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Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by bonoboTP on Monday August 21, 2023 @05:25AM (#37207115)
That's the current situation because spelling reflects pronunciation as it was hundreds of years ago. Basically spoken language moved on, but orthography remained fixed. In languages that standardized their spelling later, or implemented large scale spelling reforms, the discrepancy is smaller. But English is so spread out now with no central authority, so for sake of compatibility, it won't really be reformed now.
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by andyferris on Monday August 21, 2023 @05:58AM (#37207351)
Now GB has left the EU, maybe Europe should create an “international written English”?

It’s kinda a joke, but would be kinda cool. They’d only have to negotiate with Ireland, so hopefully wouldn’t get too bogged down.

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by rahen on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:04AM (#37207394)
Have a look at Interlingua, it would make a great official language for the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Same article written in Interlingua: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by raverbashing on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:08AM (#37207427)
Way better than Esperanto at first glance
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by rahen on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:31PM (#37216219)
And English and French...

It's essentially a modern, cleaned-up Latin that any European can pick up quickly.

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by bonoboTP on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @05:38PM (#37228866)
> any European

*cries in Hungarian*

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by bonoboTP on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:11AM (#37222212)
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by kwhitefoot on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:01AM (#37207371)
> the discrepancy is smaller.

You mean like the French who don't pronounce the final consonant?

Anyway, fixing the orthography simply privileges the group whose pronunciation matches. And the pronunciation continues to drift anyway so you have to keep on adjusting the spelling.

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by bonoboTP on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:10AM (#37222194)
English and French are the two main well known exceptions. Basically all other languages of Europe are mostly written letter for letter as pronounced.
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by kwhitefoot on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:14AM (#37207456)
People always seem to forget that English isn't one language, it is composed of vocabularies from multiple languages all used together. Quite a few words that people think of as English are taken from languages far away, such as shampoo, pyjamas, bungalow.

If people want English to have a stronger connection between spelling and pronunciation they can simply go for it, there is no authority that tells you how you must spell a word. Just be prepared for people to not understand what you write and to ridicule you.

And be prepared to defend the spelling of homophones that have now also become homonyms, such as straight and strait (strate?), might and mite.

Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by bonoboTP on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:08AM (#37222179)
But then no language is one language in that sense. For example Hungarian is a mix of Uralic, Turkic, Slavic, Germanic etc. vocabulary. This doesn't make English unique. The somewhat unique aspect is then reluctancy to respell loanwords according to their pronunciation.
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by dpig_ on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @12:26AM (#37231869)
Yes, precisely. A language isn't a thing as such. - Chomsky, probably.
Re:English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals by buovjaga on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:14AM (#37207459)
It's worse than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform#English

'On the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. For example, for "debt" early Middle English wrote det/dette, with the b being standardized in spelling in the 16th century, after its Latin etymon debitum; similarly for quer/quere, which was respelled as choir in the 17th century, modelled on Greek χορός chorus; in both cases, the pronunciation was not changed.'