have difficulty learning it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
P.S. As an aside, I always thought Antirez was much better at written English communication than he appears to be. There's something about having corresponded with people online for the past 2 decades that has leads me to turn off my inner proofreader until something like the subject matter that was being discussed brings it to the fore.
In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.
You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.
http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html
For example many letters are silent and it's not always obvious why. Contrast the last sounds of these words: grec (ɡʁɛk) and tabac (ta.ba), chef (ʃɛf) vs nerf (nɛʁ), six (sis) vs prix (pʁi), etc. There are also some heteronyms, for example, les poules couvent (ku.v) but les soeurs restent au couvent (ku.vɑ̃).
Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.
No, it just means that you need more exposure. That very same thing happened to me while learning english (as my 3rd language after Spanish and Catalan [0]). I started to interact and shared flat with people from USA, England, Wales, Australia, Ireland, etc... For instance I wasn't able to differentiate between Scottish and Australian, only between American English and non-American English. Now I'm quite good at it.
I've spent quite a bit of time in New Zealand, and a common complaint I've heard is that when they travel to the U.S., people often ask if they are from Australia. When I first rocked up to NZ I couldn't tell the difference either, but now the two accents are like night and day. Beyond that, every country has its own regional accents as well.
And to be fair, I reckon a good number of Americans who haven't traveled can hardly differentiate accents beyond American English vs non-American English too.
We have somebody in the family that is know as:
"Blah ahk guak fiuya sdsds caramañola ñame!". And " caramañola ñame" is the only thing you will understand 100% of him ;) -- the other text is not a perfect rendition. In fact, nobody agree how exactly him talk when left him at full speed!
How fast is the talking is not the only issue. Is the slang. We can have the same language... but, o boy! the slang is diverse even in the same country.
And some words have reverse meanings, or don't make much sense.
For example:
"Esta haciendo sereno"
"Is doing serene (???)"
If use this dictionary, you could get it wrong:
http://www.spanishcentral.com/translate/sereno
Instead, despite the fact "sereno" is exactly "serene", this in colombia mean "colder wheater".
Is so funny when we teach the slang to outsider. Is crazy fun for them ;)
Basically, French and English follow the same orthography "school", which is the etymological one. The idea that spelling reforms should be few and far in between and that the way specific words are spelt has to do with how they were either spelt or pronounced in other, older languages.
This makes it so that they're both to a great extent languages whose writing system feels ad hoc.
Languages such as Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, are such that if one gets taught the sound of each letter one can start accurately sounding out words immediately.
Portuguese does not follow the etymological school, instead adopting a more phonological spelling. It has, however, a far from 1:1 phoneme to grapheme ratio, and more complex rules governing how to pronounce words. Perfectly regular complex rules, though.
I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like Italian, has a very simple set of rules for pronouncing words. But even so, clearly different groups of people have different ideas about how these words should be interpreted (not to mention just straight up dropping syllables).
I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. Yeah we have lots of whacky accents and exceptions to pronunciation rules, but if a language is spoken by huge swaths of people across the world there's going to be a lot of variety.