Phonetic spelling

Posted Jun 4, 2008 6:47 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Learn to pluralize by nix
Parent article: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice

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.