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The wonders of English spelling
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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Two things about English.
First, English is not one language, it's a mix of several different languages with loanwords stolen from eveey culture encoutered. Grammar and conjugation is entirely inconsistent because it is based on Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Greek.
Second, English is descriptive, not proscriptive. In other words, there are no rules to pronunciation or spelling. English words are spelled and pronounced the way English speakers spell and pronounce them. That's how England and America can end up with such disparate spellings and pronunciations. If you are understood, you have spoken English. When new pronunciations and spellings become commonly used, they are added to the dictionary. When speaking and writing styles change, so do the rules of grammar.
Aren't most languages a mix of several languages?
Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words...
Yeah, pretty much every single language. I think it's funny when someone (usually americans) says their language has words from a bunch of languages because it shows they never really learned a second language. Word 'clima' in Portuguese or 'Klima' in German is from Greek for example, many languages have english words too, portuguese takes 'playground' and 'check in' to cite two but it has many more.
Yeah, Polish has a decent amount of loan words for example, but they tend to be used for different things and polish also uses calques and native phrases for things, for example a car is a samochód, literally "self-walker", and species names are written in Polish, not Latin
English butchers words too.
Yeah, I only was speaking about the German language as example
But yeah, you're right of course
The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.
For example German imported the word 'cakes', but it is now spelled 'Keks' inline with it's pronunciation.
I think it's funny how the slang word 'biz' fixes the spelling of 'business'
Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don't seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written "chrome" as "krohm" or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with "ch". It's actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.
and english is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from the worst, thai is afaik basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, to the point that people can read old texts quite easily.
Also Icelandic is so archaic compared to the other Nordic nations that they can more or less just read thousand year documents like how we may read writings from the 1700s.
Surely there are no languages that base their rules on forbidding certain pronunciations?
(Proscriptive means forbidding; I assume you meant prescriptive)
Indeed, you're correct. Although the French do have the DGLFLF.
Hiatus avoidance in Classical Latin poetry is the closest thing to a rule I can think of
Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.
Many languages have very specific pronunciation rules. If you can read a word, you can almost always pronounce it correctly, especially when accents are uses. You can often determine the pronunciation from the etymology by the language of origin. It's why spelling bee contestants always ask for country of origin.
Do languages with sylabic alphabets have this problem?
Which makes this meme possible.
English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it's quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it's contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.
Sure, sometimes it is. But frequently it isn't. But let's conjugate two very similar words and then pronounce them. How about "go" and "do"?
I do
You go He does He goes She did She went
How about the words "rove," "move," and "shove"? They are all conjugated basically the same, spelled almost the same, but each is pronounced differently.
Knowing how one word is conjugated and pronounced does not necessarily inform on any other. The phrase "sometimes it's consistent" is self-contradictory.
I never mentioned pronunciation. I only talked about the untrue claim that english grammar was inconsistent because it was mixed with other languages. The mismatch between pronunciation and spelling is the fault of the printing press.
Ok, but that's the topic of conversation. And even if we set aside pronunciation, English grammar is inconsistent. There are far more irregular verba than there are rules.
So, if you collectively forget a word, does it disappear from the dictionary? And if you collectively do so, are there any known words that you don't know anymore their spelling or pronunciation?
Yeah. There are a lot of words that people have stopped using and don't remember how to pronounce. Sometimes we have clues from old writings and especially poetry, but archaic words and pronunciations are studied and recorded for posterity.
Consider the word "ye" as in "Ye Olde Shoppe." We still see the word on signs where people want things to feel old, because it is a word we think we don't use anymore. People reading it probably pronounce it "yee" or maybe "yeh." Except the original word was spelled with an archaic letter called "thorn" that looks like a Y and isn't used in English anymore. It made a "th" sound, and the sign should be pronounced "The Old Shop." Thorn was replaced with Y when printing became popular, and people forgot it existed. We also have "yee" which is still used in some dialects (like Irish), but it considered archaic in American English. So when people saw the Ye Olde Shoppe signs, they forgot they knew how to pronounce the word already and assumed it was a different archaic word they remember they had forgotten, forgetting that they remembered the word in the first place.
Fascinating. I meant my other comment for those periods when not even recordings where available. In this case, that bit about poetry makes a lot of sense.