I didn’t know about the IPA itself but I imagined something like it must exist for people who study sounds or something and didn’t understand why we couldn’t just use that. Or just spell everything phonetically like in Spanish. Hell, even defining a single-valued mapping form letters to sounds would be better than the bullshit we have today that wastes thousands of productive human-hours and makes the defacto universal language less accessible (as you can see I still have strong feelings about this, though I now know how to read and write).
I think a phonetic basis is probably an unusually poor design for a script, since it will either be drastically different for different speakers or will inevitably only be accurate for a small group of speakers. You can’t even say “just use General American English” since that has a number of variations. Some people pronounce “pen” and “pin” as the same (I do, for instance) while others pronounce them differently. And good luck convincing all of the English speakers around the world that you’ve chosen the optimal dialect for them to write!
On top of all of that, the way that we speak changes frequently. If we choose to change the script over time, it will be difficult for future readers to read the things written before them. On the other hand, if we keep it the same it will no longer be phonetic for future learners, so why bother changing systems!
It would definitely be possible to simplify the script though. Spanish is a lot simpler than English, but Spanish isn’t phonetic either.
Of course, that’s a lot to explain to a child who is overwhelmed by learning to read.
Wha’;s called “phonetic” in the context of education is at least partly phonemic...ie, given systematic differences in the spoken language, the letters can be interpreted differently.
This is a good point that spelling everything phonetically is probably not a great/sustainable way of writing a language. I’m wondering if there’s a word for “spelling system where each letter corresponds to exactly one sound but that sound can change with consistency based on regional dialect/inflection/other context”. I think Spanish is a great example of a relatively straightforward spelling system with regional dialects that generally preserves the consistent mapping of letters to sounds. Granted it has some oddities (like “h” having no sound, the redundancy of “s” and “c”, the “qu-” prefix, etc). I’m curious what historically caused languages like Spanish, and German to maintain much more logical spelling rules while neighboring languages from similar groups like English, French, and Danish do not.
I’m wondering if there’s a word for “spelling system where each letter corresponds to exactly one sound but that sound can change with consistency based on regional dialect/inflection/other context”.
I didn’t know about the IPA itself but I imagined something like it must exist for people who study sounds or something and didn’t understand why we couldn’t just use that. Or just spell everything phonetically like in Spanish. Hell, even defining a single-valued mapping form letters to sounds would be better than the bullshit we have today that wastes thousands of productive human-hours and makes the defacto universal language less accessible (as you can see I still have strong feelings about this, though I now know how to read and write).
I think a phonetic basis is probably an unusually poor design for a script, since it will either be drastically different for different speakers or will inevitably only be accurate for a small group of speakers. You can’t even say “just use General American English” since that has a number of variations. Some people pronounce “pen” and “pin” as the same (I do, for instance) while others pronounce them differently. And good luck convincing all of the English speakers around the world that you’ve chosen the optimal dialect for them to write!
On top of all of that, the way that we speak changes frequently. If we choose to change the script over time, it will be difficult for future readers to read the things written before them. On the other hand, if we keep it the same it will no longer be phonetic for future learners, so why bother changing systems!
It would definitely be possible to simplify the script though. Spanish is a lot simpler than English, but Spanish isn’t phonetic either.
Of course, that’s a lot to explain to a child who is overwhelmed by learning to read.
Wha’;s called “phonetic” in the context of education is at least partly phonemic...ie, given systematic differences in the spoken language, the letters can be interpreted differently.
This is a good point that spelling everything phonetically is probably not a great/sustainable way of writing a language. I’m wondering if there’s a word for “spelling system where each letter corresponds to exactly one sound but that sound can change with consistency based on regional dialect/inflection/other context”. I think Spanish is a great example of a relatively straightforward spelling system with regional dialects that generally preserves the consistent mapping of letters to sounds. Granted it has some oddities (like “h” having no sound, the redundancy of “s” and “c”, the “qu-” prefix, etc). I’m curious what historically caused languages like Spanish, and German to maintain much more logical spelling rules while neighboring languages from similar groups like English, French, and Danish do not.
There’s an implementation!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar