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Deviousness `anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Sta.sh
How much easier would English be to learn as a second language if we used more diacritics to signify weird pronunciations that just happen for no significant reason...
Well, dude, I teach English as a second language, and English spelling really messes with people's heads. But there is logic and there are (historical) reasons for the way words are spelled. The problem is that English has roughly twice as many vowel sounds as it has actual vowels, and we've had a tendency since before Chaucer of resisting additions or changes to the Roman alphabet. I could go into spelling reform after the invention of the printing press and the great vowel shift and comparisons to Frisian, but instead bloop! [link]
Also the history of (proposed) English spelling reform is really interesting, and shows it'll never happen, because if we did make English spelling phonetic, we would have to decide which of the at least six wildly variant dialects would be the standard.
I have no illusions that English will not be changing and that it obviously remained the way it was for a reason, it's just the musings of a mad-woman. Though I think it's fair if we were to spell our words phonetically to use the most neutral dialect, which I believe we are both a part of.
Though something like that would only be good for US and Canada English speakers, GB would need their own phonetic spelling, Australia too... Ah, more trouble than it's worth. But a girl can dream.
As someone learning another language I marvel at the general simplicity of vowel and consonant sounds as compared to English. xD German is actually not difficult for me to pronounce at all, not the Umlauts or Rs or CHs given I included them in Ôrnêstán, and Spanish- forget about it! Was like a walk in the park for my mouth and I was apparently the only person in my high school class that could roll my R without any difficulty. Those are the only ones I've had extensive experience with however. I had a design teacher from Poland who taught us some Polish in class and that was a tad more difficult to wrap my mouth around- but I only view that as a challenge! >:] (Please ignore the subtle sexual context there omg)
What we have now is actually an Imperial Standard Spelling more like Chinese, where different logo-grams represent ideas, rather than pronounced words. A good example is "eye" which is actually spelled according to Renaissance Scots ("eh-yay") but pronounced different ways depending on your dialect. The benefit of this system is that the same book can be read and understood by people who couldn't understand each other if they ever actually met.
Yes, English has a relatively rich vowel system compared to most other European languages (the basic default is Spanish's 5. English has between 10 and 12). Most other languages also have more internally-consistent spelling systems than we do (French comes close to English in terms of spelling inconsistency, but even it's not as bad).
Yeah, Polish has that whole Slavic dark/light L thing going. Plus those unusual consonant combinations. But you know the Polish light L can also be found in British English (although all American Ls are dark). Imagine a British person saying "allways." It sounds more like "oh-ways". That L/W thing is the light L. Apparently you can also find it around Baltimore (Bawtimore?)
On my part, I've been lucky with my foreign languages (Bulgarian and Japanese) neither of which have any really horribly difficult sounds to pronounce. I have tried to learn Korean and Mandarin though, which are crazy! Neither one makes a distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants, but between aspirated and non-aspirated, which is a difference I never learned to hear, let alone pronounce. Plus Chinese has like six different ways to make a sound I think sounds like "sh" And also tones. Stupid tones.
So that sexual context there wasn't intentional? And here I thought you were a more cunning linguist.