Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

The transition in spelling from "colos" to "color" did not have anything with culture, but it has correctly reflected a change in the pronunciation of the word.

English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it.

So for the case of English, you are right that spelling is a cultural artefact, but not for the case of most languages, including Latin.

The oscillations in the spelling of Old French were caused by the fact that French had acquired some vowels that did not exist in Latin, e.g. front rounded vowels, so the French speakers did not know what Latin letters should be used to write them, and there existed no standardizing institution to choose some official spelling.

View on HN

> English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it.

That is true, but it's a trade-off made for other benefits. Why is there a silent "g" in "sign"? Because it provides semantic meaning - it preserves its connection to works like signatory, signature, significant, signal, etc. While English spelling doesn't always help you pronounce the word, it does help you identify its meaning. If it was spelled "sine" or "sin" (if you choose to also do away with silent "e"s in your spelling reform) that connection would be weakened or lost.

Also, this has a lot to do with the pronunciation of words changing over time and drifting out of sync with the spelling, but the spelling not changing to match the new pronunciation in order to preserve the aforementioned connection with similar words.

I don't know if the "g" in "sign" was pronounced at some point, but other silent letters today exist because the Norman scribes used them to indicate sounds that were in fact pronounced by the Anglo-Saxons at the time, such as the oft-maligned "ough" - a sound which has pretty much entirely disappeared from modern English (but as I understand can still be found in an extant distant relative: Dutch).

Does the dutch phrase "Acht en tachtig kleine kacheltje" contain a few "ough"? I am trying to figure out if your "ough" is like "ach", "och" or cough, rough, plough

Spelling is in every case a cultural artefact, even for languages more phonetic than English. Such an orthography still needs to make choices about what distinctions to reflect in writing (e.g. should the orthography reflect regular and predictable allophony? voicing assimilation? final obstruent devoicing?) and there's no correct answer to this, there are only various trade-offs.

Colos to color was indeed part of a common sound change in early Latin (e.g. floses > flores), and led to new spelling, but many later substantive changes in Latin did not lead to any changes in spelling (e.g. the palatalisation of /k/ before front vowels). Similarly, English spelling used to change regularly to reflect changes in pronunciation, until Middle English, when it suddenly stopped and became largely fixed. And yet other languages continued to evolve orthographically after that point (e.g. major Czech spelling reforms in the 19th century). Why?

All of this is entirely cultural. In certain societies and at certain times, language users will prefer phonetic spellings, and in other societies and at other times they will prefer etymological ones. Sometimes spellings can evolve dramatically in a short span of time, at other times they seem eternal and utterly immovable. Language is deeply cultural.

The spelling of a word is one thing, the writing system of a language is another thing.

Of course, the writing system of each language is a cultural artefact, which differs from the writing systems of other languages for various historical reasons.

On the other hand, for most languages the spelling of a word is determined by uniform rules, which are the same for most words, with the possible exception of a small number of words, typically recent loanwords from other languages.

In such languages for most words the spelling is not a "cultural artefact", but it is determined by the rules of the writing system, which have nothing to do with that individual word.

Few if any languages have, like English, words that come from a great multitude of sources, where each source had different spelling rules, so that now, when seeing a written word, one cannot guess which spelling rules have been applied to it, unless one knows the history of that individual word.

How are spelling rules anything other than a cultural artefact? They are invented by a person or group of people and then agreed upon and implemented by a larger group. Then the rules are obeyed or not on a case by case basis by an even larger group of people. Arguably language itself is not a cultural artefact. But distinctions between languages and all attempts to describe or prescribe their use are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com