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Re:Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe... by int_19h on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:34PM (#41791151)
That's not uncommon in general, but English is a particularly bad instance of that, partly because it has so many prominent source languages with widely different spellings, and partly because of the lack of any significant spelling reforms for a very long time.

There was an interesting study (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only one that scored below 50% accuracy for reading, and with a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an international language, since reading is kind of the most basic practical thing you can usually do with a second language.

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