Isn't this only true if you already know how Hindi specifically is supposed to be pronounced? I don't think you could show someone a romanized Hindi text and expect them to even come close to an accurate pronunciation. For example, doesn't Hindi have like six ways of making the English "D" sound?
Same thing for e.g. Chinese, you can't represent tones with unaugmented Roman characters.
Interestingly this hasn’t stopped people from trying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh
As read or read?
:-)
What.
Most other languages do not shy away from having more ways of presenting sounds native to that language than English.
There are 24 consonant and 25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation alone. All inadequately represented by just 22 letters.
1. I didn't say it was a bad thing
2. English actually can't represent a grwat number of sounds using a small set: there are many, many sounds in English that are not actually represented by its set of letters. The most common of them, shwa, isn't in any shape, way or form represented by English language. It's a mess of different letter combinations in different contexts, none of which adequately express the sound.
To quote Wikipedia: "In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with.
3. You claimed that "in other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited" which is, of course, untrue.
I watched a video about this recently I found fascinating, I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because it occurs only in certain stress positions of a word, which changes depending on the surrounding words. But notice when you "talk slowly", that is, fixate on each and every word, you actually don't pronounce the shwa very often, if at all.
Couldn't find the video but it turns out there are a million on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus
Doesn't matter. You claimed English is so much better at representing sounds than other languages. And yet, it cannot represent the most common one. And of course, shwa is just one of them. As I mentioned before, English has significantly more sounds than letters, and of course cannot represent most of them even if those exist when you "soeak slowly".
More over, its so poor in expressing these sounds that it re-uses and repurposes completely different letter combinations for the same sound. Or the same letter for completely different sounds.
Because of course get/gist and use/you and fashion/mission/faction show us not the poor expressiveness of the language but how wonderfully rich it is in representing the different sounds.
this is actually explained by something called the Indo-European ablaut, or as the Indians who original came up with this call it, Guna and Vrddhi. Basically, there is a set of vowel grades in the IE languages: a -> (long) a -> (long) a; i -> e -> ai; u -> o -> au; (vowel) r -> ar -> (long) ar. The reason for the ablaut changes are fairly complex, but notice how in your example reign has the "e" as in pain, whereas "sovreign" has the "i" as in "bit", reign is actually the "guna" or first grade of the ablaut. English spelling doesn't generally represent these changes, nor does it have to, because people are aware of the sequence without knowing it, and those sound changes do not sound strange or out of place for them.
>scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting their spelling to reflect that
English actually has no official spelling for any words, its just that the King James bible was the first widely distributed printed book that people were able to read in the English speaking world, so people adopted the spellings for words in that book. Its quite arbitrary, which makes the elegance of the spelling system even better--the fact that no one got involved meant that we were able to create this beautifully complex system that could represent nearly an infinite number of sounds, because nobody tried to "standardize" and phoneticize English spelling.