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by beagle3
935 days ago
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Your “at least half the words” requirement is an strong English bias. I suspect no language is highly irregular by that requirement. In many languages though, the irregulars are at single digit percentage - sometimes even zero. And there are easily some that are not part of a pattern: “colonel” (pronounced “kernel”). American “herbal” (pronounced “erbal”), autophagy (with the emphasis on “to”, unlike any other word that starts with “auto”). And there are ambiguous ones which in fact fit multiple patterns - e.g. “route”, british more like “flute”, American like “house”. Not to mention to-mate-o to-ma-to and either. And injured vs insured. I don’t think anyone whose first language is regular (like German, or Japanese) would agree with your claim that English is not highly irregular. If you need an order of magnitude more patterns to properly pronounce words (and you do) it’s a difference in quality, not just quantity. |
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But, that being said, it still has mostly patterns. After all, we started this conversation with you throwing out examples of what you thought were non-regular words, which all turned out to be pattern-based anyway.
You had make multiple attempts to find a non-pattern word.
IOW, you are still learning patterns, mostly - you found 1 exception in colonel below; I offer 2 more with the words 'soldier' and 'lieutenant' (mostly to demonstrate that, yes, I agree with you that english has some non-regular words).
> And there are easily some that are not part of a pattern: “colonel” (pronounced “kernel”).
This is a good example of an actual non-regular word. All the other english words that are borrowed from other languages probably are each an example of a non-regular word (for example, rendezvous).
There's nothing you can do about this sort of thing. The only alternatives I can think of are:
1. Keep the language pure and not borrow any words from other languages,
2. Make up new words.
In this regard, borrowing seems to be the better option, with the result that non-regularity is introduced.
> American “herbal” (pronounced “erbal”),
Still a pattern: honor, homage, heir, all with silent 'h' for US english and and non-silent in UK english.
Even for something with a larger pronunciation difference, such as 'solder' ('sodder' vs 'solder'), 'sodder' still fits some pattern - a silent 'l' (yolk, salmon, walk, talk).
> autophagy (with the emphasis on “to”, unlike any other word that starts with “auto”).
Autonomy/Autonomous, Automaton. There may be more, but that's certainly a pattern.
> If you need an order of magnitude more patterns to properly pronounce words (and you do) it’s a difference in quality, not just quantity.
Speaking as someone who is bilingual, I don't think it's even the number of patterns that matter (for someone speaking a language, the difference between knowing 10 patterns and 100 patterns is negligible - ask any native english speaker if they have problems with communication with other english speakers).
For example, in Kanji, for common usage, you still need to memorise around 3000 patterns. Native english speakers get by on maybe 300 patterns.
The problem isn't the number, I think, it's the ambiguity: which pattern to use for a specific word. It's still only a few patterns compared to a highly regular language like Kanji, but the ambiguity means that a little native language knowledge is necessary to determine the specific pattern.
Anyway, I think we've both said enough on this topic, so Cheers :-)