English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read.
Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irregularities out so that the language can be read after learning the alphabet. I was always against this in German but then I realized most current spellings are just a snapshot in time, it all used to be spelled differently. So now I am dor either use the original form an pronounciation or go fully local. Computer is fine as it is still english but will and should eventually become Kompjuter. It looks really wrong to me but it is readable as a German word and much better to learn for children.
What you're referring to is not a problem of orthography, per se. It is a quality of the English language called "Sandhi"[1], and is fundamental to how we construct grammar.
The fact that Sandhi is often not reflected in our orthography is a mixed blessing. Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.
Every language has complexity that seems totally horrible to a foreign learner. German, for example, has three genders, which are to an English speaker completely pointless and annoying. I've yet to study a language that doesn't feel like that, although Spanish is very close to actually making sense: the two genders are 90% a matter of suffix agreement, and the exceptions like "el día" are relatively few and far between.
> Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.
The pronounciation of the separate words doesn't preserve their etymologies either. This is my main gripe with (spoken) English: greek and to some extent german words (and probably most other words taken from foreign languages) are completely and randomly mutilated, the result confuses everyone who knows what they mean and how they're pronounced properly.
There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform:
1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good.
2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent example of this. This is only frustrating for foreign learners learning pronounciation, but otherwise has a lot to commend it.
3. Our historical orthography creates a link with our history and our culture; I can read Shakespeare even though Elizabethan pronounciation was startlingly different to today's.
1. Every other language with such a system bases it on the "standard" pronunciation, for English this could be for example BBC English. As a result you'll sometimes have youths who will write the local dialect phonetically in IM chat, but they also know how to write (and speak) the standard way.
2. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and that that's somehow better? My instincts tell me that knowing how to pronounce a word by reading it is more advantageous than having to learn 1000's of glyph-like words, maybe someone else has more knowledge about the tradeoffs between phonetic and glyph like scripts.
3. This is a gimmic. How many times do you estimate the average English speaking person reads these texts in their life?
To be honest, you can dramatically reform English spelling without encountering those problems very often provided your rule-of-thumb is that orthography ought to guide intelligible rather than prescribe "correct" pronunciation
That means leaving alone anomalies like thesis/antithesis (because "antithesis" pronounced phonetically is actually perfectly intelligible, even using the American antai- prefix which is jarringly different from the British anty-)
but it also means tackling the sheer impossibility of telling the doctor you would like medicine for a cough (cow? coup? Seb Coe?) without resorting to acting or a pronunciation dictionary
Shakespearean spelling varied more between early editions than many relatively radical proposed orthographies do from standard English. You can guess the opening words of a 1600 edition of A Midsommer Nights[sic] Dreame : "Now faire Hippolita, our nuptiall hower draws on apase: fower happy daies..." , but ironically only from trying to read it phonetically (the 1623 version is more readable)
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MND/Q1/defaul...
1. I'd say that the non-phonetic approach allowed this to happen in the first place. In languages where the writing system was pinned to a phonetic system, there is no room for saying something incorrectly. There is room for replacing words and sounds but at least the writing reflects the spoken versions.
2. If you want to go that far, then we ought to just adopt Chinese characters which go a step further and abstract out pronunciation from meaning. That is, it is possible to understand groupings of Chinese characters without even knowing pronunciation. But this system also creates additional problems.
3. I think we have the technology to "bridge" our roots to whatever we create in the future. Today it is actually possible to make something live for eternity thanks to the internet. One good application would be English writing reform if we are to accept that it is the linqua franca.
Consider the possible benefits:
* 2nd language learners will have a much easier learning curve and thus be able to transition from their first language to English more quickly
* World communication would increase--I think this has war-stopping potential (or peace creating potential)
* Translations would hopefully become more accurate (less secondary translation/interpretation needed)--things written in "new" English would be more accessible to a larger audience.
* Areas dominated by native English speakers would open up to a larger audience, thus creating more competition and more contributions by people of other backgrounds other than pure English.
For example, right now we are seeing dominance in technology/internet by English speakers, but why should that remain the case? As such traveling to a non-English speaking country often feels like going back 5-10 years because much of their tech experience is based on companies paying for translations or waiting for local companies to copy the technology.
I actually think we have the capability of making "new English" for both existing native speakers and new speakers. For example for native speakers, we could write an input method that automatically identifies words, spelling, or grammatical structures that have been deprecated and may not be understood by "new English" learners.
We also have the ability to write and document English to new English translations and historical references. There will certainly be some fallout but we currently don't document many language shifts that happen even among smaller populations.
I'm sure many exceptional native English writers and culturally engrained speakers will balk at such an idea. My challenge would be to have them learn Chinese or some other not so closely related foreign language to the same fluency they can speak English in order for them to understand the pain of learning a new and complex language. Of course I am not happy with the loss of culture, but I think for the advancement of the world at large, such a path is inevitable.
> My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis.
That's quite an unfortunate example: it comes straight from classic Greek (another very bitchy language when it comes to pronunciation pseudo-rules), and percolated into Latin and eventually English.
Still, I agree large chunks of current English pronunciation "rules" (rules? what rules?) just don't make any sense from a logical perspective; proof is that even born-and-bread Englishmen can often struggle with spelling well into their late 20s and beyond, regardless of education level.
2 remarks:
* The Turkish written language has had a similar transformation. There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy.
* Dutch is a similar 'power language' you can combine any 2 nouns in any order to create new words. For a native speaker, the meaning then is obvious.
> There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy.
Then I am 31 years old and move from Finland to London and need to spell (dictate letter by letter) my name in a bank – something I have never done in my life. I do it really slowly, and the bank clerk probably thinks I am borderline retarded, can't even spell his own name, something even kids learn to do. :-D
Well, you have it easy. So do we, in Romania - phonetic language. You learn the alphabet in the first grade (6-7 years) and you learn how to write words during the 2nd and 3rd grade I think. But basically once you know the alphabet you can pronounce any word. Except for, you guessed it, neologisms, words imported from non-phonetical languages.
Plus we have ce/ci/ge/gi/che/chi/ghe/ghi as the only exceptions, no doubled consonnants or actually any doubled other letter for no obvious reason, no long or short sounds. If I want a long "e" (we pronounce "e" - "eh"), I write it "ee" (duh!). Idea = idee. You can hear it, you can write it. You can read it, you can say it. EZ!
What we actually learn during school is higher level grammar: syntax, semantics. I'd say that Romanian is like the Python of natural languages :)
Even as a thoroughly American monolingual English speaker, I didn't get that until high school. The stress moves from the first to the second syllable thanks to the addition of a suffix two syllables distant. God help a non-native speaker trying to understand why that happens; I'm not even sure I do.
And to keep it complicated every once in a while we make it so you need to respect the origin words. One that always makes me think twice as a native English speaker is "infrared". I always have to stop myself from saying it such that it rhymes with "compared".
Yeah, the reform of Vuk Karadžić[1] few centuries ago has made wonder for ex-Yugoslawien languages that made them truly phonetic. One simple rule: "Write as you speak, speak as you write" allowed children to be fully literate as soon as they learn the alphabet. Of course, there are edge cases where something is written differently than pronounced, but are edge cases that accounts for less than 0.001% of the words, and can safely be ignored.
If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar.
English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord.
If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.
