Well, the measuring stick is not English.

Is it Latin? Which version? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet

Or is it all modern non-Cyrillic letters used in Europe that don't have diacritics?

In any case, diacritics are a positive. They're used to make a language as phonetic as possible, which is a net positive. As anyone can attest, learning to pronounce English words (or French, for that matter) is a lot of people wasting a lot of effort, which would be better spent elsewhere!

We are in complete agreement, sorry for making my argument a bit on the terse side.

Learing to pronounce French words is rather easy. English is a huge mess.

Easy? Fine. But it's still a huge waste of time on a global scale compared to phonetic languages, when you consider how many people have to learn French, English, etc.

It’s relatively easy for an English speaker to learn because we have a lot of French vocabulary, but the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling isn’t simple[1]—although granted it is somewhat simpler than English[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_sp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_p...

I don't think it's obvious that 3 of 7 letters in "mangent" are silent (as in "ils mangent").

Yes it is obvious once you learn French.

It’s usually (not always) clear how a word is pronounced in French if you know its spelling.

What isn't clear is how you spell the word after hearing it.

Really?

French (there are quite a few of them - think CA for example) has just as many idiosyncrasies as English when you really get in to it.

This is categorically wrong. French spelling has absolutely nowhere near as many idiosyncrasies as English spelling.

It is totally impossible to predict how an unfamiliar written word is pronounced in English, but quite easy in French (barring some ambiguous situations like if a noun ends in “s”.)

By the way, I don’t know what CA means. If you’re referring to the French word “ça”, its pronunciation is completely regular and predictable given the spelling.

Well, it's possible, but only if you know where did the word come from.

I don't think the Latin alphabet is particularly well-suited to English either. We pay for C, but it never does anything K or S don't already do. Yet, we cannot be bothered to buy letters for 'sh' and 'th', digraphs which cover two sounds apiece and are extremely common.

DISCLAIMER - rant below.

The problem isn't Latin, the problem is how you use it. Nobody forced you to sometimes use C when you mean K. There are many languages where these letters don't overlap.

Nobody forced you to use both PH and F for the same sound. Why even use PH? It's not like anybody cares if that particular word was stolen from Greek or not. And if some people do - they can check it on wikipedia. Make it all use f and be done with it.

The whole too/two/to situation is ridiculous. Ridiculous spelling is also ridiculous. Why put "o" before only one of these "u"? Either put it before both or none... Also - beautiful. Really? Eau?

And why sometimes there's one "l" and sometimes there are two? Full, but plentiful. WTF?

If you bothered to refactor the language every century - English would be perfectly reasonable now. Instead the whole world is stuck with learning centuries of design debt to communicate.

It strikes me that Windows is full of idiosyncrasies and historical artifacts (largely to keep it compatible with existing applications), yet is very successful and widely used - like English!

I guess keeping compatibility over long periods of time can have a lot of value, for OSes and languages alike...

Obligatory link to The Chaos

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html

By that logic German uses a thirty letter alphabet, but no one says so.

Does too. Finnish, for example, has a 29-letter alphabet, because diacritics count separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_orthography

That said, letter with diacritic vs separate letter is a surprisingly fraught topic, the same character can be considered a letter in one language and not a letter in another. Look up collation rules in European languages for a real nightmare...

Are you really telling us Slavs that we are wrong in what we (and our governments, educational systems and language authorities) consider a letter in our native languages and should stop saying our alphabets have however many letters we say they do for decades now because Germans happen to use different logic when counting their letters..?

I mean.. really?

I'm so astonished by that logic I don't even know what to tell you. Different languages can have different rules you know.

Edit: thanks for the downvote. How dare I tell a person who just claimed half of Europe is composing their alphabets wrong because Germans do it differently that they are short sighted.

> Are you really telling us Slavs[...]

Absolutely not. My argument was that Kazakh is far from unique in having ”extra letters”, which my native language’s alphabet also has.

On a personal level I far prefer latin-alphabet Slavic languages since it makes it easier to approximate an understandable pronunciation.

Is that a feature of the orthography or does that simply tell us something about your personal background?

That was a reply to the person who has said that it's wrong to say Czech has 42 letters because Germans count their letters differently, not to you.

I of course agree with there not being a problem with extra letters because Polish does it without any significant problems as well.

> Are you really

No.