Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if we could get rid on the English language as the world's dominant language altogether. The pronunciation rules are completely crazy.

I recently visited Indonesia, and people who spoke Indonesian were surprised how good my Indonesian pronunciation was. Apart from some food, I didn't understand a word of Indonesian, but in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong. Unless you're a native English speaker, in which case all the crazy mangled pronunciation you've grown up with gets in the way.

A lot of languages from totally different corners of the world have agree on pronunciation, and have practically identical rules for it. A few exceptions, like English and French, seem to require mangling it beyond all recognition.

View on HN

The primary role of a language is as a medium to transmit information from one location to another. English has developed from origins with traditional diversity of culture (anywhere British Empire), and, as a result, most of the words and phrases have an awesome Hamming distance.

Basically, two things.

1. English words are extremely robust to shitty pronunciation.

2. Communication in modern American-English is extremely robust to shitty grammar.

You're suffering under some illusions. When you say

> in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong

two things are going on.

1. Most languages are confined to a fairly small area, so their phonology is "more or less" similar everywhere. (This is the minor effect.)

2. Read it like it's written, and you'll go badly wrong in many Indonesian-speaking communities. This sort of "the sound is perfectly represented by the spelling" spelling is only possible by designating a particular region's pronunciation as "correct" and all the others as "wrong" (compare e.g. the Mexican and Spanish pronunciations of "azul"). Of, say, British, Australian, and US english, which would you anoint as the master form?

Indonesia is actually a pretty large an diverse country, but I haven't visited all corners, so I have no idea how much pronunciation of Bahasa Indonesia varies.

However, such differences are primarily differences in accent. Basic pronunciation is still the same. Sure Brits may say 'ah' where Americans might say 'ay', but they don't suddenly pronounce the 'gh' in 'enough' in a different way. Apart from some differences in idiom (pissed), they can understand each other perfectly. Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of: some English speakers pronounce the 'r', some skip it.

> Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of

There's always more out there than we're aware of. One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning).

> such differences are primarily differences in accent

These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.

Australian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)?

Or wi kud jast meyk Inglish speling ruls mor sensibl.

That requires that each sound is replaced with a letter.

There are more sounds than letters AFAIK. http://w3.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS05/efs/materials/PhonSymb...

He has used a dipthong in the middle of meyk.

Det iz vaj ju invent nju leters, lajk č for sendvič, or š for ader šit.

Weird, I've never seen people use j for that sound. They go for y (like y in yast or yet).

Slavic languages use it that way. For example polish "jest" starts with the same sound as yeast.

Not only that, but in Serbo-Croatian, in latin script, "nj" is a digraph for the ɲ phoneme. (A very small number of words, mostly of Latin origin, can cause ambivalence because they have "n" and "j" juxtaposed but are meant to properly be pronounced separately, e.g. "konjugacija" /con-yu-gatsiya/ (conjugation)). In fact, correct transcription of "new" would really be "nju" (but only in Serbian, there is no transcription of foreign words in Croatian), so you have "Njujork" for "New York".

German uses it that way too (ja, Jürgen, etc.).

What languages have you looked at? It's very common in northern Europe.

You're only interested in phonemes ("The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning" - [1]), not sounds. For example, the "th" in "thin" and "this" or "i" in "see" and "sit" and "happy" etc., even though they are different sounds, they are the same phonemes - substituting one for the other will not change the meaning of the word, it will just make other people think you have a strange accent.

Also, you can combine letters - e.g. keep "naive" the same, but write "fayv" instead of "faiv" for "five" to indicate a diphthong. And keep "ship" the same, but write "shiip" for "sheep" to indicate a long "i" sound.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Sorry but I don't think you're right about [ð] (this) and [θ] (thin) being a phoneme. For one, most native English speakers hear a difference if you ask them, and it does seem possible to find a minimal pair, that is, two words that mean different things in English but differ only in those two sounds. (e.g. thigh vs. thy)

A better example of a phoneme in English is the aspirated and non-aspirated [p] sound (transcribed as [pʰ] for aspirated). It's just the difference between holding in a bunch of air and pushing it out, and most English people can't hear a difference.

Edit: I may have been confused, were you just pointing these out as being all different phonemes?

You're right, there might be minimal pairs, but for most words the exact pronunciation doesn't matter - like there is a minimal pair for [i] and [i:] (ship/sheep, beach/bitch), but (1) not everyone can pronounce it, so often you must be able to infer the meaning from the context, and (2) for most words it doesn't matter (see, thin, happy, ...)

Or wee cood just mayk Inglish spelin roolz mor sensibl. But ov cors wee wood aw af too agree too yooz th Ampsheer aksent, or I coodnt reed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com