[r00f]

I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons.

God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.

[sotix]

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

Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.

[ASalazarMX]

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.

[tracker1]

Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures over the millennia.

It is far more organic and mixed from different sources than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down. Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves, such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well as deprecating a few other characters that were in common use in earlier Old English.

[asveikau]

I think it's a mistake to view that situation as unique to English.

Spain is still a multi lingual country with several local languages each of them centuries old. But even ignoring that and focusing only on Castilian, there were invasions by goths, who left behind words like ropa or guardar, and Arabic speakers, who left behind words like almacén.

Like English having both cow and beef, there are words with historical overlap but different etymologies and divergent meaning over time. For example almacén and bodega were both words for a warehouse.

There are also tons of words where Spanish had phonetically diverged from latin, but then the same word was re-imported from latin in "educated" use.

[cpursley]

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

[justahuman74]

Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are

[sroussey]

That’s funny!

But really, these days we have Hollywood and it sorta decides what English sounds like. Even if it sounds different in your town in the USA.

[cpursley]

This does not even account for the bizarre spelling of many (most?) English words. For example, letters that are skipped.

[thefringthing]

The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.

To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info

[WorldMaker]

Plus the Enlightenment reimported a lot of Greek for science and made a lot of greek morphology productive in the language again or for the first time, at least in scientific vernacular and jargon, but a lot of that makes it into daily use. (It's also why we still have fun debates today over plurals like octopi versus octopuses or matrices versus matrixes; do we follow the Greek morphology through to its Greek plurals or do we just use the boring English plural morphology? We use both, but which you use becomes in part a signifier of "learnedness" or rule-following. As a learnéd nonconformist, I find it more fun to use the English plural morphology here more often than not, but also sometimes silly uses of díacritics.)

Plus English still is extremely active (to this day) in borrowing words from neighboring languages, with a lot of Spanish words directly borrowed (generally from Mexican/Dominican/Puerto Rican influences in US English, then back out to UK English). There are even French words in today's English that weren't Norman Conquest imports, but American Revolution imports (the French were key US allies and neighbors in the Canadian and Louisiana Territories).

There's a lot of jokes/memes that English has always been a language willing to borrow the best words of any language in a similar way that school bullies are often looking for new sources of milk money to extort.

[baobun]

On the other hand an "Noun Gender Bee" would probably be more interesting in Spanish than English? ;)

[david-gpu]

A simple rule of thumb suffices most of the time, and native speakers will still understand you when you get it wrong.

But yeah, I wish Spanish omitted genders most of the time like Japanese does. It complicates things and adds very little in exchange.

The real kick in the gonads is verb conjugations. Nearly every common verb is irregular and there are something like 18 tenses, times six subjects. Even many native speakers struggle to get them right.

[saagarjha]

Sure, but saying the word would often give it away.

[hbn]

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.

[sotix]

My Greek teacher had trouble with early and yearly

[epiccoleman]

> 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".

[sotix]

Well both of your words just blew my mind!

[LoveMortuus]

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).

[tshaddox]

> 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.

[sotix]

You can indeed. However, if I knew all of the words I would mispronounce, I would have already looked them up! The trouble with mispronouncing words is that often you’re unaware that you’re doing so.

Respite got me recently.

[tshaddox]

The best one I've heard was from an extremely bright and well-read friend of mine in high school who once pronounced "formaldehyde" like "formal dee-hide" with emphasis on the "dee" syllable.

[sotix]

Well maybe they were just from rural Texas!

[mat0]

This is a fun one, because no matter how you pronounce it, if someone tries to correct you, you can just say "American vs British pronunciation"

[jsbg]

As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.

[koverstreet]

Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though

[serial_dev]

I also wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a shame that English does not use diacritics, on the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that diacritics make a language more difficult.

Learning how to use them in Spanish and German takes about an afternoon, and when it comes to learning languages, that’s a negligible amount of time.

[wink]

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.

[Aardwolf]

Also agree, you can already use combinations of multiple characters to define other sounds, and that's faster to type too

Shame, though, that in English the sounds that combinations of characters make, aren't well or uniquely defined (e.g. bird, word, hurt, heard, herd, ... all sound like the same vowel)

[Tadpole9181]

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.

[trueismywork]

But that's the point, each language has its own diacritics. There can never be a standard set..

[W3zzy]

I have French as second and English as my third language. English comes easy and natural because we're saturated by the language. That's one of the reasons my children don't mispronounce English words as often as they do French words. Both languages are equally terrible. On the other hand a few weeks ago my daughter demonstrated a nearly perfect pronunciation of Italian while reading a text without understanding a word. Looks like the Italians got their shit straight. Apart from pistacchio. Nobody pronounces it pistacchio...

[trueismywork]

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.

[johnnyjeans]

2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language.

On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as complex as a romanized tonal language like Mandarin (which has to account for 46 unique glyphs once you account for 4 tones over 6 vowels + the 22 consonants). Or you know, the absolute mess that is romanization of Afro-Asiatic languages. El 3arabizi daiman byi5ali el siza yid7ako, el Latin bas nizaam kteebe mish la2e2 3a lugha hal2ad m3a2ade.

[williamdclt]

> 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”

[johnnyjeans]

> Most of us still mispronounce some words

The bureaucratization of language is more problematic in my view, where things are seen as wrong and right and we try to cram the beauty of of natural language into a restricted box that can be cleanly and easily defined and worked with universally. I quite literally have nothing but detest for this conception of language, that it must bend to the whims of rigidity when it's very clearly a natural, highly chaotic dynamic system constantly undergoing evolution in unexpected ways.

[JambalayaJimbo]

How would you account for the fact that for many words, there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all? For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic.

[bcatanzaro]

English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into all the different accents.

It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell the English-speaking community how to spell things or how to say things.

I think these are both advantages that outweigh the phonetic inconsistency.

[int_19h]

Same way other dialect continuums account for it: you standardize spelling on some variant, or several variants if that is non-viable (which, yes, does mean that e.g. American and British English spellings would diverge somewhat).

[williamdclt]

To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history).

Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become incorrect english.

> For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic

Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught, G(a)vin/D(a)vid...

[throaway5454]

All those examples follow the linguistic patterns of the languages they come from. They aren't arbitrary, they just don't teach us the context when we're learning as children.

[williamdclt]

Of course there’s always reasons. Teaching it to children isn’t really a solution: you’d need to know where words come from before reading them correctly, and also many people don’t learn English as children.

Phonetic languages do borrow words from other languages too, they adapt them to their own language keeping the pronunciation (the only example coming to mind right now is the Czech for sandwich, sendvič). English could do that just fine being phonetic was a goal

[NooneAtAll3]

at some point these differences would qualify as different languages...

[throaway5454]

Draught beer is a linguistic holdout. I think many USA places list it as draft beer.

[WorldMaker]

Does relate to the point that English still doesn't have a central linguistics authority (and likely won't ever). Just various reformers that have been more or less successful and in how distributed their reforms have been. Draught versus draft was indeed one of Noah Webster's proposed reforms that influenced a lot of American spellings and in turn is still influencing UK spellings. It's not as obvious as color versus colour, but there is a bit of US versus UK in draft versus draught.

(Webster also went on to suggest dawter over daughter, to remove more of these vestigial augh spellings, but that one still hasn't caught on even in the US. Just as the cot/caught split is its own weird remaining reform discussion.)

[trueismywork]

Pronunciation is not mandated to be correct or wrong, as long as you're within a radius, it's good. Pronunciation has changed in languages before enmasse. Look at big vowel.shift

[codeflo]

> 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.

[johnnyjeans]

Edited for accuracy, thanks.

[aimanbenbaha]

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.

[vintermann]

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.

[Tagbert]

Agreed. We don’t need an IPA level alignment between writing and pronunciation and you never have a workable single system that rejected all speakers.

I do think we could have a “lite touch” reform that cleaned up some of the more egregious cases like “…ough” and some others that trip people up all the time.

[int_19h]

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.

[tracker1]

Now try to get close to a billion people around the world with already varied cultures to follow the "new" rules of their native language.

[int_19h]

I'm well aware that any kind of English spelling reform is non-viable for backwards compatibility reasons.

But that is a different argument from saying that English can't use diacritic-based orthography because the phonemic inventory is too complex.

[unethical_ban]

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

[foobiekr]

Agreed.

Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation.

In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle.

I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the ability.

[chuckadams]

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

[mamonoleechi]

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.

If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away.

Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's origin (ex: ^ means the words is greek) ; I don't get why it stopped you from learning the language.

[williamdclt]

> 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

[dragonmost]

I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is more of a France french issue. You will be understood eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures

[gnubison]

It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect?

France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).

[felipellrocha]

English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…

[tetraca]

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).

[rrgok]

Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?

[trealira]

Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish:

"No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barato" modifies "espectáculo," meaning that the show is cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap.

It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway, but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're thinking about this super consciously, you just know the word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-native to learn than all the irregular spellings of English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English speaker.

[WorldMaker]

It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.

One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.

Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.

[louthy]

It is my favourite language to read and write.

I am English though.

[zahlman]

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

[ARandomerDude]

I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense.

This takes a lot of time, effort, and interest however, which is why many (most?) people think English is nonsensical.

[wink]

You can also have a (maybe wrong) sense of familiarity that feels like it makes sense.

I'm ESL but after so many years of daily contact I find writing stuff in English easier than in my native German. Never lived anywhere else. I'm not claiming it's free of errors but it just feels like less work.

[throaway5454]

None of English is nonsense. But without diacritics, you need to know the historical contexts behind the different spelling or pronunciations to understand the rules.

[lucasoshiro]

> excessive writing marks

In English I need to find how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"? Why "though" sounds closer to "throw" than "through" or "thought"? Those differences are encoded in a unclear way that there are more exceptions than rules.

Portuguese (my native language) is not perfect in that sense, but at least it has more rules than exceptions. Part of that is because we use the diacritic marks.

Then, I prefer excessive writing marks than excessive unclear special cases

[Izkata]

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.

[int_19h]

The complexity of these rules, and the number of exceptions that you need to learn notwithstanding the rules, can be roughly estimated for any given language by training a language model on word <-> IPA correspondence for that language (using a subset of the vocabulary as a training set), and then seeing how well it can predict the remaining words. You can run it in either direction, too, to separately measure the difficulty of reading (word -> IPA) and writing (IPA -> word) that language.

This was actually done for a number of languages including English:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321

You can see how languages with true phonemic spellings tend to be in the >90% range on both reading and writing, with Esperanto at 99%. Spanish and German are in 60-80% range. English is dismal at ~30% for both, though, with only French and Chinese being harder to write, and all other languages tested being easier to read.

[lucasoshiro]

Nice!

[98codes]

I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going strong!

This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.

It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at English-speaking children, might help those adults learning to speak & read English if they could put up with being addressed as if they were a child.

[1] https://www.hookedonphonics.com/reading/phonemic-awareness/

[zahlman]

> 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.

[trealira]

> 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.

[bunderbunder]

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.

[dawnofdusk]

>but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French

In fact it can be even more complicated because in English the words can come from Norman dialects and "typical" French simultaneously. For example, warden and guardian come from the same word in Old French, the former is closer to how Normans pronounce it and the latter is closer to its modern French pronunciation.

[nemonemo]

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

[lucasoshiro]

In Portuguese, they indicate that a syllable is stressed and alternate ways to say the vowels. e.g. "país" is stressed in "i" and means "country", while "pais" is stressed in "a" and means "parents". Tilde (~) indicates that the vowel is nasal, e.g. the "ã" in "São Paulo" means that it sounds like the "u" in "sun"; the default sound of "a" in Portuguese is the same as in "car".

[stouset]

Accent marks give additional phonetic information.

[stevedzreams]

because you know the stress syllable by looking at the word. take Desert and Dessert, do we say DES-ert or des-ERT. Also in portuguese, at least, I can know which "e" sound [1] each "e" in the word makes by knowing this (well, almost, but not completely, but much better than English.)

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

[darrenf]

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

[HorseOfCourse]

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

[lucasoshiro]

> Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you?

Not exactly the same, but I differentiate them more based on the context than in the pronunciation.

Giving an example for Portuguese that has about the same difference: "roupa de lá" (clothes from there) and "roupa de lã" (wool clothes). If you write them in Google Translate or similar you'll see the difference, which is very subtle for non-Portuguese speakers but sounds completely different to us.

[tiagod]

Portuguese has a ton of such examples.

"O meu canto" can mean "My corner" and "My singing".

"Conselho" means "advice" and "Concelho" means "council".

"Aço" means steel, and "Asso" means "I roast".

All of these pairs sound exactly the same.