"You spell it exactly how it sounds" such a bullshit advice when the language in the context is English, which one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence is hilariously bad.
I'm not sure it's the structure of the language itself as much as it's how error-tolerant fluent speakers are.
Anyone under the age of about 60 seems to be completely used to a wide array of (sometimes bizarre) accents, Chinglish grammatical constructs and semi-illiterate spelling.
It's pretty common for speakers of Japanese and Chinese to substitute simpler characters with a similar phonetic value when they can't remember how to write the full character. In such a situation (particularly with handwriting) one can also just invent a character on the spot, along the same pattern most characters were invented, with a meaning + sound indication combination. In context, it usually works but reads awfully much like the English example above.
Japanese has a couple syllabary to fall back on. If you don't know the Kanji for a word you can use the hiragana/katakana version which is pretty much 1:1 with how it sounds. If you use too much hiragana can become a bit unpleasant to read though.
This reminds me of a coworker who recently immigrated from Brazil asking about the pronunciations of some English words and being astonished that we don't just use accents to differentiate it. Like, just use accents. No more ambiguity and problem solved.
We'd have to cover every word with accents. We'd have to have accents for "letter has no effect on sound," "these three letters actually represent this other letter," and "pretend you're French when you say this, but French with a severe head injury."
There was some English guy that tried to create an English alphabet where each letter would correspond to exactly one sound, so around 44 letters in total. Kinda like Serbian Cyrillic.
I can't remember his name or the name of his project though.
Not heard of this particular script before (although I see the answer was already posted), but it seems a bit redundant to have created an incompatible system when shorthand was in widespread use in the UK at the time, albeit mostly only used in a secretarial context.
Based on my very phonetically written native tounge, I think I could map most of the English language down to Hungarian letters (there are some exceptions in both directions)
Just for note, it would look something like this:
Bézd on máj veri fonetikalli vrittn nétív táng, áj (sz)ink áj kud mep…
(Sz is a single letter in hungarian in this context)
I would way rather standardize the sounds like how Japanese does it (mostly) than have accents. I've never liked accents. I'm considering learning Ido over Esperanto because of this very issue.
Most people don’t know this but a lot of Japanese words have pitch accents that you need a dictionary to learn if you don’t learn the word audibly and the accents are not in the English/Japanese dictionaries, only in specialized Japanese/Japanese dictionaries.
When Chinese speakers learn Japanese they do well at learning it because it’s similar to Chinese pitch.
Esperanto doesn't have accents that emphasise stress the same way other langauges do. The little markers over the characters indicate that it's a completely different letter with a completely different vowel/consonant sound (and they have their own entries in the alphabet).
For example, "Co" would be pronounced like "Tso", whereas "Ĉo" would be pronounced like "Cho".
Pronunciation is completely standardised, with stress (almost?) always placed on the penultimate syllable.
That's a terrible idea in English. It's fine in languages with more consistent accents, but in English I can do that for my accent, and then americans can't read it at all. It doesn't even work within Britain
Except in Portuguese some of the accents can only be used in the strong syllable, so there's still ambiguity in how to pronounce accentless vowels in some words, mainly due to regionalisms.
and in my non-english-native schooling we were never ever taught "vowel sounds" in our English classes - we only learnt vowels as letters. beyond A for Apple and introducing common words like Car and House and Tree ... the curriculum never bothered about teaching how to speak English
This is why I'm grateful for my native language, Haitian Creole. Our alphabet has signs - formed with Latin characters - and each is mapped 1 to 1 to sounds. You write words like they sound, and you pronounce them like it is written. Most of the usual mistakes made are because they tried to use the French orthography - many schools teach French before Creole. Foreign words can be either written with the original orthography or the best approximation in creole.
I am also similarly thankful for the indian languages I know and grew up learning.
There is no difference at all between what you call a letter and how it sounds when it is used in a word. Reading is simply sounding out each letter as you go from left-to-right.
I vividly remember learning the short and long vowel sounds in elementary school. With the marks over the vowels explained and used in lessons.
Things like băss and bāss. Obviously those marks can be confusing if they're substituted in for words where the spelled vowels are different than the pronounced vowels (like yo̅o̅ for "ewe"). I guess those were the advanced words we'd learn after the basics were taught. But first, the "Evil E" :)
Point taken, but it’s not bullshit advice when the particular word in question actually follows typical English spelling rules (which, despite countless exceptions, do exist)
You know you would think so, but for me it's actually been helpful many times for spelling a variety of words. I don't think I realized until checking out this thread that a lot of what I thought was spelling words how they sound was actually me memorizing the way they were spelled and somewhat skewing the pronunciation in my head in order to get the correct spelling.
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