In English, it would frustrate me if every time I read marry it would be spelled the same as merry, because I say those differently, even if most Americans I come in contact with daily do not.
Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English, but one thing I admire about it is when things are correctly spelled, you can adjust the text for accent based on spelling. The only area I can think of where spelling does not denote contrast in any accent is between b and v. (Edit: and that h is silent.) There are some contrasts that are only kept by a minority of speakers (Ll is merged with Y for most people, but maybe not in Bolivia or parts of Spain; s and z are merged in Latin America), but it's still a meaningful contrast for somebody.
Edit - I looked up and there is a translation thing online.
"this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.
Not sure it's going to catch on.
These samples are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which isn’t really designed for the purpose of being a practical orthography — it’s used as a language-independent transcription method which can represent any sound. (That’s also why the British and American versions are different: different accents use different sounds, so they’re transcribed differently.) So this isn’t really a ‘phonetic spelling of English’, though it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.
I don’t. The complexity and history is what makes life fun, and makes English one of the most interesting languages read, written, and spoken today.
Similar to Imperial versus Metric. Yes the metric system is better (aside from temperature ranges - Fahrenheit is superior) but it’s not nearly as fun. Why 12 inches in a foot? Who knows!
I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.
There is no reason why English would be more interesting to native speakers than German, Spanish, Finnish or Bulgarian to their respective native speakers.
I've since heard interesting comparisons as well from native Mandarin speakers, where there is a certain formulaic piece missing in English that let's them form ideas easier. Interestingly in that case they would describe opposites too where there are certain groupings of ideas that they found easier to form in Mandarin that they had to invent words for in English to get across. But they could do so - invent those words.
I'm a native English speaker and only a third rate French and Spanish speaker, so I have to take this on faith for the most part, but it is interesting to hear that common view across origins.
A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.
I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
Not that German is "pure" but even with words you don't know you got a fair chance of being right most of the time
To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.
Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.
Of course both scales can go above and below the numbers mentioned above, but if you are going to do things based on units of 10 you might as well be consistent.
Really both C and F are silly, the minute temperature was found out to have a zero point, they should have been discarded, and we should have gone full in on Kelvin(or Rankine if that is your jam), or even better a new unit that better integrates 0, a scale from 0 to the boiling point of water? and give water boiling 1000? or would it be better to give water freezing 1000? Triple cells are a common way to calibrate temperature.
You're changing the definition of "better" so you can have your cake (admit X is better than Y) and eat it too (prefer Y over X). It's ok to like fun things! It's ok to like Imperial and weird grammar, but then you can't also claim that you agree it's worse.
Sure I can. Didn't I just do it?
Lots of divisible factors.
With that said, there are clearly some things that could be changed.
There are a wide variety of accents in Britain alone - ‘wahtah’ isn’t recognisable to me for example. It’s a cliche to say brits don’t pronounce “r”, but all you have to do is watch Harry Potter to see all the different accents that do.
(Not actually by Mark Twain)
"a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling"
English, a language with over 40 different dialects in its country of origin.
English, the official language of over 60 countries?
English, the bastard child of millenia of Roman, Germanic, and French colonization?
English, a language with documented vowel shift that occured over 200-300 years?
THAT language would be easier if the words were spelled how they were pronounced?
--James D. Nicoll
Or the "pin=pen" merger of some accents, or "caught=cot". No one speaks "English", it's an ugly compromise of an army of dialects.
Is there a black person here?
Thick lousiana accent? Southeast london accent? Boston southie accent? Mid-atlantic?
No matter what you choose, it won't be phonetic for someone
But good luck getting the UK or India to adopt it.
By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.
But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.
Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.
I sometimes discover that I mispronounce words I know very well. The reason is that I never heard those words used audibly, I only encountered them in books. So I "invented" a phonetic sound to them, and long ago forgot that I did that. Until whammy, I encounter it verbally, decades later.
As I watched my son learn to speak, then later to read and write, I paid attention to his misspellings and they all made perfect sense if you approached the language phonetically.
The first sentence he wrote for me was:
“my daddy and i tocd on d woki toki” (“My Daddy and I talked on the walkie talkie.”)
At first confusing, but it omits all the silent, or effectively silent because native speakers usually omit the sound, or abbreviate it so much that non-native speakers would miss it if they didn’t know it was there. Like “l” in “talked”.
And don’t get me started on irregular conjugations.