There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.

The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.

Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.

It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.

What the symbols look like is beside the point.

According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

> No, it doesn't

Yes, it does.

This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script.

> According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.

A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.

If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?

In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.

Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.

Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D

If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.

I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phoneme is.

What does the symbol “c” represent, if not two different phonemes?

The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do you disagree?

English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.

The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.

The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.

"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.

Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".

As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.

I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.

Yes, exactly.

If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).

English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.

* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?

In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.

English is "[very] loosely phonetic"

Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"

Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?

Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.

The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple:

* Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/).

* Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter.

* Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).

* Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation.

Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).

Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.

The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.