Envy: in my native languages every letter means one concrete sound no matter of the word or any other circumstances. I can pronounce correctly any word I see written, and can correctly write down whatever word I hear even if I hear it for the first time and don’t know its meaning.
It has. Some regions use local words that aren’t included in official vocabulary plus they love to misplace emphasis (we don’t mark it in written form). Not sure if it can be called “accent” though, more like “dialect”.
I’m envious of that, to be honest. Non-phonetic spelling is one of the greatest barriers to learning a language like English.
Part of the problem though is what this comic highlights, where English does not often try to adapt names and loanwords to its own phonetics. They are transliterated to the Latin alphabet in ways that make sense for the logic of the source language, and then just carried into English.
And then it just happens that the history of the English language is characterized by the number of times Britain was invaded by speakers of other languages that just merged into the lexicon, so English is riddled with loanwords that are each informed by the logic of their languages of origin.
The Ethiopian alphabet (abougida) has this feature, but it goes one step further. Every vowel consonant pair (aka every syllable) has it’s own symbol. That sounds like a lot of symbols, and it is, but the beauty of it is that the vowel sounds are just modifiers of the consonant. So you only have to memorize the consonant symbols and the modifiers and you can reduce drastically reduce the number of letters needed plus have a completely phonetic writing system.
Envy: in my native languages every letter means one concrete sound no matter of the word or any other circumstances. I can pronounce correctly any word I see written, and can correctly write down whatever word I hear even if I hear it for the first time and don’t know its meaning.
Does your language still have different regional accents or does that end up getting smoothed/averaged out by the writing system?
It has. Some regions use local words that aren’t included in official vocabulary plus they love to misplace emphasis (we don’t mark it in written form). Not sure if it can be called “accent” though, more like “dialect”.
I’m envious of that, to be honest. Non-phonetic spelling is one of the greatest barriers to learning a language like English.
Part of the problem though is what this comic highlights, where English does not often try to adapt names and loanwords to its own phonetics. They are transliterated to the Latin alphabet in ways that make sense for the logic of the source language, and then just carried into English.
And then it just happens that the history of the English language is characterized by the number of times Britain was invaded by speakers of other languages that just merged into the lexicon, so English is riddled with loanwords that are each informed by the logic of their languages of origin.
What language?
Ukrainian.
My guess: Serbian, Turkish or Italian
Same (with few exceptions that are well documented and always applicable to every situation)
But names are still fucked, because they’re not translated. Example:
Or the Shawn/Sean example in the comic
The Ethiopian alphabet (abougida) has this feature, but it goes one step further. Every vowel consonant pair (aka every syllable) has it’s own symbol. That sounds like a lot of symbols, and it is, but the beauty of it is that the vowel sounds are just modifiers of the consonant. So you only have to memorize the consonant symbols and the modifiers and you can reduce drastically reduce the number of letters needed plus have a completely phonetic writing system.