English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of words where it isn't clear what is the correct pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of letters together there are only a few possible pronunciations, often exactly one.
I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.
There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid!
We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.
> We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
We're still taught very basic phonetic rules in English. Like how vowels have a long sound and a short sound, where "ee" is the long e sound, or "<vowel> <consonant> e" triggers the long sound for that vowel. But you're also taught that many words are exceptions (e.g. bear vs beard). And you learn there are patterns to the exceptions, like how "ea," if it doesn't sound like "ee," will sound like a short e, like in "head" or "breadth," and particularly in cases like "dream - dreamt" or "leap - leapt."
And if you do a lot of reading as a kid, you vaguely recognize in the back of your mind some words that seem to follow a different set of pronunciation rules not taught in school (e.g. rouge, mirage, entourage, entrée, matinée, parfait, buffet, memoir, soirée, patois), which you learn implicitly. I remember this as a kid, only later learning those were French.
And this lets you guess pretty well how you'd pronounce a word. Just with basic rules and a lot of input to learn from, you can guess how to pronounce pretty much anything with good accuracy, because there are rules, and even a logic to the exceptions, but the rules are overlapping, so it's more like a set of rules you choose from.
I'd liken it to machine learning. You can learn the rules without even being taught the rules, like I did in the case of French loan words. And there are probably rules we follow without even realizing it, just instinctively thinking it's the natural way to pronounce the word without knowing why.
I'm not saying it's as good as being as phonetic as Italian, but it's not like we just have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of every word as though it were a structureless string of letters and a corresponding, unrelated sound.
You can frequently do that in English too. Of course there are exceptions, but if anything it's typically because of words/names from other languages.
In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match its pronunciation.
Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.)
English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.
1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel.
2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects.
3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it.
4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
> English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
That's not really true -- there is and was a great deal of dialect diversity within England itself. It was widespread printing that allowed languages to be standardized at the scale of nation-states in the first place: the divergences that developed after the age of sail were reversing convergence that had only begun a couple of hundred years earlier.
And although versions of English from the south and east of England became the basis for modern standard English, other dialects persisted and sometimes spread around the world, so some of the differences between English dialects globally are due to disparate influences from different dialects originating within the British Isles.
being fluent in a language makes you less likely to be interested in a second when everyone speaks the first. This plays out over generations in killing the less common languages.
There is a still a lot more linguistic diversity in Italy than across the entire English speaking world.
e.g. Northern Italian languages are technically more closely related to Gallo-Romance languages from the other side of the Alps than to standard Italian.
I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography?
I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?
> I think you're trying to to argue something like:
I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before.
Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
This is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not.
Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet.
Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.
The door vowel placed between P and L would make the word 'Paul' or 'pall' in most English accents. If I imagine 'door' with the pool vowel, I get something like a Scottish pronunciation of 'dour'.
I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.
That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc.
Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
We're discussing features of written language ("phonetic" -- or the etymologically related "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems by their relationship to spoken language.
> Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic
"Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language.
> They even have two fully regular alphabets
I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)
Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It quite literally is relating to spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?
> Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though?
It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language.
But it is not a feature of a spoken language.
> Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language.
But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)
It absolutely is a feature of spoken languages. It is in contrast to vocalizations, specifically because it is about speech and not just the sounds animals can make.
I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes different languages have. If you had to cover all vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit more trouble.
"phonetics" is about speech, but the noun "phonetics" is not the adjective "phonetic" as applied to a language. "phonetic" is not a modifier that applies to spoken language (with the hypothetical caveat I gave upthread), and even if it was, it would have a different definition than the one that applies to non-spoken language and is about the relation such a language has to a spoken language, so trying to redirect to it in a discussion of that use of the adjective "phonetic" would be equivocation, argumentative conflation of different definitions of the same word.
It is hard for me to read this. You seem to have given up on capital letters. And sentences. I don't like criticizing run-on sentences as being indicative of bad thinking; but I do literally feel you grasping here.
I'm largely comfortable with the idea that there is something lacking in the orthography of English. Fully comfortable, even. I'm growing frustrated with how many are pushing the idea that it is not phonetic. The system is literally to convey, in writing, the words that you would speak in English. And the word "phonetic" captures that perfectly.
If you want to argue that we are building a new use of the word "phonetic" applied to writing that supersedes "orthography" and related terms. You do you. It still seems nonsensical to me and only works if you ignore that we have an alphabet that is literally used to convey speech sounds.
The issue at the start of the conversation is not about speaking or gesturing. It is about using the Latin alphabet properly (i.e. phonetically, as it was designed) or "with some imagination" as the English does.
The alphabet is used to communicate the spoken words. Not the concepts or something else, literally the spoken words. Is a big part of why slang is so popular in fiction settings, as they would use the letter to convey pronunciation. Because the letters generally represent phonemes.
Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is.
The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.