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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This is clever:

> The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear.

I see nothing wrong in principle with diacritics (I use two languages that require them daily, in addition to English) but given the dire state of internationalization this makes it easier for foreign software to support Kazakh, and fits their entire language in the ASCII plane.

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I guess not using diacriticals makes computing easier, but it's silly to claim that use (or non-use) of diacritical marks can make sounds disappear.

If specific sounds in Kazakh disappear because "they were written the same", it merely means that the particular sound distinction was already being phased out in the spoken language. If the sound distinction is gone, separate symbols won't save them. It will merely become yet another opaque spelling rule for children to memorize.

English "th" represents two different sounds, and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused with each other.

The sentence from the article is ambiguous. It's not clear that "rare use" refers to rare use of the diacriticals or of the sounds themselves. If the latter, their claim makes sense — the sounds are already rarely used, so aren't worth enshrining in the alphabet.

> English "th" represents two different sounds

Three main ones (excluding compounds where it's really a “t” next to an “h” that aren't related): in IPA terms, they are θ,ð, and t.

> and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused with each other.

English speakers do okay because they learn fairly quickly that written English isn't phonetic and you just have to memorize spelling, not because of a lack of ambiguity.

Nothing about “Thai” vs. “thigh” vs. “thy” tells you which “th” sound each uses (and in pronunciation, the “th” sound is the only difference between them) except knowing what each word is as a rule unto itself.

I don't think English spelling not being perceived as phonetic does much here. For example, a lot of Russian speakers think Russian spelling is phonetic, and yet there has been no shift to pronounce words as written there either, as is surely the case in most other languages: there are not many writing systems that are truly phonetic, and often this happens because the spoken language has shifted away from the written form.

To say nothing of the regional accents in England where "th" is often pronounced the same as "f".

In which case it would still only be three distinct realizations: [f v t].

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