rant about the English language
It's unfortunate that the #1 international language ended up being English. With its complete pronunciation anarchy it's impossible to tell someone over writing how to pronounce something, or in some cases even describe a sound, without digging up example words. And even that isn't foolproof since they fail at consistently pronouncing their own language and the same written word can have completely different pronunciation depending on accent.
Every single other European language I know of would be better. Yes, even French, they write 4x what they read, but at least they do it fairly consistently. No "ghoti" situations. No cases where an adult sees a written word and isn't sure how to pronounce it.
In some better timeline the US ended up speaking Spanish and a whole class of worldwide communication problems was avoided.
rant about the English language
> how to pronounce something
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
shaw fixed that but the state embezzled the money
re: rant about the English language
@icedquinn @Amikke Every attempt to develop a phonetic alphabet for English will ultimately fail as the oft-lamented uncoupling of sound to meaning that those alphabets try to "fix" is what allows English to be interoperable between accents, dialects, and nations. Even if you were somehow able to convince English speakers to adopt one, the situation wouldn't be much better with the various splits and mergers resulting in a handful of different spellings for every word depending on the person, place, or time of day. It's an unsolvable problem for any language of scale.
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote it's a solved problem for most existing languages.
re: rant about the English language
@Amikke Most definitely not. For example, in Spanish "almuerzo" can be pronounced [almweɾθo] or [almweɾso] or in French "tempête" can be [tɒ̃.pɛt] or [tã.paɪ̯t]. Any language with more than a couple hundred people will probably have this problem, and any with a couple thousand is almost guaranteed to.
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote accents and dialects develop over time, sure, but these are still small differences in certain words or in pronouncing the language overall, not wildly different pronunciations of the same sequences of letters depending on what sequences they're next to, where they are located within the word, what language did English take the word from, and the alignment of planets on March 15th 1386.
Neither Spanish nor French have the problem where an adult native speaker looks at how a word is written and isn't sure which one of multiple possible pronunciations to pick. It's a solved problem.
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote the whole point of an alphabet since its inception, as opposed to logogram systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, is to write down phonemes so that you don't have to wonder how to write something you hear or pronounce something you read. A unification of spoken and written language. English experienced some kind of devolution where they essentially went back to words being logograms, except using latin characters as components, that for historical reasons vaguely suggest the pronunciation. Worst of both worlds.
