> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.

Totally! I once heard (I think it was in an AvE video) that you shouldn't make fun of someone for wrong pronunciation - it just means they encountered the word in text first - i.e. autodidactically.

I remember a few funny examples of this from my own youth - I didn't know that "dachshund" and what I was hearing as "doxen" were the same thing. I was pronouncing it as "dash-hund" (only realizing after someone pointed this out that it's spelled "dachs - hund" and that the pronunciation makes at least "German sense".)

Also I remember talking about the Led Zeppelin song "D'yer Maker" to someone and pronouncing it like some kind of "fantasy name" - like "Die-er Mah-ker". Only to be told what should have been obvious enough from the music: It's pronounced "Jamaica".

Coming from Spanish, with just the right diacritics to make pronunciation obvious, at first I didn't get the concept of a "Spelling Bee". Did it involve something besides spelling? Did "Bee" was a metaphor for the actual hard part of it?

I was first exposed to written English, so after trying conversational English, I learned why its pronunciation/writing is a national competition. It might as well be random.

English would have benefited a great deal from an equivalent to the Royal Spanish Academy.

If anything, I'd guess that when speaking English as second language, harder than knowing the accents on words would just be keeping track of all the exceptions in pronunciation between words that you basically just have to memorize. Tough, though, taught, thought, through, thorough, throughout, etc.

It always makes me sad when a language's alphabet is different from their phonetic alphabet because it means that unless you hear how the word is pronounced there's basically no way of know how to pronounce it. Right now I'm learning Portuguese Portuguese and it just makes me so sad that it legit pushed me away from learning the language.

They pronounce 's' at the end on the word the same as how they pronounce 'x' and many many more such examples, basically no word is pronounced the way it's written.

My native language is Slovenian, the way you say the letters in the alphabet is how you pronounce them in 99% of the words and even if you miss-pronounce the 1%, the words are usually so close that people still understand you.

It just really made me appreciate my language even though it has many other things that just makes it difficult to the point that most of my writings are in English, were I don't really need to think about all the rules and can just focus on telling the story.

I'm of the opinion that all languages should use their phonetic alphabet as their alphabet, that way, once you've learned the (phonetical) alphabet you would know how to pronounce all the words. (Unlike in Portuguese where milk is written as 'leite' but it's pronounced very similarly to the word 'light' in English. (not to mention the Brazilian Portuguese)).

And to the Spanish people, your language is just slightly more aligned than Portuguese, but nowhere near as clear as I would like it to be.

I agree with the parent, Greek is much easier to pronounce, at least when compared to Spanish and Portuguese, though though the emphasis of the words not always being at the front of the word can make things a bit difficult, I'm looking at you κοτόπουλο (chicken).

> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.

This is a very popular pro-reading sentiment. The trouble is that you can also read about how to pronounce words.

Not exactly sure what you mean (in German) but just learning about them and using them correctly are 2 completely different things.

I mean, you could maybe ignore the use of going a -> ä for plural forms, I would argue that learning all these words are part of it.

I'm not saying it's hugely complicated but I've seen enough people struggle with it.

They're faster to type largely because your keyboard is English. Other languages (French, German, etc) have diacritics right there. Even Japanese isn't that much harder to type once you actually learn it (and, on fact, is quite pleasant on a smartphone even at beginner level).

On the topic of similar word sounds, this is a big thing that hangs up English speakers on romantic languages. Their vowels are sloppy and contextual, so when they're given explicit symbols that say "use this vowel", they struggle to pick that vowel out. That "symbol to sound" wiring isn't up in the noggin'. A Spanish person learning English will see the Spanish equivalent and go "duh". But an English speaker needs those "like in bird" tables.

Luckily, we have a huge phonemic index (because of all the stealing), so we're actually at an advantage from many languages once that hurdle is crossed. Spare tonality.

Pronunciation to be honest is the least important thing in languages today. Being able to type within mobile and keyboardd is probably the most important.

> The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about

Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft).

Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”

> It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24, or German's 25.

I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but German has around 45 phonemes according to all sources I could find, depending on how you count: 17 vowels (including two different schwa sounds), 3 diphthongs, 25 consonants.

If Arabic had to cater to afro-asiatic dialects phonemes then the script would have been even more messier. I'm a speaker of one, and my dialect is heavily influenced by the indigenous Tamazight language. and I think this is why many of the Amazigh community were and some still disappointed with the neo-Tifinagh script. While it carries symbolic weight, it doesn’t offer practical readability, phonemic clarity and tech accessibility of a modern script that Tamazight deserves. Latin script, ironically, fits Tamazight much more naturally.

You don't have to make a perfect pronunciation system. It's OK if a vowel is pronounced slightly differently, as long as its pronunciation can be predicted from context. Even if it can only be predicted 99% of the time.

Insisting that the writing system captures every little distinction is a common mistake enterprising linguists do (often when designing an alphabet for a bible translation, or "modernizing" the spelling of a language which is not their own). They don't have to. Even if you do it, it won't last long. Letters only have to be a reasonably consistent shorthand for how things are pronounced. People don't like a ton of markers or, god forbid, digits sprinkled into their writing to specify a detailed pronunciation.

English has accumulated inconsistencies for so long, though, that it can't really be said to be consistent anymore. Usually, there are radicals who just cut through and start writing more sensibly here and there (without digits or quirky phonetical markers), cutting down on the worst excesses of inconsistency. But in English, these radicals have been soundly defeated in prestige by conservative writers.

Diacritics don't need to be used the way they are in French, i.e. to preserve the original spelling. On the contrary, most languages use them to make their spelling more phonetic.

Nor is there a need for some insane kind of diacritics to handle English. Its phonemic inventory is considerable, yes, but it can be easily organized, especially when you keep in mind that many distinct sounds are allophones (and thus don't need a separate representation) - a good example is the glottal stop for "t" in words like "cat", it really doesn't need its own character since it's predictable.

Let's take General American as an example. First you have the consonant phonemes:

Nasals: m,n,ŋ

Plosives: p,b,t,d,k,g

Affricates: t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ

Fricatives: f,v,θ,ð,s,z,ʃ,ʒ,h

Approximants: l,r,j,w

Right away we can see that most are actually covered by the basic Latin alphabet. Affricates can be reasonably represented as plosive-fricative pairs since English doesn't have a contrast between tʃ/t͡ʃ or between dʒ/d͡ʒ; then we can repurpose Jj for ʒ. For ŋ one can adopt a phonemic analysis which treats it as an allophone of the sequence ng that only occurs at the end of the word (with g deleted in this context) and as allophone of n before velars.

Thus, distinct characters are only strictly needed for θ,ð,ʃ, and perhaps ʒ. All of these except for θ actually exist as extended Latin characters in their own right, with proper upper/lowercase pairs, so we could just use them as such: Ðð Ʃʃ Ʒʒ. And for θ there's the historical English thorn: Þþ. The same goes for Ŋŋ if we decide that we do want a distinct letter for it.

If one wants to hew closer to basic Latin look, we could use diacritics. Caron is the obvious candidate for Šš =ʃ and Žž=ʒ, and we could use e.g. crossbar for the other two: Đđ and Ŧŧ. If we're doing that, we might also take Čč for c. And if we really want a distinct letter for ŋ, we could use Ňň.

You can also consider which basic Latin letters are redundant in English when using phonemic spelling. These would be c (can always be replaced with k or s), q (can always be replaced with k), and x (can always be replaced with ks or gz). These can then be repurposed - e.g. if we go with two-letter affricates and then take c=ʃ x=ð q=θ we don't need any diacritics at all!

Moving on to vowels, in GA we have:

Monopthongs: ʌ,æ,ɑ,ɛ,ə,i,ɪ,o,u,ʊ

Diphthongs: aɪ,eɪ,ɔɪ,aʊ,oʊ

R-colored: ɑ˞,ɚ,ɔ˞.

Diphthongs can be reasonably represented using the combination of vowel + y/w for the glide, thus: ay,ey,oy,aw,ow.

For monophthongs, firstly, ʌ can be treated as stressed allophone of ə. If we do so, then all vowels (save for o which stands by itself) form natural pairs which can be expressed as diacritics: Aa=ɑ, Ää=æ, Ee=ɛ, Ëë=ə, Ii=i, Ïï=ɪ, Oo=o, Uu=u, Üü=ʊ.

For R-colored vowels, we can just adopt the phonemic analysis that treats them as vowel+r pairs: ar, er, or.

To sum it all up, we could have a decent phonemic American English spelling using just 4 extra vowel letters with diacritics: ä,ë,ï,ü - if we're okay with repurposing existing redundant letters and spelling affricates as two-letter sequences.

And worst case - if we don't repurpose letters, and with each affricate as well as ŋ getting its own letter - we need 10: ä,č,đ,ë,ï,ň,š,ŧ,ž,ü.

I don't think that's particularly excessive, not even the latter variant.

I'll just say that learning Serbian Cyrillic in two days and knowing instantly how to pronounce any word I read was amazing.

Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as lowercase letters.

> Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.

“Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…)

If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood

I don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).

It is my favourite language to read and write.

I am English though.

Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.

Rules exist, but most are never taught and instead only learned through exposure. It's why "ghoti" is a trick - you have to break several rules of English pronunciation to get "fish" out of that.

Here's a page where someone tried to reconstruct as many of those rules as possible: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html - obviously it can't eliminate all exceptions but it does surprisingly well.

Rules 6-8 are relevant to one of your examples, including the explanation afterwards.

> how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?

From what I could easily research, Portuguese has a pretty wide variety of vowel sounds, but it still pales in comparison to the Germanic languages that English took from; and across the spectrum of English dialects and accents you can end up hearing pretty much anything vowel-like that the human voice apparatus can generate. The strength of the difference between "men" and "man" will depend on who's speaking, but it's generally less than Portuguese phonology can accommodate. The "e" sound here should be familiar; the "a" sound not so much. Spanish (and, say, Japanese) learners of English will have much the same problem, but more so; their natural "e" is a bit off.

(From what Wikipedia is telling me, many Brazilian Portuguese dialects will use the right /ɪ/ sound for "bitch" in unstressed syllables. But then, my local accent contrasts /ɪ/ with /i/ quite strongly.)

On the flip side, I struggled with pronouncing Dutch when I made a brief attempt to pick it up; the individual sounds are all straightforward enough, but certain combinations are really unnatural.

> What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?

Those words all have completely different vowels in English; they're not irregular spellings. If you can't tell the difference, you probably just haven't listened to enough English or have said them incorrectly too much to tell the difference.

I think that's probably more because English uses etymological orthography.

So spelling rules are based on four distinct "primary" systems of phonics that can be used depending on whether the word or morpheme has a Germanic, Greek, Latin or French origin. (Yes I know French comes from Latin origin, but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French.) And then the Germanic and French origin words can get even messier because their spelling was standardized before the Great Vowel Shift. And then whenever we take loanwords from other languages that use the Latin alphabet, we preserve that language's spelling. Which creates a whole mess of special cases where the spelling doesn't follow any of the regular phonetic rules.

If you look at languages where the writing system is famously difficult to learn, a common element they all share is etymological orthography.

How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.

Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you? I am kinda confused here, these words have distinct meanings and sounds.

Maybe Jazz Emu is onto something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0

> booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.

You can't be that naive. Not every country wanted and a lot of them were forced into.

And that would have failed. Because rest of world doesn't use accents. Remember that first typewriters were actually german but English ones have succeeded.

Yes, this is the pragmatic answer.

Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world.

A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)

Well, there's this story about how printing failed Arabic. Allegedly, in Italy, they tried to print a Koran, but because the printers didn't speak Arabic, and were trained on Latin scripts, they messed it up so much that the Arab world came to believe printing is not going to work for them. Even though most scientific books of the day were written in Arabic and the best schools spoke the language, it quickly fell out of favor, being replaced by Latin in Europe.

In turn, the Caliphate made a point of standardizing the script and creating libraries which fueled research science for a good few centuries.

----

Even before Internet, languages with diacritics (eg. Russian Ё) were deprecating their use. I believe something similar is happening in German (with ß). Also, languages with long history seen incremental thinning out of the alphabet to remove duplication and rare special cases. Sometimes, the opposite happened, but it was usually brought by reactionary politics, especially inspired by local nationalism which looked for validation in ancient history. So, for example, in the 90s Ukrainians brought back the letter Ґ that was used in only a handful of words, and was happily forgotten during the Soviet times.

So, convenience and suitability for new technology can be a meaningful factor in adoption.

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet.

And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea.

Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.

> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules

Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.

The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much.

But, french is much worse!

As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it.

Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.

English is not a phonetic language and it also lacks accents.

Saying it has pronunciartion rules it is an strech. You have conventions.

In languages like spanish if you read a word, is very hard to misspronounce it.

> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization

It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)

Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?

(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does.

Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling:

https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

> Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing

Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?

English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

You're correct on the reasons why "ghoti" cannot be pronounced like "fish," but what your explanation illustrates is that the mapping from English spelling to pronunciation is extremely nuanced - needlessly so.

A more direct phonetic writing system, like many other languages have, would make it much easier to learn how to read and write English.

Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples.

English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.

Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.

You missed enough and borough

America is diverse in some ways, but in terms of language and dialects (which is what we're discussing here), America is remarkably homogeneous. There are many tiny countries with more linguistic diversity than the US.

Most English words are regular, and most commonly used ones too. "the", "be", "are", "why", "can", "might", "life", etc. are all perfectly regular if you understand how to read english orthography (which uses character clusters and can't be read a letter at a time).

Infinite/finite regularly related, too - the reason the pronunciation of the finite cluster changes is due to stress differences (initial in- always takes the stress, and then the following syllable must be destressed). Note that the long vowel at the end comes back in the 4 syllable "infinitum", again due to regular stress rules.

that's how "sh" is pronounced, not how "s" is pronounced

same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in

- sugar

- sure

- machine

- Chicago

- mustache

- sheikh

- nation (!!!!)

Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them?

English doesn't make any sense.

Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.

The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...

Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

This comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why Esperanto uses Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, and Ŝ is because the circumflex was present on French typewriters (which were very common in Europe at the time). Even though French itself only uses it for Â, Ê, Û - since it was a distinct key used for overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like Unicode combining marks today.

If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript

Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.

> That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.

I find it interesting that the Spanish consider the ñ to be a separate letter, in their 27 letter alphabet.

I see naïve as an example of diacritics in English as well.

I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!

But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.

I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.

The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".

There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.

Most publications are haphazard like this. The diacritic example also applies to Vietnamese, despite the alphabet coming from Portuguese.

Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

The difference is whether the sequence of vowels crosses the morpheme boundary or not. When it does, as in "cooperate", it's usually readily obvious to native speakers even when seeing the word for the first time, thus they don't need a mark to disambiguate.

It is probably connected.

Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing.

Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers.

Like the article says: "situations like these are surprisingly few in English"

Yes, surprisingly few Italian dialects are actually Italian derivatives (maybe only a couple?)

But there are differences between a dialect and a language, we can't say all of those are languages even if most come from Latin.

Italian wikipedia says that officially in Italy there are about 13 recognized languages (not counting Italian, plus French and Slovenian in some parts), and about a dozen main dialects.

In wikipedia you will notice 3 big dialect groups that are just that, groups of many, many dialects that do not qualify as languages.

It's more a difference of how recognized by the community those are, and how unified by grammar, locality and uniqueness. Kind of a gray area for many.

> Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects!

Indeed they are not strictly dialects of Italian, which followed its own evolution alongside them. I think most of them could still be explained as dialects of Latin, who underwent major "niche differentiation" in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome and the rise of barbaric kingdoms.

> [Italian] was mostly a written/literary language before that.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Clearly, even before the early modern era "Italians" could understand each other. Dante (from Florence) lived in Genoa and Ravenna, and had no need for an interpreter from what we can gather. Ditto the many "Renaissance men" who toured around Italy (Leonardo: Florence->Milan; Raphael and Michelangelo: Florence->Rome; Galileo:Pisa->Padua). This level of interconnection becomes really hard to explain without a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

IIRC in the early 1900s, coercive methods were used to stop children speaking their native regional languages, a lot of it in school.

In my region of Brittany (France) the most famous example that was on posters detailing good manners would say : "Il est interdit de parler breton et de cracher par terre" meaning "It's forbidden to speak Breton and to spit on the ground", placing both on the same level.

> I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

As a French person born before 1982, I find this sentence questionable.

If you mean "there were some people who learned a local dialect", then sure, you could dig some up.

If you mean "many regions had dialects that were learned before French", then I believe you misunderstood (or were misled).

Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French.

it remains true to this day. gascon[0] is still spoken in south of france, by both young and old. i know because i've heard it spoken. the idea that the french speak french, italians italian, is very modern. european nations weren't as properly integrated as modern history will have us believe. iirc the integration sped up post-ww2. cf seeing like a state[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_dialect

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois

Closer than that in some places. I'm from Sunderland, which is contiguous with Gateshead, and then Newcastle. I can clearly hear when someone is from Sunderland vs. Newcastle, although 'a foreigner' - say, someone from London - might not be able to pick it.

I dare say Liverpudlians and Mancunians and Glaswegians and so on would make the same claim.

Sadly those Brooklyn and Queens accents are becoming rare in large parts of Brooklyn and Queens. You really have to go out to areas with few transplants (Long Island, Staten Island, or rapidly shrinking white working class parts of Bk/Queens) to hear the typical NYC-area accents being used as the main variety of the majority of the community.

I mean, people do end up talking the same after a while. Regional differences are disappearing and being leveled all over the world due to the influence of centralized education systems and media.

'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?

Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.

Generally speaking, countries that have a lot of different ethnic groups and/or introduced universal education relatively late tend to be those with more diverse dialects. Think about it: in a world without newspapers and TV, where most people live their entire lives in the same village they have been born in, and relatively few travelers, any linguistic innovation that appears in one place is going to take a very long time to travel elsewhere. Thus, local dialects tend to diverge. Universal school education slows this down by introducing a standard literary language (and, historically, often in a very forcible way). Mass media, TV especially, leads to further homogenization.

Oh geez, for example in Italian to say here you say "qui", where I grew up I say "mchi" but my brothers say "mqui" or "mque", where I used to go to school they say "meque" with the weirdest sound.

To say what are you doing in Italian is "cosa fai" but I say "co fei" and my brothers "sa fei" and where I used to go to school they say "che fe".

These are just simple simple things but almost everything changes here and there and I can't put the sound with the words here, they actually sound different, and change where the actual accents are.

From the site guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"

Personally, the parent comment added a lot more, even inadvertantly, than one complaining about whether someone has or has not read the article.

According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there is more chance diacritics would have been added, as it would not have been 'good enough'.

Written English is a worse is better story. The Norman influenced version being the first-mover that users cling to even when better comes along.

Diacritics wouldn't have helped moderns if they were in from the beginning - most of the confusing words used to be pronounced like they are spelled (at least to people of the time). Maybe they would have helped to petrify pronunciations and slowed or stopped linguistic drift but I somewhat doubt that given historical literacy rates.

In French you can (and most people do) drop diacritics from all uppercase forms.

I don't know what a headless `i` or `j` would sound like in English, since they aren't used. So it's not really a verifiable claim that the tittles don't alter the sound.

It's very important for English to have 9000 vowels so we can tell where you're from within about a five mile radius, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

If you mess up every vowel in an English sentence, everybody can understand every word, but it makes everybody a little upset and a little aggressive. If you want to play it safe, just make every vowel a schwa and people will think you're from New Zealand.

You'd be surprised! I actually see a fair amount of haceks hereabouts in PNW because they are used in the orthography of the local Salish Native American languages, so you end up with road signs like these: https://www.charkoosta.com/news/salish-language-stop-signs-e...

The great thing about using Singapore as my locale is that it accepts pretty much any English spelling you throw at it, British or American. You see quite a mix of both on signs and documents here, too.

After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.

It gets worse. Canadian is different to both British and American (or it has some of each) and Australian is different again from all three.

Did you mean misspelled

Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.

Why is it trivial?

The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).

>Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages

Some languages really are a lot better than English as far as mapping between spellings and pronunciations. French just isn't one of them; as you pointed out, it's possibly even worse.

I point to German as the superior European language in this regard. I learned some in high school. I can't speak conversationally any more, but I know the pronunciation rules, so if I can read it, I can say it and pronounce it well enough for a German speaker to understand me, even though I don't understand it myself.

That said, German is a nightmare compared to English because of the grammatical complexity (cases etc.), but for pronunciation in relation to spelling, it's excellent. The written form really does reflect the spoken form accurately.

> Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

As a non-native to both French and English who was taught both languages at school, there is a difference that french pronunciation rules were taught from the beginning, while english pronunciation was taught just as IPA transcription of dictionary words.

I love French. Institutionalized mumbling.

You might not hear the t in chat, but you need to know it's there to pronounce it properly. And especially if there's a vowel starting the next word.

I’ve been learning french and for the most part once you learn that you just start but don’t finish saying the last letter of any word and you understand which letters you don’t pronounce on the end of the verb that change between je/il/elle/on (usually the last one) and ils/elles (usually the last 3) it’s not that hard. To test my pronunciation I can read a french word I’ve never heard before and have a pretty good chance that the apple speech recognition in notes will get it or conversly I can hear it and have a good chance of spelling it correctly. By contrast I am a native British English speaker, I have two postgraduate degrees, I can read the ‘dearest creature in creation’ poem perfectly and still there are words I would avoid saying in a professional or academic context for fear of saying them wrong and looking ignorant. And good luck pronouncing the name of any UK town or village correctly. What is hard about french is remembering if something is masculine or feminine.

The problem with French is that pronounciation changed but not ortography. It's easy to see that you did pronounce chaT in the past. Other languages periodically review their ortography. My language had that twice in my lifetime.

> it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts.

Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the complex rules to pronounce the ed + exceptions... You basically have to know how an English word is pronounced to pronounce it correctly. Guessing works but only so far, and I believe less than for French (and I'm a French speaker too).

I have a close friend from the US who likes to make fun of the French language, but when I cite English, he says oh yeah, but for English we already know that! :-)

Anyway, English and French are both quite bad at this, and you are right, that's nothing to be proud about. It's just a reality we have to deal with.

> The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Simpler is not dumber and I absolutely don't think the language is becoming dumber. The last reform (1990) brings more regularity and this is most welcome, freeing us time for things that actually matter, making the language more accessible to foreigners as well as people with conditions like dyslexia or dysorthography and less a status tool. I welcome the French language becoming more welcoming.

Or please strongly back your dumber and dumber statement. Because usually that's just baseless, tired rambling from clueless conservative people saying such things. A French speciality (a national sport even, championed by the Figaro?).

> And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall

That too. Maybe you should fix your English before lamenting on the writing skills of people, because you are making a lot of basic language mistakes in this very comment in which you are doing this. That's harsh and not nice, but that's what you are seemingly doing to others and I want to take the opportunity to make you feel what it may feel like. Actually, you probably cannot even begin to imagine how you may sound like to people for whom writing is a struggle. Such people often feel ashamed because of people like you. Let's just be forgiving, tolerant, more empathetic and stop using language skills as status and start focusing on the content.

I have a close acquaintance who expresses themself perfectly, only writing without mistakes is hard for them. They even have an official disability recognition for their strong dyslexia (so they can have a related tool on their workstation). Let's just cut people some slack on their writing skills (which are in the vast majority not related to laziness - or maybe you are suggesting people are dumber and dumber?) and the world will be a better place.

See also [1] for a nuanced discussion on "Writing skills are lower and lower". It turns out it's partly due to more people going to school and not only the elite, which is a good thing, including children whose first language is not French and whose life in general may likely be a bit more complicated than the one of a random privileged French child (like I was).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8SJ6v2A0qU&t=120 (in French)

Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.

This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct.

If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.

Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".

Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.

> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.

It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).

Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.

Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.

Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.

During the Norman Conquest, England was ruled by the French... and that is when those words entered the language.

Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.

While ~29% of the dictionary words come from French, in any written or spoken sentence the number falls dramatically. All the small joining words we use and the core of our grammar is Germanic.

See Rob Word's "Is English really a Germanic language?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCE4C9GvqI0

Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1].

Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.

Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.

As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.

[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488

[2] Hangul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Given the meaning of "accent" given in the article Chinese seems like a very accented language (saying that as a Mandarin speaker). Aren't Chinese tones the very definition of an accented language? (as defined by the article, accent is a broad term)

Digraphs can still unambiguously denote sounds, but Zamenhof really wanted the canonical spelling to have one character = one phoneme.

And, ironically, it was easier to do it back then compared to the computer age, because typewriters did something similar to Unicode combining marks - specifically, on the French typewriter, you'd have a single key for ^ which was used to overtype letters where circumflex was needed. And since French typewriters were very common in all countries Zamenhof used circumflex for his letters (except Ŭ, seemingly just because).

As far as digraphs, using "h" can be ambiguous in some cases, which is why Esperanto digraphs are more often written using "x" these days when diacritics aren't available for some reason. I actually quite like that scheme for several reasons. The obvious one is that "x" is then strictly a modifier letter with no sound value of its own, like hard/soft sign in Cyrillic, so all digraphs are unambiguous. But also, there's a matching diacritical mark, "combining X above". So we could e.g. say that "cx" and "c̽" are the same thing, and you use the latter when possible falling back to the former when you need ASCII.

> Computers were not much of a concern in 1887.

Obviously true, but typewriters were in common business use by then.

Ah, I misunderstood "one sound" as meaning, "these letters only ever produce one sound that is unchanging regardless the word".

If I recall correctly, the accent marks only started to get dropped when people began using keyboards. Resumé and fiancée still got an accent when it was handwritten