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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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English orthography is awful. Hard "c" AND soft "c"? Are you crazy? How about that "k" that is already the hard c sound? It should be "kat" and "kar". And it only goes downhill from there (or their?!?).
We should clean it up someday. But we'll probably end up with LOL-WTF-speak.
Some of the low hanging fruit would just be to pick one pronunciation of "oo" and stick with it:
The problem is that English has far more vowel sounds than vowels. And that's without even having certain sounds that are common in other languages like "ü".
Linguistics would teach that it is the orthography that is flawed. The English language has many vowel sounds, more than most languages. But as you demonstrate, the orthography "lumps" many of them together. Which, again, is why I think English orthography is awful.
There's a great article at Wikipedia, scroll down to the "Vowels" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology
There's a link the the article above to this page, which I don't suggest viewing on your phone. It has a great effort to document vowels across dialects of English, scroll down again to the huge table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects
Be careful, the linguistics "rabbit hole" is deep (but fascinating)!
Thanks, I really like the IPA and I wish it were something that was taught in high school. It would be great if people were competent at reading it and could maybe use it to explain how something sounds. It's hard enough that English has such flawed orthography. Then you add the fact that there are dozens of English dialects and it only makes things more complicated.
Do you know about Dr. Geoff Lindsey's YouTube channel?
https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey
I do not know about that channel. I will check it out, thanks!
His topics are really interesting, hope you enjoy them like I did.
It's not all bad. The varied spellings of English help with visual pattern recognition and increased reading speed.
That must have already happened and we got the Geordie accent from it!