The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).
Between languages, even the letters have different uses. Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know those are the two uses).
I don't understand what this thread is all about. English doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.
For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).
Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".
No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.
Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.
I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.
Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.
Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.
And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.
Source: I'm a native french speaker.
Some languages really are a lot better than English as far as mapping between spellings and pronunciations. French just isn't one of them; as you pointed out, it's possibly even worse.
I point to German as the superior European language in this regard. I learned some in high school. I can't speak conversationally any more, but I know the pronunciation rules, so if I can read it, I can say it and pronounce it well enough for a German speaker to understand me, even though I don't understand it myself.
That said, German is a nightmare compared to English because of the grammatical complexity (cases etc.), but for pronunciation in relation to spelling, it's excellent. The written form really does reflect the spoken form accurately.
Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts.
Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the complex rules to pronounce the ed + exceptions... You basically have to know how an English word is pronounced to pronounce it correctly. Guessing works but only so far, and I believe less than for French (and I'm a French speaker too).
I have a close friend from the US who likes to make fun of the French language, but when I cite English, he says oh yeah, but for English we already know that! :-)
Anyway, English and French are both quite bad at this, and you are right, that's nothing to be proud about. It's just a reality we have to deal with.
> The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.
Simpler is not dumber and I absolutely don't think the language is becoming dumber. The last reform (1990) brings more regularity and this is most welcome, freeing us time for things that actually matter, making the language more accessible to foreigners as well as people with conditions like dyslexia or dysorthography and less a status tool. I welcome the French language becoming more welcoming.
Or please strongly back your dumber and dumber statement. Because usually that's just baseless, tired rambling from clueless conservative people saying such things. A French speciality (a national sport even, championed by the Figaro?).
> And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall
That too. Maybe you should fix your English before lamenting on the writing skills of people, because you are making a lot of basic language mistakes in this very comment in which you are doing this. That's harsh and not nice, but that's what you are seemingly doing to others and I want to take the opportunity to make you feel what it may feel like. Actually, you probably cannot even begin to imagine how you may sound like to people for whom writing is a struggle. Such people often feel ashamed because of people like you. Let's just be forgiving, tolerant, more empathetic and stop using language skills as status and start focusing on the content.
I have a close acquaintance who expresses themself perfectly, only writing without mistakes is hard for them. They even have an official disability recognition for their strong dyslexia (so they can have a related tool on their workstation). Let's just cut people some slack on their writing skills (which are in the vast majority not related to laziness - or maybe you are suggesting people are dumber and dumber?) and the world will be a better place.
See also [1] for a nuanced discussion on "Writing skills are lower and lower". It turns out it's partly due to more people going to school and not only the elite, which is a good thing, including children whose first language is not French and whose life in general may likely be a bit more complicated than the one of a random privileged French child (like I was).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8SJ6v2A0qU&t=120 (in French)
On the other hand, we do violence to the pronunciation of “comfortable”. I’ve lived in so many parts of the English speaking world that I can partially code switch pronunciation for some dialects. Kind of weird but not that bad.
If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.
The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.
Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".
Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.
Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...
Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.
(Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)
Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance.
I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.
Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.
As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.
[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488
[2] Hangul:
Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.
Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
That's the the majority of the world's population.
I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.
What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?
I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
You can say that again.
That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.
> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.
It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].
[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
For example, "calque" is a loanword, while "loanword" (from German "Lehnwort") is a calque.
Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?
English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.
Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
infinite, finite
sign, signal
wind, rewind
heave, heavy
And countless more like this. This language is beyond fucked and this is not possible to defend logically. This also causes many problems for people who learn english solely by speaking, they don't know the difference between "its" and "it's", "they/they're/their" and so on. In my native language these kinds of errors are impossible as how you pronounce letters doesn't change depending on the word they are in
There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.
[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner.
But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.
Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.
Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.
I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.
I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.
The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.
Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.
My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.
mikequinlan•4h ago
bawolff•3h ago
e <backspace character> '
Which was called "overstriking".
PyWoody•3h ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript
kps•2h ago
mousethatroared•1h ago