# Most Divergent Orthography? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 7, 2009, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267 "2009-01-07T19:39:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/21 "2009-01-08T17:53:07Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > The “high” registers of Tamil and Arabic are like Latin, while the spoken languages are like the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish, etc. It would be like if everyone in those countries used Latin for things like writing, making speeches, TV new broadcasts, but spoke the local Romance language in everyday life. Is it really that divergent? Because those languages (Latin, French, and Spanish) aren’t mutually intelligible and would be called a language family under other circumstances. (Yes, we all know the old saying…) It can be difficult for me to find out just how divergent the ‘dialects’ of Arabic are, for example, because there seems to be a strong desire (political, cultural, or both) to insist that all of ‘these people’ speak the same language. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/22 "2009-01-08T20:06:35Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > Is it really that divergent? Because those languages (Latin, French, and Spanish) aren’t mutually intelligible and would be called a language family under other circumstances. (Yes, we all know the old saying…) It can be difficult for me to find out just how divergent the ‘dialects’ of Arabic are, for example, because there seems to be a strong desire (political, cultural, or both) to insist that all of ‘these people’ speak the same language. They can be. I understand colloquial, spoken Bengali perfectly well and I can understand texts (usually children’s stories) writeen in colloquial Bengali. However, a television or newspaper news report? I understand maybe 25 to 50 percent of the vocabulary. Literature written in the “literary” form of the language? I understand even less of the vocabulary and the grammatical inflections are entirely different from the colloquial forms. Yet it’s all considered the same language – they’re all “standard” Bengali, not even separate regional dialects or varieties. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/23 "2009-01-08T20:25:12Z")
I’m fluent in Classical Arabic, but the regional dialects are largely unintelligible to me. I’m in the same position as someone who was fluent in Latin, trying to understand Spanish. One could recognize a word here and there, but not enough for real comprehension. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/24 "2009-01-08T22:03:02Z")
> [@acsenray](#): > > They can be. I understand colloquial, spoken Bengali perfectly well and I can understand texts (usually children’s stories) writeen in colloquial Bengali. However, a television or newspaper news report? I understand maybe 25 to 50 percent of the vocabulary. Literature written in the “literary” form of the language? I understand even less of the vocabulary and the grammatical inflections are entirely different from the colloquial forms. Yet it’s all considered the same language – they’re all “standard” Bengali, not even separate regional dialects or varieties. > [@Johanna](#): > > I’m fluent in Classical Arabic, but the regional dialects are largely unintelligible to me. I’m in the same position as someone who was fluent in Latin, trying to understand Spanish. One could recognize a word here and there, but not enough for real comprehension. Well, I can imagine you both get how this is frustrating for the very layman language geeks in the audience. Moreover, it means that if I ever decided to take Arabic or Bengali as a second language I’d be going in to a course that would be teaching me something far different and far less universal from what I might otherwise expect. It’s just this side of false advertising. **Johanna** : I remember reading a few years ago that the military had ‘Arabic’ translators and interpreters who only knew Modern Standard Arabic, and were less than useful when it came to dialectical forms used in, say, Iraq or Gaza. I filed that away somewhere in my head and it formed part of the impetus for this question, but I never imagined it would be as bad as that. [This article details the same problem at the FBI in 2002.](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E5DC143AF932A35755C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=) Now, why do I not imagine terrorist cells using nicely-enunciated MSA to communicate with each other? :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/25 "2009-01-08T22:10:19Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > For example, _smo fi’n gwbod_ (spoken, “I don’t know”) vs. _dydw i ddim yn gwybod_ (more formal, “I don’t know”) vs. _nid wyf yn gwybod_ (literary, “I don’t know”). And endless variations. But all pronounced exactly as written, given the orthographic conventions of the language. and they all sound like sheep gargling rocks… you need to take back your vowels from the hawaiians. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/26 "2009-01-08T22:28:40Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > you need to take back your vowels from the hawaiians. I know this is meant to be a joke, but just for argument’s sake … How is the vowel distribution here any different than it would be in English? Note that, in Welsh, _y_ and _w_ represent vowel sounds and digraphs like _dd_ also exist in English (_th_, _sh_, etc.). Indeed, I suspect that Welsh has fewer consonant clusters than English has (_st_, _str_, etc.) ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2009, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/27 "2009-01-09T02:20:54Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > But “fines homards” would be pronounced as feen omard. Nitpick: “homard” is masculine, and in any case, the adjective “fin” is pretty much never used with “homard”. However, the reason you pronounce “mes herbe” as “may zerb” and “mes homards” as “may omar” is a matter of _h muet_ vs. _h aspiré_. In one case, you treat the ‘h’ as though it’s not their, in the second, you treat it as a silent “phantom” consonant. There is no easy rule to knowing whether a leading ‘h’ is _muet_ or _aspiré_. > [@John\_Mace](#): > > And Japanese does have two syllabaries that are quite phonetic While it’s true that the Japanese syllabaries are quite regular, there are a few irregularities. は can either be pronounced /ha/ or /wa/, へ is either /he/ or /e/, and while the character う is usually used to stretch the /o/ vowel, sometimes you have to use お instead: see Tōkyō -\> とうきょう vs Ōsaka -\> おおさか. However, until fairly recently, writing used to be somewhat less regular. For example the phrase _Sō iu fū ni_ (“in that way”) was written as さういふふうに (Sau ifu fuu ni). Going back to before the Meiji period, there was also [hentaigana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana). Essentially, where modern Japanese uses one symbol per syllable, classical writers used, according to their whims, various different characters to express the same sound. It’s hard to give examples because those characters aren’t supported on computers but [this Japanese page](http://www.toride.com/~yuga/moji/kana.html) lists some common ones. [Here’s a text](http://herakles.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/makura/makura4/1/textL/1-01-0.htm) (the first page of The Pillow Book) written almost entirely in _hentaigana_. Despite what it may look like to a modern reader, there are almost no kanji in there. Compare the first sentence (ha-ru-ha-a-ke-ho-no) on the page with the modern standard usage: はるはあけほの and the variations on the list I linked to. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2009, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/28 "2009-01-09T15:41:21Z")
Note also that one’s _written_ language might not be the same as one’s _spoken_ language. Norway has quite a mess on it’s hands. It has two standard written forms and scads of dialects. Generally, people don’t actually talk exactly like any of the written forms and many people don’t even use the spoken form that most closely resembles the written form they know best. Start reading about the mess [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynorsk). Keep in mind the language issue is controversial so there is no such thing as an unbiased Wikipedia article. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2009, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267/29 "2009-01-11T04:53:03Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > **Johanna** : I remember reading a few years ago that the military had ‘Arabic’ translators and interpreters who only knew Modern Standard Arabic, and were less than useful when it came to dialectical forms used in, say, Iraq or Gaza. I filed that away somewhere in my head and it formed part of the impetus for this question, but I never imagined it would be as bad as that. [This article details the same problem at the FBI in 2002.](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E5DC143AF932A35755C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=) Now, why do I not imagine terrorist cells using nicely-enunciated MSA to communicate with each other? :rolleyes: I don’t know about the FBI, but I can tell you other parts of the intelligence community employ native speakers of the various Arabic dialects as linguists, and they are quite efficient at getting them translated. That’s in addition to linguists fluent in MSA, who can be either native speakers or well-educated Americans. Since MSA is used for writing all sorts of texts and documents (everything but cartoon balloons, comedy scripts, and internet chat), there is still a big demand for knowledge of it. Besides, many ideological Islamists insist on using Classical Arabic for religious reasons. > [@jovan](#): > > However, the reason you pronounce “mes herbe” as “may zerb” and “mes homards” as “may omar” is a matter of _h muet_ vs. _h aspiré_. In one case, you treat the ‘h’ as though it’s not their, in the second, you treat it as a silent “phantom” consonant. There is no easy rule to knowing whether a leading ‘h’ is _muet_ or _aspiré_. There is a fairly reliable way of predicting that, as long as you’re good at etymology. French words derived from Latin like _heure_ (\< L. _hora_) elide with the preceding word. Words of Germanic (usually Frankish) origin don’t elide-- e.g. [_haie_](http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/haie) ‘hedge’ from Frankish _hagja_; or _hutte_ ‘hut’ from German _Hütte_. As for [_homard_](http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/homard), it’s derived from German _Hummer_. The verb [_haïr_](http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha%C3%AFr) ‘to hate’ is derived from Frankish _hatjan_. The reason is, the letter _h_ had ceased to be pronounced in Vulgar Latin centuries before it became French. Meanwhile, the language spoken by the Franks still had a pronounced h. So as long as Frankish was still a living language, there were bilingual speakers who kept the pronunciation of _h_ alive in French as well, and by the time Frankish died out, and its _h_ stopped being pronounced, the absence of elision for those words had already been established in French. See [http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/forum/post.php?tid=3425&qid=108915](http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/forum/post.php?tid=3425&qid=108915) – > [@](#): > > Il n’y a pas de règle grammaticale pour distinguer les “h” aspirés des “h” qui ne le sont pas. C’est une question d’étymologie ; il faut opérer une distinction entre les mots dont l’origine est latine et ceux dont l’origine est germanique, francique, anglaise. > > Dans les premiers, le “h” ne sera pas aspiré, dans les seconds, le “h” est aspiré et se comporte comme une consonne. 'There is no grammatical rule to distinguish the aspirated _h_s from those that aren’t. It’s a question of etymology: you have to distinguish between words whose origin is Latin from those whose origin is Germanic, Frankish, or English. In the former, the _h_ won’t be aspirated; in the latter, the _h_ is aspirated and behaves like a consonant.’ In Modern French, calling the non-eliding initial _h-_ “aspirated” is of course not literally true; the point is, it used to be aspirated, and has left behind a trace of that. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-divergent-orthography/480267.md?page=1)