If we are voting on missing letters I want thorn(þ). My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages, and it deserves to get it's own letter back.
On the topic of screwball spelling is this video essay on silent letters. The fun takeaway for me was that a lot of silent letters were never pronounced. it is just that when some of the first dictionaries were being produced, and the spellings decided on, they decided to introduce silent letters to indicate the origin of the word. the b in debt is because it comes from the latin debitum. but it was not spelled that way until the 1500's prior to that it was dette.
It would be nice to revive all of the Old English letters (well, except for the wynn Ƿ because it's so easily confused with P).
"æ" even has the same obvious sound value still, it can even keep the name "ash"
"þ" and "ð" for the two th-sounds (the former unvoiced, the latter voiced).
And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc, then "j" could instead be used with the value it has in French, i.e. used to spell words like "measure" - this is one of the few English phonemes that doesn't have a definitive letter associated with it right now.
Always use "k" for that sound and repurpose c/q/x for something else, and we could ditch the digraphs completely.
I don't know how many of you need to read this but no one is stopping you from doing any of this. Putting aside cultural friction and being thought a bunch of quacks, you could just start doing these things. There's no real authority telling anyone that they can't despite what some people believe. Just do it!
i am inclined to agree on all points, and while the second parenthetical would be useful in Contemporary English, i cannot help but note that "þ" and "ð" in Old English both represented the same phoneme (unlike in, say, Icelandic). all of the OE fricatives (/s/, /f/, /þ/) had predictable phonetic voicing depending on environment (voiced intervocalically, unvoiced elsewhere), but no phonemic distinction. in extant MSS, <þ> and <ð> are completely interchangable, mere stylistic variants of writing the phoneme, and even texts written by a single scribe will often have the same word written with both letters. some older MSS will use a plain <d> for the voiced sound (and a plain <b> for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used <th>. in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see <th> or <d>, but Classical OE spelling didn't generally distinguish the voiced or unvoiced.
even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative[1] is another fun one. The only european languages that have it are Welsh and Icelandic where it's simply written "ll" and "hl". In some medieval texts it had a dedicated letter "Ỻ" or "ỻ".
Here's a fun thing you can do with AI, here ChatGPT:
"I speak a number of languages, but I'm not a linguist. How could I get a list of sounds that aren't included in the languages I speak? Would be interesting to hear what sounds I'm not used to hearing"
<Long blurb about what a great idea I had, and an intro to how to do it>
If you’d like, you could just tell me the languages you speak, and I can give you a first-pass list of major sound types you’re probably missing (like clicks, ejectives, tones, pharyngeals, etc.).
Would you like me to sketch a concrete example with your languages?
"Sure, here's my list: <my list>"
And then it gives a list of sounds you know, and sounds you don't. Pretty cool. It even has links to a sound map site so you can hear them.
If you like, I could generate a concrete list of IPA symbols that are not in <my list> — a sort of “negative phoneme inventory”. Would you like me to build that for you?
"Yes please. Also what additional language would cover the most ground?"
One language that covers the most new ground
Amharic (Ethiopian Semitic) is a superb single add-on because it gives you, in one go:
• Ejectives (tʼ, kʼ, qʼ, sʼ/tsʼ),
• Pharyngeal consonants (ħ, ʕ),
• Uvular stop (q), and
• True gemination (contrastive long consonants).
If you want a two-language combo to “max out” the world’s rarities, add Zulu (or Xhosa) for clicks alongside Amharic.
About silent letters, French did the same, but one of the unintended consequences was to change pronunciation of many words when reading became common in the XIXth century. For instance "admirer, admiration" had a silent d before ~1830, which is now pronounced by everyone. Ditto the "ir" termination of verbs, the "r" was silent, that's why old songs have strange rhymes such as "Compère Guilleri" rhyming with "te lairas-tu mourir", and "les lilas sont fleuris" rhyming with "qu'il fait bon dormir".
This is just a feature of Castilian Spanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
\th\ only occurs naturally in like 5% of the thousands of human languages that have ever existed. Just because those languages are some of the most widely-spoken ones worldwide does not make the sound a commonly-occurring one in a meaningful phonological sense.
I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, but am less sure about that. Unfortunately I lack the data needed to substantiate my claim.
with
lang_sounds as (
select
lang,
unnest(string_to_array(ipa, null) ) as sound
from world_dictionary
),
totals as (
select
lang,
count(sound) as sound_count
from lang_sounds
group by lang
)
select
lang,
totals.sound,
count(sound) / totals.sound_count
from
lang_sounds join
totals on
lang_sounds.lang = totals.lang
where sound = 'θ' or sound = 'ð' or sound = 'θ̠' or sound = 'z'
group by lang, sound
order by count(sound) / totals.sound_count
It’s true. English and the main Spain version of Spanish are two of the few languages in the world which have the sound. Even most Latin American versions of Spanish (maybe all?) do not have it.
> My understanding is that thorn is one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages,
Not as rare as the lateral fricative, the "ll" in Welsh and "hl" in Southern African languages. e.g. in the place names Llandudno in Wales and Hluhluwe in KwaZulu.
And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
> And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
<q> is only one of the clicks in Bantu languages! The letters <c> and <x> are used for other kinds of clicks too (for dental and lateral clicks, respectively).
And then of course there are the Khoisan languages, which use a completely different set of click letters: <ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ>.
I work for a small remote company with employees all over Europe; it's pretty common for most non-native English speakers to pronounce it this way. Especially noticeable with Germans.
It depends on whether you define "rare" in terms of language variety or human variety, obviously. In terms of languages, it is a relatively rare phoneme. It occurs more often as an allophone of other phonemes, but in that case the speakers may not be able to distinguish it and will struggle to reproduce it in "unusual" environments.
I want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular.
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.
With the very wide variety of English accents around the world, you would have a tough time creating phonetic spelling in English that everyone would agree to. My mother (a true Brit) might want 'wahtah' for water, where I think it is perfect as is.
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.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,
I believe that there is a lowest common denominator for accented English, and it sounds like “sung” English - which sounds like non-regional American English if the singer is singing and doesn’t naturally have a very pronounced accent. This is partially due to cultural effects but partially due to the mechanics of speaking with an accent.
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 want to see English become mor fonetik and mor regular
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 don’t think it’s etymology and irregularity that make English “fun”; I think that it’s English’s large number of concepts because we freely appropriate words and their ideas from other languages (“schadenfreude”, “Deja vu”, etc), the small alphabet, the lack of diacritics, and the flexibility that has been forced onto it primarily by American speakers abusing grammar- verbification, etc.
I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.
The writing system has 0 to do with that. More the UK and USA being superpowers for ages.
There is no reason why English would be more interesting to native speakers than German, Spanish, Finnish or Bulgarian to their respective native speakers.
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.
Most imperial units are how they are because they can be easily divided into a bunch of different ways - 10 can only be divided by 5 and 2, 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This is practical when you have a physical amount something you need to deal with, like re-portioning a recipe.
Spelling preserves a lot of meaning and etymology in words. Phonetic spelling would remove some of this richness from the written language. Logographic systems like Chinese take this to the extreme. I think English strikes a nice balance.
Spelling can also bridge the gap between phonetic differences between accents. Many variants of English don't even have the same number of sounds as others, but we all "come together" when we write.
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.
"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"
My favorite example of a phonetic misspelling - when my older daughter was learning to write, we were potty-training my younger daughter. The older one made a sign "PODE CHRAN FOR [younger daughter's name]" and taped it to the wall over the potty.
Maybe we could have a separate version that was fonetik and regular and the kids could learn it? They could always use google translate to deal with texts in normal English like I do with most languages.
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.
> "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.
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.
Learning to read phonetically still pays off handsomely, despite the erratic spellings of English.
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.
> This is why, when you read Old English, you can often replace ‘ᵹ’ (or ‘g’ in modern editions) with ‘y’ and get recognizable Modern English words: ᵹear is year, dæᵹ is day, weᵹ is way.
Interesting, because at least for the last two, "tag" is "day" and "weg" is "way" in German. Replacing both of the G's there make a more recognizably English equivalent word.
Also, "-ig" is the suffix most commonly associated with "-y". For example, "hungrig" is "hungry", which tracks.
Super interesting article. Also I think "cat in a barbershop run by monkeys" is my new favorite classical painting.
Still not as strange as ꙮ, the Multiocular O from a 15th century manuscript used to describe a many-eyed seraphim. (Officially added to unicode in 2022)
"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more
different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.
Recommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”
Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.
If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.
How is it that you can say these words without confusion?
Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.
On paper, yes. But not when someone speaks. If you used a homophone while speaking, the listener would be able to distinguish which variant the talker intended based on context. I would argue this is enough of a reason for written text as well.
"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does.
Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.
There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).
"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.
But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".
"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.
I've played around with respelling quite a bit; one of the most difficult adaptations is forcing yourself to correctly use "dh" (few-but-common words, "thy", "either", "teethe") vs "th" (most words, "thigh", "ether", "teeth").
j -> dzh is more weird than anything.
Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.
I kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words.
Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.
One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).
Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.
OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.
I completely agree with you. I've taken an amateurish interest in linguistics over the past couple of years, and I've often thought that it might be a fun exercise to come up with a phonetic alphabet for the English language. Use the letter 'c' to represent /ch/, 'x' to represent /sh/, etc.
Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.
Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)
It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.
> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh
It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.
> ‘ȝ’ was used to write two completely different sounds in Middle English
Was it, though? By comparing English and Dutch you can clearly see that one of the ways this harsh "gh" changed in English is it became "y" as in "yesterday". "Weg" (Dutch) - "way" (English), "gister[en]" (Dutch) - "yester[day] (English), etc. I wonder if at the time pronouncing it as "gh" was still common and this would make using the same letter in some words much more logical.
The other sound ȝ was used for in words now written with 'gh' like 'laugh' and 'night' corresponds to 'ch' in Dutch/German 'lachen' and 'nacht'. If ȝ had corresponded to a single sound in Middle English, it's implausible that it would've split into two different sounds in exactly the same way as in other Germanic languages. So it's more likely that the two sets of words had always been pronounced with different sounds even in Proto-Germanic, and Middle English scribes merely didn't consider it important enough to distinguish them in writing.
They still treat the g consistently the same in every word. It's silent-ish in all words, not some.
The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".
wait, now I realize, is not only Dutch but German as well. TIL!
yesteday -> gestern
way -> weg
But the mistery is: how was it pronounced in the old English? The modern y was possibly a norman induced change, and people started reading it as modern y instead of "g" ?
In Old English it was already pronounced /j/ there, even though the spelling was still "weg". Ditto for Old Frisian, so Normans had nothing to do with it.
The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].
In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.
Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.
I think the article is very bad and that it assumes that modern pronunciation is what it was pronounced back then while as you stated all the sounds of one sign might have been identical back then
The article is describing the generally accepted reconstruction of Middle English pronunciation, which is based not only on the modern pronunciation, but also on comparison with related languages.
In the UK, yogh existed in Scotland a while longer than in England. You can observe it still in the name Menzies which is pronounced Ming-is there - the z in place of the yogh.
In the last week, our most famous Menzies passed away - politician Sir "Ming" Campbell.
Readit News
On the topic of screwball spelling is this video essay on silent letters. The fun takeaway for me was that a lot of silent letters were never pronounced. it is just that when some of the first dictionaries were being produced, and the spellings decided on, they decided to introduce silent letters to indicate the origin of the word. the b in debt is because it comes from the latin debitum. but it was not spelled that way until the 1500's prior to that it was dette.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVqZpHY5R8 (RobWords: Why English is full of silent letters)
"æ" even has the same obvious sound value still, it can even keep the name "ash"
"þ" and "ð" for the two th-sounds (the former unvoiced, the latter voiced).
And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc, then "j" could instead be used with the value it has in French, i.e. used to spell words like "measure" - this is one of the few English phonemes that doesn't have a definitive letter associated with it right now.
Always use "k" for that sound and repurpose c/q/x for something else, and we could ditch the digraphs completely.
I'm in. It would also clear up some ambiguity over the pronunciation of "gif" ;-)
even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
"I speak a number of languages, but I'm not a linguist. How could I get a list of sounds that aren't included in the languages I speak? Would be interesting to hear what sounds I'm not used to hearing"
<Long blurb about what a great idea I had, and an intro to how to do it>
If you’d like, you could just tell me the languages you speak, and I can give you a first-pass list of major sound types you’re probably missing (like clicks, ejectives, tones, pharyngeals, etc.).
Would you like me to sketch a concrete example with your languages?
"Sure, here's my list: <my list>"
And then it gives a list of sounds you know, and sounds you don't. Pretty cool. It even has links to a sound map site so you can hear them.
If you like, I could generate a concrete list of IPA symbols that are not in <my list> — a sort of “negative phoneme inventory”. Would you like me to build that for you?
"Yes please. Also what additional language would cover the most ground?"
One language that covers the most new ground
Amharic (Ethiopian Semitic) is a superb single add-on because it gives you, in one go: • Ejectives (tʼ, kʼ, qʼ, sʼ/tsʼ), • Pharyngeal consonants (ħ, ʕ), • Uvular stop (q), and • True gemination (contrastive long consonants).
If you want a two-language combo to “max out” the world’s rarities, add Zulu (or Xhosa) for clicks alongside Amharic.
Is that true? Seems like it's in every other word when I visit Spain...
Not as rare as the lateral fricative, the "ll" in Welsh and "hl" in Southern African languages. e.g. in the place names Llandudno in Wales and Hluhluwe in KwaZulu.
And then there's the clicks in Southern African languages. Which are usually written as a Q not followed by a u. e.g. in the place name Gqeberha or the Mbaqanga music style.
<q> is only one of the clicks in Bantu languages! The letters <c> and <x> are used for other kinds of clicks too (for dental and lateral clicks, respectively).
And then of course there are the Khoisan languages, which use a completely different set of click letters: <ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ>.
English speaking Swedes often transform this silent b into a spoken p which is about as awkward a result as you're imagining.
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[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/phonemes
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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.
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.
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.
Thick lousiana accent? Southeast london accent? Boston southie accent? Mid-atlantic?
No matter what you choose, it won't be phonetic for someone
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.
But good luck getting the UK or India to adopt it.
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.
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.
Lots of divisible factors.
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.
"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"
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 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.
(Not actually by Mark Twain)
(What was that essay/joke called again?)
Interesting, because at least for the last two, "tag" is "day" and "weg" is "way" in German. Replacing both of the G's there make a more recognizably English equivalent word.
Also, "-ig" is the suffix most commonly associated with "-y". For example, "hungrig" is "hungry", which tracks.
Super interesting article. Also I think "cat in a barbershop run by monkeys" is my new favorite classical painting.
different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise
But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"
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How is it that you can say these words without confusion?
Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.
Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.
practice / practise licence / license
Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.
There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).
"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.
But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".
"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
j -> dzh is more weird than anything.
Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.
Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.
One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).
Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.
OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.
Maybe as a fun pet project someday!
-- Caeser, seizer of the day
It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.
That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.
What’s the ch sound? My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh. Somehow that got spoiled into k in most English words.
Every c in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. C is a silly letter.
If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.
It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.
Was it, though? By comparing English and Dutch you can clearly see that one of the ways this harsh "gh" changed in English is it became "y" as in "yesterday". "Weg" (Dutch) - "way" (English), "gister[en]" (Dutch) - "yester[day] (English), etc. I wonder if at the time pronouncing it as "gh" was still common and this would make using the same letter in some words much more logical.
In Holland the g will be hard while in West Flanders "weg" is much closer to English "way" with a very soft g.
The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".
yesteday -> gestern way -> weg
But the mistery is: how was it pronounced in the old English? The modern y was possibly a norman induced change, and people started reading it as modern y instead of "g" ?
The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].
In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.
Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.
In the last week, our most famous Menzies passed away - politician Sir "Ming" Campbell.
Some wag made a 'ming vase' of his face: https://www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2004.176/ming-vase-sir...