I recently read a book set in Poland. The author included a pronunciation key, which was fortunate, because I never would have figured out that “Kollataj” was pronounced “Kaw-wohn-tie”.
Why is spelling in some foreign nations not phonetic? German is phonetic-- not speaking German, I could read aloud a written passage, and a native speaker probably would be able to understand it. When Japanese is written in Roman letters, it’s written phonetically. I can read Latin because each letter makes the “expected” sound in English.
I guess my question comes down to this: why did some cultures assign different sounds to Roman letters? . . . . why make things unecessarily complicated? The Polish use the “Y” sound wherever a “J” is written-- why not just use the “Y”? It’s not as if letters didn’t exist which would stand for those sounds. Why did they feel the need to use “cz” to stand for the “ch” sound? In Spanish, why use “LL” for a “Y” sound? In short-- why not give each letter its Latin pronunciation?
I assume many of these cultures had their own forms of writing before the Roman alphabet dominated. Why would they use different letter combinations to make sounds which can easily be made through the “usual” combinations in the Roman alphabet?
The Roman alphabet is simply a set of symbols. You can ascribe different phonetic values to the symbols. Even in English we do that. Through = throo. Rough = ruff. Cough = coff. Bough = bow. Etc. What does “ough” represent?
Now look at how Spanish, Polish, etc use the letters of the Roman alphabet to represent different sounds. At least they are fairly consistent.
Try pinyin - the Romanized version of Mandarin Chinese. “c” = a “ts” sound. “zh” = a “j” sound. “z” = a “dz” sound. (Assuming “ts”, “j” and “dz” mean what you think they mean.)
There is an inernational phonetic alphabet - here which has a mathematical style consistency.
Conservatism? I think linguists like to preserve the history of language as to where the words originated. So the pronunciation of letters in the new language preserves the pronunciation in the old.
What surprises me is that English is one of the most polyglot having taken words from all of the various invaders. The British Isles are way off the northwest corner of Europe with a water barrier besides while Germany is right smack in the middle where invaders can march back and forth through it. You would expect German to be more irregular in spelling and pronunciation than English, but the reverse seems to be the case.
There isn’t a one-toone mapping between sounds and letters, so German wouldn’t meet the requirements for a phonetic alphabet like IPA, but the pronunciation of “Schwein” is perfectly regular: “Sch”+“w”+“ei”+“n”, without any ambiguity.
I know how “schwein” is supposed to be pronounced, but the OP’s point was that the letters in other languages did not make their expected sounds in English. If one were to “phonetically” pronounce the word according to the letters’ expected English values, one would not get the proper German pronounciation since the rules for German pronounciatin are different from English.
Over centuries, words end up getting mispronounced while the original spelling is preserved. “Ghost” was originally pronounced with a gutteral “gh” that no one outside of Scotland bothers with anymore. The word that we spell as “jail” is still spelled by the British as “gaol” (g as in giant, long A, o, l). For that matter do you always pronounce “the” with a long E?
Actually, German has a ‘Y’ sound for a ‘J’ too. In fact, the IPA symbol for that sound is /j/.
And for that matter, Latin does not pronounce its vowels the same as English. Long-E in Latin is pronounced the same as a long-A in English, long-I the same as long-E in English. The reason for this is that English underwent a sound shift among some of its vowels after the spelling had been largely standardized, so the English “standard” vowels are not the same as in other European languages. Also, the short-A sound in many English dialects (including most American ones) is not found in most other languages.
BTW, many German dialects, including standard German, pronounce W as /v/ and V as /f/. This was also the result of a pronunciation shift after the spelling had been standardized. So I suspect that you would mispronounce many words when reading Latin or German
Languages change, pronunciations of words change. But usually the spelling and the letters used don’t.
Different languages have started out with the same word, or very similar, spelt the same way, but then headed in different directions. This is why some languages end up pronouncing the same letters in totally different ways.
Latin is a dead language. It doesn’t change.
German has gone through wholescale spelling reforms, in order to attempt to keep spelling in line with the spoken language. That’s never occurred in English.
>Why is spelling in some foreign nations not phonetic?
I’m going to guess that, because you ask about “foreign nations” without saying which nation isn’t foreign, or which one you call home, that you are American. I am, too, and that seems like the sort of thing we usually do. Pardon me if I guessed wrong. That being said, we pronounce our V like an F only using the vocal cords. The Romans pronounced this like we pronounce W. I can’t remember - maybe there are more examples. So, we do it too.
You do realize, do you not, that in Latin also, the letter “J” (or equivalently, “I”: There’s no distinction between the two) is pronounced like an English “Y”? And the Latin letter which looks like a Y is a borrowed Greek upsilon, which has a u-like pronounciation. So one might just as well ask why the English letter which looks like an upsilon is pronounced like a “J”.
So, “Julius” would have been pronounced “Yoo-li-us?”
I knew that in Latin, the “J” was interchangable with the “I”, because I’ve seen the name “Jane” rendered in Latin as “Iana”. However, I thought that it was pronounced the same-- much like the word “read” in English, context would determine pronunciation.
I know that some letters we use are not part of the original Latin alphabet-- what I was wondering was why when there is a letter (or combination thereof) established in Latin to represent a sound, why some languages use different letters to express the same thing.
Gaelic is a good example of this. Sometimes, you can’t really even hazard a guess how to pronounce a word based on the spelling.
Actually, it represents a very specific sound, and all words that end in -ough rhymed at one point. But English evolved; the sound represented by “-gh” (a velar fricative like the German “Ach”) vanished from the language, the the pure “-ou” sound (best represented by “through”) underwent shifts.
But to change spellings due a change in sound is to make language of the past incomprehesible. It also causes problems when different locations pronounce the same word differently. Do you say ta-may-toe or ta-mah-to? What is served by having multiple spellings of the same word?
I’d like to point out that in Polish there are two characters that look like an ‘l’. Because of the similarity they are usually both typed as ‘l’. One is pronounced like ‘l’, the other like ‘w’.
Hijack : Is it then related to the french “geôle” whih has a rather similar pronounciation? ( I just looked it up, the french word comes from the vulgar latin “caveola”)
Second hijack : I thought about an example of what you were saying, and “Volk” came to my mind. However, it’s obviously (well…at least I assume so) to the english word “folk”.
So, here’s my issue. If the pronunciation switch happened quite recently in German, which means, I assume, that it was originally pronounced /v/olk, how comes it now sounds like the english word? Was the word originally pronounced “volk” and an identical switch took place in both languages at a difrent time? Or was it originally pronounced “folk”, and the pronouncition didn’t change in english, while it switched twice in German : folk —> volk ----> folk again? Both hypothesis seem strange.
That’s more or less how I always heard it being pronouced. In french we call him “Jules”, so in this case, it’s pronounced like a modern “J” . But when someone, for some reason, use the latin form “Julius”, he pronounces the name , as far as I can tell, “Yoo-li-oos” (not “Yoo-li-us”).
Thank you for posting that! That is the alphabet my forensic/drama teacher* used in his classes. I’d searched unsuccessfully for it online more than once, but I couldn’t recall the proper name for it.
*He is also a speech therapist, and taught Inter-personal communications as well as being the Debate/Forensics coach for our school.