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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.

It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new ones and how linguists can reconstruct old languages that have no written records.

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Pronunciation drifts in all languages. But usually languages take some effort to have either a clear mapping from spelling to pronunciation (when you read it you can pronounce it) or from pronunciation to spelling (when you can pronounce it you can spell it); or some compromise that tries to achieve both. Hence when pronunciation drifts too far that eventually causes the word to be spelt differently too.

Meanwhile English seems to have spelling set mostly in stone hundreds of years ago, and any shifts in pronunciation since then are just ignored (barring minor reforms like the ou->o thing that part of the world adopted)

People are very resistant to spelling reform, and it doesn't help that english has enough accents/regions where it is spoken, that no unified spelling is going to be sensible for all english speakers.

I mean, look at Carnegie's attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

some wins, but didn't go anywhere, really

The other thing is English speaking world hasn't had a government with enough authoritarian power to rationalize spelling and pronunciation. So pronunciation and spelling is all historical convention. Which it used to also be in most places until the government rationalized the language. This is the same reason people in the US still use English units. The government isn't willing to force the issue.

One advantage of the disconnect between spoken and written is old English literature since the great vowel shift is still readily accessible. Go back 500 years and the spoken language would be difficult but written would be easy.

> This is the same reason people in the US still use English units.

US customary units aren't English (or Imperial) units; even the ones that share names sometimes aren't the same, and not just because of the minor adjustments when the US customary system was redefined in metric terms.

The spoken language might be easier than you'd guess.

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s to see what our best understanding of Shakespeare actually sounded like. It is surprisingly easy to understand.

They also found that he had some bawdy jokes that rhymed for his audience which no longer do rhyme. :-)

How does mapping spelling to sound work in languages like English that have homophones?

"wear", "where", "were-" (as in werewolf), "weir" (in some regional dialects) can all be pronounced identically in modern English. If we map them all to a single spelling, is that an improvement to readability and understanding?

English has plenty of words that have different meanings but are are spelled and pronounced the same. An arm is either a limb or a weapon. A break is either a pause or a physical defect. A trunk can be a piece of clothing, a part of a tree, a cloth-covered chest, or the rear compartment of an automobile. A bat can be an animal or a stick. And while some of these words are related, some have completely different origins and just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same in contemporary English. The stick "bat" is from Old English batt, derived from Welsh and Celtic, the mammal from Middle English bakke, derived from Old Swedisch/Danish/Norse.

If you "cleaned up" English spelling, the same would happen with wear, where and were-. If the distinction were important for understanding, it would be equally important in spoken language and the pronunciations wouldn't have converged.

English is drifting as we speak, literally.

Look at the shifts going on right now in the great lakes area. Lots of vowels are changing around.

Charlie Berens is a comedian that focuses on great lakes and midwestern life. His accent, though suped up for views, is somewhat representative of the state of the vowel changes going on right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKFReM16N4Q

English is drifting as we speak, literally.

Ha, nice :)

English's two most common other intensifiers, "really" and "very" (verily), got their start the same way.

Did they? I'd love an article about that if you have one handy.

It's not but the Great Vowel Shift happened after spellings were standardized and was a pretty big change.

For me the worst part is that my last name, Clough, was originally spelled that way to indicate it used English's guttural sound before that sound got dropped from the language and all the words with that sound got their own new pronunciations. E.g., "Though through rough boughs I push my way."

Nice!

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