Learn to pluralize

Posted Jun 3, 2008 23:58 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Learn to pluralize by sbergman27
Parent article: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice

Phonetic spelling is a catastrophically bad idea for any language spoken 
outside a very restricted set of speakers, especially for a language as 
popular as English. Why? Because what's phonetic spelling for you is not 
phonetic spelling for a speaker who learned in Bangalore, or Perth, or, 
gods forbid, Glasgow. Go phonetic and suddenly nobody outside your local 
area spells the same way you do, and *still* virtually nothing you read 
makes phonetic sense (to you).

In the end I'd almost expect English to do what Chinese has done (although 
this might take a prolonged period of restricted global travel, so the 
post-petroleum era). Already we've got nearly-mutually-incomprehensible 
accents: given enough time and enough purely-written communication and you 
end up with multiple mutually incomprehensible languages sharing only a 
grammar and a writing system.

Chinese?

Posted Jun 4, 2008 2:52 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

AFAIU, in China there are lots of different languages (not dialects!) spoken. This is not a case of "dialects drifted apart", the (official) language is... just the official one.

Chinese?

Posted Jun 4, 2008 7:37 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, but they share a written form. They're mutually unintelligible, but 
only when *spoken*.

Chinese?

Posted Jun 4, 2008 15:53 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The difference between a dialect and a language is like the difference between a sub-species
and a full-blown species, it's a matter of degree and always arguable.

"A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy" is such a famous comment on this that it's
got a whole Wikipedia page devoted to it.

(All the below is based on book learning, I can't speak Chinese, and I don't know any actual
native Chinese speaking people well enough to interrogate them as to its accuracy, so caveat
emptor...)

The various Chinese "languages" today are closely related, and are all descended from Old
Chinese, just as today's English dialects are all descended from Old English, a language we
cannot understand today.

Indeed, although the written Chinese of a Wu speaker (from say, Shanghai) is not mutually
unintelligible with that of a Mandarin speaker (from say Beijing) as their speech would be,
they are certainly different and a native Chinese scholar would probably be able to tell you
whether an informal written note was written by a Wu speaker, it should be a much bigger
difference than you'd notice by the excess Zs in an American's writing, or the various
superfluous vowels in writing by an Englishman.

Phonetic spelling

Posted Jun 4, 2008 6:47 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

That is a bit of an exaggeration. Sure, the use of certain vowels (and even diphtongs) is not consistent across the whole English world, and there are some consonants which tend to vary a lot (the glottal stop is just a particularly surprising example, changing the 't' for a pause). But in no country is the 'k' in 'know' pronounced (and if so, it's time to drop it :). Likewise with most phonemes. IIRC Bryson says in "Mother tongue" that there are some 60-odd words pronounced the same as 'air', and that is not pretty.

'Phonetic spelling' just means there is a univocal correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but this correspondence doesn't have to be immutable: it can change throughout the globe. In Spanish we have more-or-less phonetic spelling, even though there are some 400 million native speakers in tens of countries, and it works. Actually, given that modern Spanish has mostly lost a few phonemes ('v' and 'b' are now the same, 'h' is silent, and 'll' is only pronounced in small areas of Castilla), I wish we went a little bit further along this way. Schoolboys and schoolmasters would be so grateful.

A bigger problem IMHO is that Latin was not a particularly rich language, what with 26 phonemes; some languages have 80+. Correspondingly, the Latin alphabet is quite poor. Trying to represent 9+ vowels with 5 signs is going to be difficult: witness the crazy patterns of accents and circumflexes in modern French. And consonants are even worse. But I agree with Steve, a bit of adaptation might go a long way.