All right, I do know Chinese and, to an extent, Japanese are character-based, but for written languages that are based on alphabets, are they all phonetic except for English? Spanish and Italian, for example are phonetic, as is French if you ignore the silent one or several letters at the ends of words, and so is modern Vietnamese. I learned the Russian and Greek alphabets so I could puzzle out signs when I traveled to those places, and they also seemed to be phonetic. I’ve tried to do the same with the Khmer languages like Thai, Laotian, and Cambodian, but that alphabet just baffles me.
I’ve heard that other languages have modernized spellings to stay in sync with pronunciation. Why hasn’t English done that?
I wouldn’t call Japanese fully phonetic. There’s some interpretation with characters, where す may be “su” or “s” depending on the part of the word it’s in, the sentence, or the speaker, し can be “shi” or “sh” and whether you pronoucne the i depends on what follows the character to a great degree, く is “ku” or something similar to a glottalized “k” depending on context. I’m sure it also doesn’t describe some dialects very well, but I’m not certain of that. It’s mostly phonetic, but it’s certainly not perfectly phonetic.
Basically, it depends on when the language got its writing system, how much the sounds of the language has changed since then, and how flexible they are about adjusting the spelling.
English has the additional drawback of uniting widely divergent dialects, so we (like the Chinese) keep the written form fairly fixed in the hopes of promoting mutual intelligibility.
ETA: as to the “why hasn’t English changed the spelling,” you’d have to get the English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Canadians, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Nigerians, Indians, and several other nations to agree on the reforms, all against the vested interests of the publishing industry, English teachers, and other people who benefit from the status quo. Not likely!
The correct term in this context is phonemic, not phonetic. The question should be, do other languages have writing systems in which one symbol corresponds to one phoneme and vice versa.
No, non-English languages have different levels of phone-osity.
The Bengali writing system is less phonetic than the Hindi writing system, but more phonetic than English.
Finnish has a fantastically phonetic orthography.
Not so much Danish/Swedish/Norwegian, which are less phonetic than German. (Or so they seem to me. I haven’t really been able to figure out how to connect Scandinavian orthography to phones.)
OP: do you mean, is there a one-to-one mapping between the writing system and the pronunciation in languages other than English? No, that’s definitely not the case in all languages. You yourself point out that it’s not the case with French. In many cases, the same letter/letter combination in French represents two or more sounds, and the same sound can be realized by different letter combinations. I believe both English and French had their spelling mostly set in stone before their pronunciation shifted to what it is today. And they certainly aren’t the only two languages for which this is true.
And let’s not mention how the variety of dialects in some languages might affect how “phonetic” they seem.
I have noticed that all the languages I learned for singing: Latin, Italian, German, French and Spanish, while not all phonemic, all at least seem to have very easy to follow rules. What languages besides English do not have regular rules.
Yes, I know that English does have rules, but there are so many, and even more irregulars, while most languages I have even passing familiarity with do not have this problem to any real extent. Besides those above, it includes Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and even Irish.
Ah, that explains why I couldn’t get 14-down to work!
Anyway, in Vietnamese, there is also some difference in letters at the beginning of words vs. ends. “CH” in particular. However, it’s not (for example) pronounced differently in at the end of one word from how it’s pronounced at the end of another word. In Vietnamese, as in many languages, you can predict the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling. Is that true in every language but English?
If that’s too vague, then answer this: are there homographs that aren’t homophones in other languages? Examples: I wind my watch when the wind blows. I’d like to polish off some of that Polish sausage. Close the door that’s close to the street.
Also, point taken about the geographic dispersion of English. However, why isn’t the same thing affecting other languages? Spanish in particular, but also French, Italian, and possibly Dutch.
Tibetan has the lowest correspondence between the written characters and the pronounced sounds of any language’s alphabet that I’ve ever seen. The notoriously wretched orthography of English seems like Spanish or Finnish in regularity of sound/symbol correspondence, compared to Tibetan.
*Excluding, obviously, writing systems that don’t represent sounds, e.g. Chinese characters.
For example:
The name that is written Bka’ brgyud is pronounced Kagyu.
First place, French is almost as bad as English. For example, there are six words with five different spellings, all pronounced “ver”. (For the record, vert, verre, vers, vaire, and ver). If you don’t know it, I defy you to guess how the Chateau d’Oex (in French Switzerland) is pronounced.
Sounds like “day” more or less.
Second, English spelling makes no claim to be phonetic; it is morphological. Consider the words “finite” and “infinite”. If you tried to spell them phonetically, they would not look related. Then there are historical accidents. I haven’t counted lately, but “ough” has something like 8 different pronunciations. Now it used to be something like the sound in German “Loch”. But most dialects of English lost that sound. But different dialects changed it in different ways. And then speakers of all those different dialects descended upon London and there was chaos until, for each word, a “received pronunciation” emerged (who received it?) Still chaos, I guess.
The book Sound Patterns of English by Chomsky and Halle has, early on, the claim that by and large the English orthography is well suited to the needs of English and they then defend this claim. They make a pretty good case.
Once again, the correct term for these alphabets is phonemic—not that laypeople would care about this.
There’s only one transcription system that’s truly phonetic: the International Phonetic Alphabet—which is vastly more complex than the phonemic alphabet of any one language. A given phoneme in a given language is like an umbrella that can cover a number of different sounds, called allophones, which nevertheless are perceived by speakers as all the same “letter.” The phonetic differences between the allophones are ignored, and generally not even perceived (until someone with a foreign accent pronounces them a little differently). A phoneme is like a cubbyhole into which a number of allophones can be collected, and all considered equivalent for the purposes of the speakers. In any language, the number of phonetic sounds is much larger than the limited set of phonemes—and the purpose of an alphabet is to transcribe the phonemes. If you’ve ever seen a language’s phonetic sounds transcribed into the IPA, it needs lots more symbols than there are letters in its alphabet.
I’m not a linguist, cunning or otherwise, but it seems to me that the Zhuyin Fuhao transcription system, AKA “Bopomofo” for standard Mandarin dialect might be pretty close. Mandarin has a pretty simple system of sounds (which BTW accounts for all the cursed homophones) and Bopomofo was created “artificially” as a purpose-made transcription system.
Which ones? Well, hiccough obviously, because that’s exclusively British, but also … plough? That’s the way I would spell it. There is also bough though, which even Firefox would have to concede. The ones you missed are like ought, bought, fought, and one from the name McCullogh.
So other languages, notably French, has homophones. But do they have homographs that aren’t also homophones? Do they have “phonemes” that sound different from word to word? The only example I can think of is French where ent (I think) is silent at the end of a verb, but not a noun.
