# Germanic language with the most consistent spelling



## Nino83

Hello everybody. 

How would you rank Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic) from that with the most consistent spelling to that with the most inaccurate one? 

For example, I know that Danish has something like 35 vowels (this is why "A 15-month-old Croatian child understands approximately 150 words, while a Danish child of the same age understands just 84 on average." http://www.krusekronicle.com/kruse_...es-irritable-vowel-syndrome.html#.U3Hn4vl_uBQ) and the spelling is not so consistent ([æ] [ɑ] and [a] can be written with /a/ or /e/, [ɛ] with /e/, /æ/ or /i/, [ɔ] with /o/ or /å/, [o] with /o/ or /u/, [ø] [œ] and [ɶ] with /y/ or /ø/, the _soft d_ (transcribed as [ð̞ˠ̠]) that sounds like an [ɫ], _silent h_ (before _v_), _d_ (after _l, n, r_) and _e_ (after _r_), non-initial /p/ /t/ /k/ are pronounced * [d] [g] and /v/ /r/ and /g/ as [ʊ̯] [ɐ̯] and [ɪ̯]/[ʊ̯] in syllable coda). 

So probably Danish language has the worst spelling system. 

Is there any Germanic language which is read (almost) as it is written (like Italian or Spanish)? 
The main reason why English spelling reforms were rejected is that there are too many English accents so it's unlikely to reach an agreement. 
Why does nobody propose to reform Danish orthographic system (seing that it is spoken only in Denmark)?*


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## Frank78

Nino83 said:


> H
> Is there any Germanic language which is read (almost) as it is written (like Italian or Spanish)?



German is "spoken as its written" to quite a high degree but I'm unable to compare to any other language than English.

Here you have all the sounds: http://www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/de/le..._Ursula_Bock/phonetik/beispielw__rter_ipa.pdf


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## ahvalj

To perform a major reform of an orthographic system is almost as difficult as to change any other primary habit of adult people: more so, since orthography is one of the bases of the visual orientation of a literate person, its significant change is akin to, say, a change in the way the person moves. One is suggested to forget the old locomotory skills and to learn new ones. This is the reason why major reforms were extremely rare in history and were mostly tied with the change of an alphabet. I cannot imagine any major reform in e. g. English not involving a switch to a completely different (non-Roman) writing system. Yu jast cænt meik piipl to rait in æ touteli nyu wei widhaut æbændening ol thæ vizhuæl links tu thæ priivies sistem.

I think, indeed, German and Dutch orthographies are the least troublesome. Swedish and Norwegian have major problems with the letter _o _and with omitting the pitch tone.


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## Nino83

Frank78 said:


> German is "spoken as its written" to quite a high degree but I'm unable to compare to any other language than English.
> 
> Here you have all the sounds: http://www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/de/le..._Ursula_Bock/phonetik/beispielw__rter_ipa.pdf



Thank you. 
So hasn't German "silent letters"? 
Are vowels and diphtongs written always with the same letters/diagraphs (for example [iː] is always written "ie" in open syllables)? 
Wouldn't be better to write final /b/ /d/ /g/ with /p/ /t/ /k/?



ahvalj said:


> This is the reason why major reforms were extremely rare in history and were mostly tied with the change of an alphabet. I cannot imagine any major reform in e. g. English not involving a switch to a completely different (non-Roman) writing system. Yu jast cænt meik piipl to rait in æ touteli nyu wei widhaut æbændening ol thæ vizhuæl links tu thæ priivies sistem.



Why non-Roman? 
English doesn't have problems with consonants. Removing silent letters would be sufficient (*k*nife, *w*rite, wa*l*k, shou*l*d, i*s*land, de*b*t, bom*b*, lis*t*en). 
For example, it's not necessary to write "vi*zh*uæl". The rule is simple, unstressed "s" before "ju" is a [ʒ], as in Italian a "c" before "e, i" is a [ʧ]. It's sufficient to write "vis*i*ual (with an "i", or "j" or "y" before the "u") or as it is "visual". 
If we're speaking about vowels, they could make the "silent e" rule more consistent (ar, hav, liv, giv) (or write diphthong as they are pronounced, as you did in you comment, it was very clear to read, but this second change would be too drastic), eliminate the few irregular "ea" (breik, greit, steik, si), "ei" (why not "seeze" instead of "seize", "receeve" instead of "receive"?), the "ough" words (thaut, thru, tho, drout, cof, tuf). 

It's not important to write every single vowel exactly as it sounds (there is the IPA for this purpose). It's sufficient to have few diagraphs with regular rules.


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## ahvalj

Nino83 said:


> Why non-Roman?
> English doesn't have problems with consonants. Removing silent letters would be sufficient (*k*nife, *w*rite, wa*l*k, shou*l*d, i*s*land, de*b*t, bom*b*, lis*t*en).
> For example, it's not necessary to write "vi*zh*uæl". The rule is simple, unstressed "s" before "ju" is a [ʒ], as in Italian a "c" before "e, i" is a [ʧ]. It's sufficient to write "vis*i*ual (with an "i", or "j" or "y" before the "u") or as it is "visual".
> If we're speaking about vowels, they could make the "silent e" rule more consistent (ar, hav, liv, giv) (or write diphthong as they are pronounced, as you did in you comment, it was very clear to read, but this second change would be too drastic), eliminate the few irregular "ea" (breik, greit, steik, si), "ei" (why not "seeze" instead of "seize", "receeve" instead of "receive"?), the "ough" words (thaut, thru, tho, drout, cof, tuf).
> 
> It's not important to write every single vowel exactly as it sounds (there is the IPA for this purpose). It's sufficient to have few diagraphs with regular rules.


Well, then why _feel_ and _feeling_ and not _fele_ and _feling_? _Read_ and not _rede_? _Breath_ and not _breth_? _Wait_ and not _wate_? _With_ and not _widh_ (cp. _myth_)? What happens in the Latin borrowings with the open and closed syllables (_confuse/confusion_ but _provide/provision_). What about the permanently unstressed vowels (_bottom_)? And what about latest borrowings that do not follow these rules (_machine instead of mashene_)? If they start correcting all these inconsistencies, the overall aspect of the text will change drastically. Hence my comment about the non-Roman script.


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## bearded

@ Ahvalj
Just a marginal remark or Randbemerkung:  your ''caent meik'' in #3 reveals that you adopt the US pronunciation, since a Briton would probably have written ''caant meik''.  Now suppose a different alphabet was accepted to the purpose of making orthography consistent with pronunciation: what would happen with those words that are being written in the same way but pronounced differently here and there?  Would there be two or more orthographies of English? Thank you for letting me know your idea.


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## ahvalj

bearded man said:


> @ Ahvalj
> Just a marginal remark or Randbemerkung:  your ''caent meik'' in #3 reveals that you adopt the US pronunciation, since a Briton would probably have written ''caant meik''.  Now suppose a different alphabet was accepted to the purpose of making orthography consistent with pronunciation: what would happen with those words that are being written in the same way but pronounced differently here and there?  Would there be two or more orthographies of English? Thank you for letting me know your idea.


I am actually not suggesting any change: in contrast, I am trying to explain why it most probably won't happen (at least, without major geopolitical and cultural shifts). The new orthography, if eventually introduced, should of course be a result of a broad consensus, to be applicable to all the regional literary variants. In cases like _can't _there probably will be separate spellings for each pronunciation (e. g. _cænt_ and _cant_).


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## Nino83

ahvalj said:


> The new orthography, if eventually introduced, should of course be a result of a broad consensus, to be applicable to all the regional literary variants. In cases like _can't _there probably will be separate spellings for each pronunciation (e. g. _cænt_ and _cant_).



The important thing is the correspondence between grapheme and phoneme (short /a/ can be pronounced [a] or [æ], this wouldn't be a real problem).


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## Frank78

Nino83 said:


> Thank you.
> So hasn't German "silent letters"?
> Are vowels and diphtongs written always with the same letters/diagraphs (for example [iː] is always written "ie" in open syllables)?
> Wouldn't be better to write final /b/ /d/ /g/ with /p/ /t/ /k/?



That's why I wrote "to a high degree". Final obstruent devoicing speaks against it.

Real silent letter are rare in German, no example comes to my mind right now. Even If they are not spoken they have a function, e.g. the h in "stehen" indicates that the preceding vowel must be spoken long.


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## ahvalj

German has a number of cases when the distinction between long and short vowels remains not reflected in the orthography. Thus, probably Dutch (+Afrikaans) should be considered the Germanic language with the most consistent spelling.


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## Nino83

Frank78 said:


> Real silent letter are rare in German, no example comes to my mind right now. Even If they are not spoken they have a function, e.g. the h in "stehen" indicates that the preceding vowel must be spoken long.



Thank you. So would it be correct to say that German and Dutch have the most accurate orthography, English and Danish the least one and Swedish and Norwegian are in the middle? 
And Icelandic? Does anyone know something about it?


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## ahvalj

Nino83 said:


> Thank you. So would it be correct to say that German and Dutch have the most accurate orthography, English and Danish the least one and Swedish and Norwegian are in the middle?
> And Icelandic? Does anyone know something about it?


Icelandic is pretty regular: the problem is that the rules are too numerous (a bit like French: every letter in certain circumstances has only one reading, you just have to memorize each of these zillion circumstances). Faroese has a very historical orthography, like English, if not more. But the most complicated is probably Frisian.


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## itreius

Dutch has some inconsistencies in its orthography, -lijk and -en immediately spring to mind, although the orthography as a whole is fairly straight-forward. Certainly much more intuitive for me than the Danish one.


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## Nino83

ahvalj said:


> Icelandic is pretty regular: the problem is that the rules are too numerous (a bit like French: every letter in certain circumstances has only one reading, you just have to memorize each of these zillion circumstances). Faroese has a very historical orthography, like English, if not more. But the most complicated is probably Frisian.



Thanks. 
Where would you put Icelandic? Before or after Swedish and Norwegian?


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> The important thing is the correspondence between grapheme and phoneme (short /a/ can be pronounced [a] or [æ], this wouldn't be a real problem).


That *is *exactly the problem. In British English* _can't_ does *not *contain a short /a/ but a long /ɑ:/ and in American English* this would collide phonemically with a short <o>.

________________
_*Of course simplified. There are dialects in both countries where this is not true._


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> That *is *exactly the problem. In British English* _can't_ does *not *contain a short /a/ but a long /ɑ:/ and in American English* this would collide phonemically be a short <o>_._



Ah, ok. Oxford Learner's Dictionary is clear on the matter (BrE has an [æ] in can and an [ɑ:] in can't, quite irregular). 
So things would be complicated with open vowels.


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## ahvalj

Nino83 said:


> Thanks.
> Where would you put Icelandic? Before or after Swedish and Norwegian?


Icelandic pronunciation is 100% deducible from the orthography, if I am not mistaken (well, except the shortenings and assimilations in the less careful speech), hence before Swedish and Norwegian, but the rules are much, much more numerous and the overall phonetic aspect of the language is much more different from the written image, not less than in Danish. In principle, you can try to pronounce the Swedish text in an Italian way (not forgetting the initial stress and a few basic rules) and you most likely will be understood (I heard an Italian colleague doing this), which is definitely not so in Icelandic and Danish.


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## berndf

Frank78 said:


> Real silent letter are rare in German, no example comes to my mind right now. Even If they are not spoken they have a function, e.g. the h in "stehen" indicates that the preceding vowel must be spoken long.


But you have no way to predict, e.g. if /ʃlaːfən/ produces _schlafen, *schlaafen_ or *_schlahfen_. There are ambiguities spelling->pronunciation (mainly the non-marking of vowel length, stress and morpheme-boundary (_Wachstube_ could be _Wach-stube_ or _Wachs-tube_)) and there are ambiguities pronunciation->spelling.


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## Stoggler

itreius said:


> Dutch has some inconsistencies in its orthography, -lijk and -en immediately spring to mind, although the orthography as a whole is fairly straight-forward. Certainly much more intuitive for me than the Danish one.



True but such inconsistencies (or exceptions if you will) are rare compared to most other languages and it takes little effort to learn them.


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## Nino83

So it would be: Dutch, German (vowel lenght ambiguities), Swedish, then Icelandic (predictability but too many rules), Norwegian, Danish.


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## Stoggler

Nino83 said:


> So it would be: Dutch, German (vowel lenght ambiguities), Swedish, then Icelandic (predictability but too many rules), Norwegian, Danish.



Why are Norwegian and Swedish split by Icelandic?  

And what about the two written standards for Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk)?  How do they fit into the equation?

I can't speak for Nynorsk but the standard Norwegian courses you can buy in bookshops here cover Bokmål and that seems more consistent than Swedish to me (I am on thin ice with Norwegian though - I can talk about Swedish and that has issues with the sk- and sj spellings, nothing too difficult but there are inconsistencies in their spellings)


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## Nino83

Stoggler said:


> Why are Norwegian and Swedish split by Icelandic?



I don't know  (I made a supposition)
Is there a great difference between Bokmål and Danish in spelling?


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## itreius

Written Bokmaal and Danish are close, but the first is a better representation of speech than the latter.


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## Stoggler

Nino83 said:


> Is there a great difference between Bokmål and Danish in spelling?



I don't think there are major differences between the two written languages - they are very similar in writing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Norwegian_Bokmål_and_Standard_Danish

The spoken languages though are a different matter


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## Nino83

So would you put Norwegian (Bokmål) between Swedish and Icelandic?


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## Dib

As far as I understand, as a matter of official stand, Norwegian has no standard pronunciation nor any standard spoken language. Both Bokmål and Nynorsk are supposed to be purely written languages. Things may be a bit less diverse in practice, but that certainly adds another level of "problem"?


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## ahvalj

So, speaking purely of consistency, for those who like charts (not a Russian habit, I should confess), I would suggest something like this:
Dutch/Afrikaans (well thought and consistent, looking much better than sounding ,-)
Icelandic (highly etymological but very consistent spelling)
Soviet Yiddish (with all vowels marked and basically no redundant letters for _x_ etc., though with some troubles as to the Slavic borrowings and influences)
German (_v/f_, vowel length, _-h-_)
Swedish/Bokmål/Nynorsk (ambiguous _o_, no pitch tone marked, _sk-/sj-/skj-/stj-_, _j-/dj-/gj-_)
Faroese (extremely etymological but rather consistent spelling)
English (etymological and rather inconsistent spelling)
Frisian (not well established spelling)
Danish (etymological and rather inconsistent spelling, no stød marked)
traditional Yiddish (part of vowels omitted, historical spelling of Hebrew words).


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> Soviet Yiddish (with all vowels marked and basically no redundant letters for _x_ etc., though with some troubles as to the Slavic borrowings and influences)


What do you mean by "Soviet Yiddish"? The YIVO standard (which is based on the Lithuanian dialect)?


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## ahvalj

berndf said:


> What do you mean by "Soviet Yiddish"? The YIVO standard?


I am not an expert and I am based on the comments in the manuals and overviews: it was the orthography used e. g. in the newspaper _Sovyetish Heymland_ and in the books edited in the USSR. Wikipedia states (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_orthography):

_The first action formally undertaken by a government was in the Soviet Union in 1920, which prescribed the abolition of the separate etymological orthography for words of Semitic (i.e., Hebrew and Aramaic) origin. This was extended twelve years later with the elimination of the five separate final-form consonants (as indicated in the table below) which were, however, widely reintroduced in 1961. The changes are both illustrated in the way the name of the author Sholem Aleichem is written. His own work uses the form שלום־עליכם but in Soviet publication this is respelled phonetically to שאָלעמ־אלײכעמ also dispensing with the separate final-form mem and using the initial/medial form instead. This can be seen, together with a respelling of the name of the protagonist of his Tevye der milkhiker (originally טביה, changed to טעוויע), by comparing the title pages of that work in the U.S. and Soviet editions illustrated next to this paragraph. Note also the Germanized מילכיגער (milkhiger) in the former exemplifying another widespread trend, daytshmerish, discussed further below._


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## berndf

Interesting, thank you. I didn't know such a convention existed. The YIVO standard also unifies some variant spellings but it never went so far as to respell Hebrew and Aramaic words or abolish ף ,ן ,ם ,ך and ץ.


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## Nino83

ahvalj said:


> So, speaking purely of consistency, for those who like charts (not a Russian habit, I should confess), I would suggest something like this:



Thank you for the chart!


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## Dan2

A couple of tangential comments if I may...


Nino83 said:


> I know that Danish has something like 35 vowels


Danish certainly has a lot of vowels, but I think it's unwise to make a statement like this without more specificity.  Danish certainly doesn't have anything like 35 vowel _phonemes_, so the number 35 clearly includes allophones.  Then the question arises of how different two sounds have to be to call them different allophones.  American English has about 15 phonemically distinct vowels and diphthongs, but the number of allophones is not clearly defined.  For ex., the words "bet", "bed", and "Ben" would all be said to contain the same vowel phoneme, but the vowel if "bet" is distinctly shorter than that of the other two.  Of the other two, the vowel of "Ben" is partially nasalized.  With respect to these three words then, do we have just one allophone (since the vowel quality in all of these words is essentially [ɛ]) or two (long vs short) or three?  With effort I might be able to identify 35 or even more "vowels" for American English.


Nino83 said:


> The  main reason why English spelling reforms were rejected is that there  are too many English accents so it's unlikely to reach an agreement.


This is often said, but I think it represents a misunderstanding.  No one is suggesting replacing English orthography with something like IPA, which would require choosing an absolute pronunciation for each word.  Rather, spellings would simply be made more consistent.  Here's an example of how dialectal variation is much less important than one might think:  One can distinguish about a half-dozen dialectically different pronunciations of the word "heart" ([hɑrt], [hart], [hɑ:t], [ha:t], etc.) and yet speakers with every one of these pronunciations would agree on the following: a) "heart" has an exceptional spelling, b) "heart" rhymes with "part" and "cart", c) respelling it as "hart" (even if unwise for other reasons) would make its spelling regular.  So the dialectal variation here is irrelevant to spelling reform. Similarly, a British friend and I pronounce "go" and "got" quite differently from one another, but we would both insist that "go" and "got" are absolutely fine spellings for these words.

Sure, there are some cases where major dialects have irreconcilable differences (Amer vs Brit "can't", "bath", etc.), but claiming that it's impossible to "fix" thousands of irregular spellings because a small residue of inconsistencies would remain is illogical.

But there _are _good reasons to reject a major spelling reform for English: the loss of continuity with earlier texts; the obscuring of relationships between words ("nation" and "democrat" have different vowel phonemes compared to "national" and "democracy"); the obscuring of relationships across languages (words like "nation" and "democracy" exist in other important languages); the difficulties that would be imposed on generations alive during the change (as pointed out by ahvalj); and an aesthetic sense that many of us have that the appearance of "phonetic" English is quite unappealing.  (I personally would favor the respelling of only a small handful of words that are not part of paradigms and that give natives and foreigners a lot of problems, like "through" and "though".)


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> Danish certainly doesn't have anything like 35 vowel _phonemes_, so the number 35 clearly includes allophones.



Yes but the "problem" is that in Danish, often, these vowels overlap so the same sound in the same circumstances is written with different letters. For example, in Brazilian Portuguese you have _ represented by /i/ or final unstressed /e/ but no word ends with an /i/ so you can predict whether the sound  is a written /i/ or /e/. 
If you can't predict how the same sound is written, the spelling is, simply, inconsistent. 



Dan2 said:



			This is often said, but I think it represents a misunderstanding.  No one is suggesting replacing English orthography with something like IPA, which would require choosing an absolute pronunciation for each word. (I personally would favor the respelling of only a small handful of words that are not part of paradigms and that give natives and foreigners a lot of problems, like "through" and "though".)
		
Click to expand...


In fact I supported spelling reform of ough words, the removing of the silent letters (that are never pronounced), and to make the "silent e" rule more consistent (in verbs like have, give etc.). The fact that "nation" and "nationality" have a different vowel is due to the fact that the first is stressed and the second has a secondary stress, so it's not a problem if the change is always the same (from [eɪ] to [æ], as in n*a*tion/n*a*tionality and in n*a*ture/n*a*turalistic). The rule is found and the spelling is consistent._


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Yes but the "problem" is that in Danish, often, these vowels overlap so the same sound in the same circumstances is written with different letters. For example, in Brazilian Portuguese you have _ represented by /i/ or final unstressed /e/ but no word ends with an /i/ so you can predict whether the sound  is a written /i/ or /e/.
> If you can't predict how the same sound is written, the spelling is, simply, inconsistent._


_I'd say the opposite is true. In "consistent" spelling, each grapheme should always represent the same phoneme, independently of how it is realized.



Nino83 said:



			The fact that "nation" and "nationality" have a different vowel is due to the fact that the first is stressed and the second has a secondary stress, so it's not a problem if the change is always the same (from [eɪ] to [æ], as in n*a*tion/n*a*tionality and in n*a*ture/n*a*turalistic). The rule is found and the spelling is consistent.
		
Click to expand...

That is the situation we have now (lots of at hoc rules to explain certain shifts). If this is not a problem for you you don't need a reform at all._


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## Nino83

In fact (for me) it would be sufficient to remove exceptions (why to write _break_ or _receive_?). 
About regular shifts, I don't understand why _n*a*ture_ and _n*a*tural_ don't have the same vowel (another exception?). 
Finally, I think that if a language have all these exceptions to the rule, there won't be any system which can make spelling consistent without obscuring the relationship between words.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> About regular shifts, I don't understand why _n*a*ture_ and _n*a*tural_ don't have the same vowel (another exception?).


I don't really know. Interesting question. The MED gives states the pronunciation with three long vowels ([na:tu:ra:l]). I only guess that a three syllable word with long vowels in all three syllables was too cumbersome and two vowels were shortened ([natu:ral]).


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## Nino83

According to Oxford Dictionary: [ˈneɪtʃə(r)] and [ˈnætʃrəl] (so the /u/ is elided and the /a/ shortened). 
With these changes it's impossible to have your cake and eat it.


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## berndf

Yea, that's what I said, both /a:/s were shortened. The /u:/ is not elided. Its post-great-vowel-shift-reflex in an unstressed syllable is [ʃ(ə)].


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## Nino83

So is it [ˈnætʃərəl]?


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> So is it [ˈnætʃərəl]?


In my experience there is free variation between [ˈnætʃərəl] and [ˈnætʃrəl] (see phonetic transcription in Webster's).

You might even call it an _arbitrariness of transcription_: The realization of some Schwas can be _very _reduced so it almost doesn't matter anymore, if it is audible or not. You would still "feel" it. It is similar to the "flüchtiges e" phenomenon in German (_unsre_ vs. _unsere_).


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## Ben Jamin

Nino83 said:


> Thank you.
> So hasn't German "silent letters"?
> Are vowels and diphtongs written always with the same letters/diagraphs (for example [iː] is always written "ie" in open syllables)?
> Wouldn't be better to write final /b/ /d/ /g/ with /p/ /t/ /k/?
> 
> 
> 
> Why non-Roman?
> English doesn't have problems with consonants. Removing silent letters would be sufficient (*k*nife, *w*rite, wa*l*k, shou*l*d, i*s*land, de*b*t, bom*b*, lis*t*en).
> For example, it's not necessary to write "vi*zh*uæl". The rule is simple, unstressed "s" before "ju" is a [ʒ], as in Italian a "c" before "e, i" is a [ʧ]. It's sufficient to write "vis*i*ual (with an "i", or "j" or "y" before the "u") or as it is "visual".
> If we're speaking about vowels, they could make the "silent e" rule more consistent (ar, hav, liv, giv) (or write diphthong as they are pronounced, as you did in you comment, it was very clear to read, but this second change would be too drastic), eliminate the few irregular "ea" (breik, greit, steik, si), "ei" (why not "seeze" instead of "seize", "receeve" instead of "receive"?), the "ough" words (thaut, thru, tho, drout, cof, tuf).
> 
> It's not important to write every single vowel exactly as it sounds (there is the IPA for this purpose). It's sufficient to have few diagraphs with regular rules.



You just quote the simple words in English, but what about Cholmondeley, Worcestershire, cough, dough, voicing or not voicing of intervocalic "s", and many others?


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## Nino83

Ben Jamin said:


> You just quote the simple words in English, but what about Cholmondeley, Worcestershire, cough, dough, voicing or not voicing of intervocalic "s", and many others?



_Cough_ is _cof_, _dough_ has the same vowel of _though_ (_tho_). 
I agree with you but it's better (I think) to have less exceptions than more ones. 
Anyway, it's clear that it's no use reforming English spelling, seeing that the word _n*a*tion_ (stressed /a/ in open syllable) has an [eɪ]), _n*a*tional_ (stressed /a/ in open syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) has an [æ] while _n*a*tionhood_ (equal to _national_) has an [eɪ]. It impossible to put toghether consistent spelling preserving, at the same time, ethymological relationships.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Anyway, it's clear that it's no use reforming English spelling, seeing that the word _n*a*tion_ (stressed /a/ in open syllable) has an [eɪ]), _n*a*tional_ (stressed /a/ in open syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) has an [æ] while _n*a*tionhood_ (equal to _national_) has an [eɪ]. It impossible to put toghether consistent spelling preserving, at the same time, ethymological relationships.


You could add markers for long short and reduced varieties of a vowel, e.g. macron for long, nothing for short and breve for reduced, _nation > nāshŏn, national > nashŏnăl, nationhood > nāshŏnhud_. That would be a compromise between etymological and phonemic spelling. Not that I advocate it but at least it doesn't look too awful.


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## Peterdg

I don't know why you consider Dutch spelling consistent. (my mother tongue is Dutch).

First of all, you have no way to know where the stress of a word falls. However, you need to know where the stress of the word falls to be able to deduct the pronunciation of a vowel (you need to be able to determine if a syllable is open or closed and stressed to know if a single written vowel has to be pronounced long or short).

E.g.: "bedelen". If the stress falls on the the first syllable, you pronounce the first "e" long and it means "to beg". If the stress falls on the second "e", then that one is pronounced long and it means "to endow".

Second, you have "ij" and "ei". In some cases, they are pronounced exactly the same, in other cases "ij" is pronounced as a schwa.

Third, you have "au" and "ou" which are pronounced exactly the same.

Then there are the eternal "s", "c", "k" ambiguities. "Sex" in English is written "seks" in Dutch. Don't ask me why.

We also have the problem of the intermediate "n" in compound words: that is a real disaster. In a compound word consisting of two independent existing nouns, you have to write an intermediate "n" if the first noun only has a plural in "n". If it also has a plural in "s" (or only has a plural in "s"), the you don't write the intermediate "n". So far so good: then you have what they call the "petrified" cases: some words don't follow the above rule because "they are petrified". Only God knows why, and even then...

I can go on and on about our spelling but the base line is that nobody can write correctly in Dutch. 

I have written this post without any spelling checker. When I write in the Spanish forum, I always do that without spelling checker. When I want to write something in the Dutch forum (my own mother tongue for Pete's sake), I do not dare to post without passing what I have written through a spelling checker first. Sad, very sad.

BTW: Since I was born, we have had at least 4 spelling reforms and none of them has made it any better.


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## Nino83

I'd distinguish between accent and other orthographic matters. 
For example, also in Italian there are minimal pairs differing in accent (lèggere, to read, leggère, lighweight f. pl.). I'd be in favor of marking the accent when it doesn't fall on the penultimate syllable (as in Portuguese or Spanish). 

The problem of English language is that the same written letter with the same accent is often pronounced in a different manner (unpredictability). 
In Dutch, have vowels the same pronunciation when they are stressed? Is it easy to determine if a syllable is open or closed? 
If the answer is yes, I don't see many problems. 



berndf said:


> You could add markers for long short and reduced varieties of a vowel, e.g. macron for long, nothing for short and breve for reduced.



If I'm not wrong, long vowels are present only in stressed syllables (is it right?), so for me it would be sufficient to introduce two accents: grave accent (`) for long vowels and (´) for short vowel (to use only when the stress doesn't fall on the first syllable). 
So: n*à*tion, n*a*tional, n*a*tion*á*lity, n*à*tionhood. 

Anyway, the introduction of accents would be healty in (some) Germanic languages (and in Italian, as in the example above).


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## ahvalj

Yes, mea culpa, I haven't thought about _ei_/_ij_ and _ou_/_au_ and minor problems in Dutch. It turns out that the most consistent spelling is found in Icelandic, which seems really odd considering the complexity of the etymological Icelandic orthography. Anyway, these four languages — Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic and German — have the least problematic orthographies of all the Germanic languages. The Soviet Yiddish, which had the most consistent orthography in the 30—50's, was spoiled later, and in any case seems to be dead now.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> If I'm not wrong, long vowels are present only in stressed syllables (is it right?), so for me it would be sufficient to introduce two accents: grave accent (`) for long vowels and (´) for short vowel (to use only when the stress doesn't fall on the first syllable).
> So: n*à*tion, n*a*tional, n*a*tion*á*lity, n*à*tionhood.
> 
> Anyway, the introduction of accents would be healty in (some) Germanic languages (and in Italian, as in the example above).


Remember, Germanic distinguishes three and not just two levels of stress and also three quantities and not just two, so marking primary stress alone wouldn't suffice. In your example you would lose the information that the unaccented <a> in _nationálity_ is short and not reduced while the <o> is reduced. In my notations that would be marked: _nashŏnalĭty_. The shortcoming of my notation would be that primary and secondary stress aren't distinguished.


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## Nino83

Yes but often secondary stress is predictable (e.g. stress-reduced-secondary or secondary-unstressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed), i.e the secondary stress doesn't fall immediately before or after the stressed syllable. 
My notation shows where the primary stress is. 

EDIT: It's not always so, e.g. ass*ò*ci*à*tion. So also my notation is not able to show where the primary stress is.


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## Testing1234567

Why don't we just use IPA to write English, for that matter.


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## Peterdg

Testing1234567 said:


> Why don't we just use IPA to write English, for that matter.


Because of this:


Dan2 said:


> No one is suggesting replacing English orthography with something like IPA, *which would require choosing an absolute pronunciation for each word*.


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## Hulalessar

Nino83 said:


> How would you rank Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic) from that with the most consistent spelling to that with the most inaccurate one?



It is implicit in the question that the ideal is a system where there is an exact correspondence between grapheme and phoneme, that is each grapheme represents only one phoneme and each phoneme is only represented by one grapheme, and that "consistency" is the measure of how far an orthography departs from that ideal. Orthographies are classified as being "shallow" (like Spanish) or "deep" (like English). It is comparatively easy to compare shallow orthographies with each other and conclude which is the most consistent. The task is more difficult with deep orthographies because of the amount of information you need to collect. Whilst no orthography is completely chaotic, there are some (like English) for which the best you can do is to set out what may be called the basic values of each grapheme and announce that the exceptions are many and various. In some cases (like German) the rules are basically there but quite complex so that they are not learned as such, but rather absorbed after being exposed to a sufficient number of examples. Two principles apply to German. One is to preserve the identity of morphemes;  "Bad" and "Bader" are both written with <d> even though its value is different in each case. The other is to avoid homophones being represented by homographs. The same principles apply to English, though there are other reasons for the complexity of the orthography. These two principles actually serve a useful purpose. Whilst they may be a burden to the writer, they are a benefit to the reader who has control of the system.

We are apt to forget that, whilst writing and speech are related, they are two different things. Since the system of alphabetic writing is predicated on the basis that graphemes represent phonemes, we are inclined to think that that is all they do (even if in some cases imperfectly). In fact they are also direct signs for the thing which the sounds of speech are signs for. I can imagine the possibility of learning Latvian from a book without knowing how it should be pronounced and getting to an advanced stage where I could read Latvian newspapers and understand everything. Taking it a stage further, I can also see the possibility (mainly theoretical!) of learning Georgian without any assigning any sound values to the letters and reaching the same level of reading competence. In either case whether the system is deep or shallow would be irrelevant.

From the perspective of learners, whether native speakers as children learning to read and write or foreigners learning a second language, the ideal system is a perfect shallow orthography. Also, any language can in fact be written with a perfect shallow orthography without any significant loss of meaning - indeed many languages are written with (near) perfect shallow orthographies. It should not though be assumed that deep orthographies do not have some benefits.


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## Nino83

After reading about the Great Vowel Shift and the Trisyllabic Laxing, I can say that English orthography is "consistent" enough and pronunciation is sufficiently predictable but after all this work (a big work, harder than French orthography) there are a lot (some hundred words) of exceptions. 

The words having a "long open e" in ME which now have a "short e" (more than 36 words, e.g "bread" vs. "lead", ofter before /t, d, th, -sure, -sant/), words with /ʌ/ but spelled with "ou" (double, country, enough, nourish, often before /Cle, ough, rage, rish),  or "o" (some, above, nothing, often before /n, m, v, th/), word with /u:/ spelled with "ou", "ui" (often French loans) or "o" (do, who, move, prove), words with /ou/ spelled "ou" (e.g. soul). There are also verbs like "have", "give" and so on. 

Is it so important to retain these spellings for historical reasons (I'd mantain, for example, spellings like book/foot, but is it so important to mantain, for example, very few exceptions like blood/flood?)? 

Without these exceptions, it would be sufficient to study the GVS and the trisyllabic laxing, in order to understand English orthography.


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## berndf

By eliminating these exceptions you wouldn't study the GVS but you fake it. You would pretend a level of consistency that has never existed.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> By eliminating these exceptions you wouldn't study the GVS but you fake it. You would pretend a level of consistency that has never existed.



It would be true for the "ea" spelling but what about the "o" spelling in words like "some", "son", "nothing", "above"? Weren't they pronounced with the same vowel (short "u") in Middle English? 
It seems that it was just in ME inconsistent.


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## berndf

The distinction between late ME and early ModE vowel shifts are of course totally artificial. There was first a merger of short o and u for the words affected and then these merged vowels shifted to /ʌ/ in southern dialects. The modern spelling reflects the state just before the first of the two shifts.

PS: To make things even more complicated, some of the shifts form short o to /ʌ/ happens later, e.g. in "one" which still have has a short o in dialects that lack the shift to /ʌ/. In those dialects "London" has a short u and "one" a short "o".


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## Stoggler

Peterdg said:


> I don't know why you consider Dutch spelling consistent. (my mother tongue is Dutch).
> 
> First of all, you have no way to know where the stress of a word falls. However, you need to know where the stress of the word falls to be able to deduct the pronunciation of a vowel (you need to be able to determine if a syllable is open or closed and stressed to know if a single written vowel has to be pronounced long or short).
> 
> E.g.: "bedelen". If the stress falls on the the first syllable, you pronounce the first "e" long and it means "to beg". If the stress falls on the second "e", then that one is pronounced long and it means "to endow".
> 
> Second, you have "ij" and "ei". In some cases, they are pronounced exactly the same, in other cases "ij" is pronounced as a schwa.
> 
> Third, you have "au" and "ou" which are pronounced exactly the same.
> 
> Then there are the eternal "s", "c", "k" ambiguities. "Sex" in English is written "seks" in Dutch. Don't ask me why.
> 
> We also have the problem of the intermediate "n" in compound words: that is a real disaster. In a compound word consisting of two independent existing nouns, you have to write an intermediate "n" if the first noun only has a plural in "n". If it also has a plural in "s" (or only has a plural in "s"), the you don't write the intermediate "n". So far so good: then you have what they call the "petrified" cases: some words don't follow the above rule because "they are petrified". Only God knows why, and even then...
> 
> I can go on and on about our spelling but the base line is that nobody can write correctly in Dutch.
> 
> I have written this post without any spelling checker. When I write in the Spanish forum, I always do that without spelling checker. When I want to write something in the Dutch forum (my own mother tongue for Pete's sake), I do not dare to post without passing what I have written through a spelling checker first. Sad, very sad.
> 
> BTW: Since I was born, we have had at least 4 spelling reforms and none of them has made it any better.



Fascinating reading the thoughts of a native Dutch speaker on Dutch othography, as for me (as a learner) I found Dutch spelling really easy.  Yes, there are some irregularities and the intermediate n is a problem, but overall I never had any issues with it.  I wonder if having to learn English spelling with all of its intricacies made a language like Dutch (and similarly Swedish, another language whose spelling is fairly easy but with a number of things to be look out for) easy in comparison.


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## Hulalessar

Whilst there is a lot of complaining about deep orthographies, the fact is, ignoring those with cognitive disorders, that most people taught to read and write in fact master them almost completely. Even someone declared to be "not very good at spelling" will spell most words correctly and only rarely misread words they actually know. No one has problems giving the correct pronunciation of words ending in "-ough". Some may confuse "their" and "there" but not spell either "thair" on an analogy with "hair". The "irregularities" of orthography are coped with in the same way as the "irregularities" of speech.

Deep orthographies do of course take longer to learn and no one providing a language with writing for the first time is going to come up with a system as complex as French or English. However, no system is so chaotic or complex that it is not mastered by most people by the time they leave school. It may be thought that time spent learning to master deep orthographies could be better spent doing something else, or certainly something less tedious, but in practice the education of the British, French and Germans (for example) does not suffer compared with the education of the Spanish, Italians and Hungarians (for example).


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> It may be thought that time spent learning to master deep orthographies could be better spent doing something else, or certainly something less tedious, but in practice the education of the British, French and Germans (for example) does not suffer compared with the education of the Spanish, Italians and Hungarians (for example).



But I don't think that it's difficult to write in English. For foreign students, probably, the most difficult thing is to understand fast speech, for these reasons: 
- high number of vowel with different qualities (more or less 12 monophthongs and 6 diphthongs) 
- reduction of vowels in consonants in fast speech 

but it's not due to the "intrinsic" difficulty of the language but to the lack of teaching. At school neither GVS nor trisyllabic laxing (nor secondary stress and syllabic consonants) are taught. In addition, in Italy, wrong pronunces are taught (for example pronouncing the "short a" equal to the short "e" and so on...). 

It's not fault of English orthography, it's fault of school programs.


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## berndf

Why on earth would you want to teach GVS nor trisyllabic laxing in school. That is something for crazy people like us but why would you want to pollute normal people's brain with such irrelevant stuff????


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## Peterdg

What is GVS?


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## berndf

Great Vowel Shift.


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## Peterdg

berndf said:


> Great Vowel Shift.


Oh

Thanks.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> Why on earth would you want to teach GVS nor trisyllabic laxing in school. That is something for crazy people like us but why would you want to pollute normal people's brain with such irrelevant stuff????



In order to do general rules for pronunciation instead of making them memorize every single word? 

For me it is more easy to have some general rules than memorize each word without any logic.


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> Why on earth would you want to teach GVS _or_ trisyllabic laxing in school. That is something for crazy people like us but why would you want to pollute normal people's brain with such irrelevant stuff????





Nino83 said:


> In order to do general rules for pronunciation instead of making them memorize every single word?


Only a tiny fraction of the irregularities in English spelling disappear when one takes the Great Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic Laxing into account.  (Additional irregularities are _related_ to the GVS, but subsequent changes and the fact that today's standard has been influenced by different dialects means that a knowledge of the GVS would help very little with these irregularities.)  So I am almost entirely on Bernd's side in this debate, altho I do think that outlining the GVS to advanced students of English would give them some insight into some peculiarities of the language (for ex., why the pronunciation of English "long" a, e, ee, i, and oo differ so greatly from that in other European languages); but it's not going to help much with the great majority of irregular spellings.

Trisyllabic laxing, together with GVS, has been offered to explain correspondences like "sane" [e] vs "sanity" [æ], but TSL is not a general rule of English spelling ("Avery", "basically", "capability" ... all [e].)

Here are what I believe are the 20 most common words of English with irregular spelling:
_of to was from as are have one you were would there been who said some other could two through
_I don't see that a knowledge of GVS/TSL would help with ANY of them.


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## Hulalessar

"Sane" and "sanity" are an example of why completely phonemic spelling is not necessarily a good idea for English. From the non-native learners' point of view you would only be changing one difficulty for another. Would spelling _drama_,_ dramatic_ and _dramatist_ phonemically be more or less of a complication than having to know that the first <a> has three different values? With the existing system the connection is at least visible from the way the words are written.


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> Here are what I believe are the 20 most common words of English with irregular spelling:
> _of to was from as are have one you were would there been who said some other could two through
> _I don't see that a knowledge of GVS/TSL would help with ANY of them.



Yes, I agree on it. As I said in comment #52 



Nino83 said:


> Without these exceptions, it would be sufficient to study the GVS and the trisyllabic laxing, in order to understand English orthography.



They are exceptions and they need to be learnt by heart. 

You all are right but, how many times, before reading about historical changes of vowels before "l" in coda, have I wondered why "all", "although", "talk", "also", "allright" were pronounced with an "o" while "calf" was pronounced with an "a" or why in "talk", "walk", the "l" is not pronounced? 

Before it, English pronunciation was for me very strange, without any sense. 
Knowing these steps of the language and how, when and where these changes happened, I think, can help to remember better how to pronounce words having the same spelling while if one doesn't know this history, it may seems that English pronunciation doesn't make sense.


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## Peterdg

It's completely useless when you want to teach English spelling. It's interesting to know, but you won't spell any better and you won't pronounce any better if you know that theory.

I'd like to give an analogy: the use of the subjunctive/indicative in Spanish is very often explained in terms of "doubt", "unreal", "hypothetical" etc. This is also completely worthless because it is *not a generative* criterion. This means that, if you base your choice on this kind of criteria, you will as often make a correct decision as you will make an incorrect one, meaning you can just as well use nothing at all to decide between the two verbal moods and your success rate will be the same. 

And I like to think I know what I'm talking about, at least what concerns the verbal mood in Spanish; half of my posts in these forums is about this subject.


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## Nino83

I don't contest anymore  
If you all say that it is useless there will be some reason.


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## djmc

Nino83 said:


> Before it, English pronunciation was for me very strange, without any sense.
> Knowing these steps of the language and how, when and where these changes happened, I think, can help to remember better how to pronounce words having the same spelling while if one doesn't know this history, it may seems that English pronunciation doesn't make sense.



When English children learn spelling it is very much a case of learning meaningless rules. There is very little explanation of why a word is spelled as it is, and not much to be able to predict how a word is pronounced given its spelling. Given a random but slightly complicated word which they have not come across before many English people are totally incapable of guessing how it is pronounced. This is even more the case when the word is not English. There are regularly panics in the UK about the number of adults who have left school and are functionally illiterate. It seems to me that current spelling systems do nothing to help this. We who speak English as a native language and have linguistic interests have forgotten the tedium and difficulty of learning how to spell. It a little history of the language makes it easier then it would be a good thing.


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## berndf

It basically only shifts the problem. As a regular user of woth written and spoken English, it is much easier for me to use the comparison of spelling and modern pronunciation to remember the rules of the GVS then it would be the other way round.


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## Словеса

Hulalessar said:


> I can imagine the possibility of learning Latvian from a book without knowing how it should be pronounced and getting to an advanced stage where I could read Latvian newspapers and understand everything. Taking it a stage further, I can also see the possibility (mainly theoretical!) of learning Georgian without any assigning any sound values to the letters and reaching the same level of reading competence. In either case whether the system is deep or shallow would be irrelevant.


I myself have thought that. However, let me share a story: when I started to learn English, mainly out of curiosity (why not curiousity, by the way), I used an ages-old Soviet textbook to grasp basic concepts on this language. I thought I could manage understanding anything I needed without any pronunciation whatsoever; however, I was amazed to learn that not knowing how to pronounce the words without the tongue-twister feeling was a block to learning and understanding words. Also I thought I was okay to attach any sound meanings to the words I could think of, best of all those sounds that were most familiar to me; that was not the case. I had to use something that was relatively 'logical' to pronounce, something natural and self-going; so, I found use in learning some values of sounds that were approximately English from what the pedantical textbook presented to me. These values allowed me to evade the feeling of a block. I have not tried to learn Chinese, but I believe that I could not remember and understand their words without assigning phonetic values to them. I did indeed try to learn some Chinese texts with the help of a dictionary, and I was able to understand the approximate sense of some texts, but without any phonetic values the words were not passing into my memory, they remained abstract symbols. Some symbols get easy to remember (I have no idea what they advertised during the World Cup, but the characters for 'China' were easy to identify), but still lack of pronunciation blocks from the ability to repeat words, evaluate and appreciate them, mentally try them out (even if incorrectly) etc.


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## Hulalessar

Словеса said:


> I myself have thought that. However...



I do not doubt the practical difficulties involved in trying to learn a language without knowing how it is pronounced, especially if written in a script the learner is unfamiliar with. My point was to stress that writing and speech are two distinct if related things and that understanding writing does not in fact have to depend on knowing how it is pronounced. We only think that is the case because we tend to forget that writing and speech are two distinct even if related things.

Most writing systems have some degree of polyvalence. Whilst the more complex the system the longer it will take to master, the fact remains that, at least for native speakers, there is no real problem. Even second language learners cope with complex systems better than would be expected. The fact that complex systems can be mastered without that much apparent effort is perhaps surprising except when you remember the complexities of language itself. So, whilst the complexities of English orthography are impossible to reduce to rules that will tell you how to pronounce every word and the exceptions to any rule you formulate may be numerous, the fact is that in practice it does not present as much difficulty as is often represented.

English may be described as having developed logographic tendencies, which may be thought of as a backward step in the development of writing. The system is based on the idea that symbols represent sounds, but in fact goes beyond involving complex polyvalence because in some cases the signs have no value but nevertheless indicate pronunciation or distinguish between homophones. All that is absorbed without necessarily being expressly taught.

I am no traditionalist arguing for preservation of the current system for the sake of it. I am just pointing out that the need for reform to make life easier is not quite as needed as some think.


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## djmc

While I have no problem with English spelling, I think that a lot of native speakers do, and as I said earlier I think quite a lot of native English speakers are functionally illiterate, and that this has always been the case. There is a type of amnesia among who have mastered to art who forget the many hours not to mention years they spent memorising spelling.


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## Nino83

For us (non-native speakers) it's not difficult to write but (clearly) the pronunciation. 
My opinion could be biased (due to the fact that, as Italian, I can easily know how a new word is pronounced only by seeing as it is written and the other way around).


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## iezik

The question on ranking of spellings turned into a discussion of reforms, interesting. Let me give my ranking of the following list of reasons against the spelling reform. I added the labels for the reasons with a) to e) to the original text:



Dan2 said:


> But there are good reasons to reject a major spelling reform for English: a) the loss of continuity with earlier texts; b) the obscuring of relationships between words ("nation" and "democrat" have different vowel phonemes compared to "national" and "democracy"); c) the obscuring of relationships across languages (words like "nation" and "democracy" exist in other important languages); d) the difficulties that would be imposed on generations alive during the change (as pointed out by ahvalj); e) and an aesthetic sense that many of us have that the appearance of "phonetic" English is quite unappealing. (I personally would favor the respelling of only a small handful of words that are not part of paradigms and that give natives and foreigners a lot of problems, like "through" and "though".)



d) is probably the most important. I did some experiments and it turned out that I read much faster the standard English than any respelled form. Also as a father I want my children to learn the current standard first and then there is not much need for any other standard. I would also have problems helping my children in spelling system that I don't know.

b) is rather important as seen in plenty of orthographies of European languages that preserve similar spelling for inflected word forms or words of the same family. But it can also be used for respelled English. Using your example words, "nǎšọn" and "démọkrat" are the forms that are similar to forms "našo̤nạl" and "dẹmókrasi". The respelled words might not be shown well in all the browsers. One dot under the letter means reduced form, two dots mean removed form, "š" is taken from Americanist/Slavic notation for "ʃ", main stress is shown on non-default position with acute (é, ó).

a) is important for paper technology (Guthenberg), but no more using computers. All the digitized Modern English texts can be respelled and also Shakespeare (or any text since e.g. 16/17th century onwards) could be read in respelled form.

e) Aestetic sense is important, but not very much. Even the word "aesthetic" can be written in different way as "esthetic", so different people have different opinions on what is most pleasing. When there are two competing standards (miles vs. kilometers, artistic styles, beautiful body), aestetics seems to be important on short term only and technology or science is more important on the long term.

c) I never understood this point as different languages already use similar and different spellings: English and French nation, German Nation, Spanish nacíon, Italian nazione, Portuguese nação, Slovenian nacija... Yet another version would fit nicely in such a soup.


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## iezik

Is anybody interested in doing experiments in reading texts in internet in respelled form? The aim of experiments would be to find a suitable form that is easy to use and gives enough phonetic information to be useful. Let me send a private message. During my experiments I learned the pronunciation of several words.



iezik said:


> I did some experiments and it turned out that I read much faster the standard English than any respelled form.


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## Hulalessar

iezik said:


> I did some experiments and it turned out that I read much faster the standard English than any respelled form.



That is not surprising. I suggested above that English has developed logographic tendencies. I do not mean that it is becoming like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but that, whilst the underlying principle is that each letters has phonetic/phonemic values, the spelling of many words defies (at least simple) analysis if you try to attribute a value to each letter or combination of letters. Rather than "sounding" a word the reader recognises it as a whole from the combination of letters used; indeed, so long as the first and last letters are in the right place, many words can be read with the other letters jumbled up. A reader expects a given word to be written with given letters. When confronted with an unknown combination of letters the reader has to sound them. It follows that if confronted with a whole series of words written in an unfamiliar way the reader is going to be slowed down. However, if the system is consistent one can soon get used to it.


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## Red Arrow

Sorry for bumping this thread, but I really wanted to response 


Peterdg said:


> First of all, you have no way to know where the stress of a word falls. However, you need to know where the stress of the word falls to be able to deduct the pronunciation of a vowel (you need to be able to determine if a syllable is open or closed and stressed to know if a single written vowel has to be pronounced long or short).
> 
> E.g.: "bedelen". If the stress falls on the the first syllable, you pronounce the first "e" long and it means "to beg". If the stress falls on the second "e", then that one is pronounced long and it means "to endow".


This also counts for all other Germanic languages.


> Second, you have "ij" and "ei". In some cases, they are pronounced exactly the same, in other cases "ij" is pronounced as a schwa.
> 
> Third, you have "au" and "ou" which are pronounced exactly the same.
> 
> Then there are the eternal "s", "c", "k" ambiguities. "Sex" in English is written "seks" in Dutch. Don't ask me why.


All other Germanic languages have these difficulties as well. Dutch just has way less.

*Dutch spelling difficulties* (8)
ei / ij
au / ou / auw / ouw
c / k
c / s
t / th
sj / stj / ch / sh
qu / kw
s / z

I left out certain suffixes with pertified spelling. I will leave them out in German and Swedish, too.

*German spelling difficulties* (15)
aa / ah / a (long)
ee / eh / e / äh / ä (long)
oo / oh / o (long)
y / ü / üh (long)
i / ie / ih / ieh (long)
ö / öh (long)
e / ä (short)
y / i (short)
ei / ai / ey / ay
eu / äu
f / v
chs / x
t / th
sch / sh
kw / qu

In Dutch there are two ways to write a long vowel, but there are proper rules for which spelling should be used when.

*Swedish spelling difficulties* (10)
ä / e (short)
o / å (short)
o / å (long)
m / mm (long)
n / nn (long)
k / kj / tj / sh / ch
sj / stj / skj / sk / sch / ge / gi / j / sh
rs / ssj / sch / sh / che / ge / sc
j / g / hj / dj / gj / lj
c / s

*Danish spelling difficulties* (∞)
About everything.

I think the easiest spelling is Afrikaans


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## Angelo di fuoco

Hulalessar said:


> I do not doubt the practical difficulties involved in trying to learn a language without knowing how it is pronounced, especially if written in a script the learner is unfamiliar with. My point was to stress that writing and speech are two distinct if related things and that understanding writing does not in fact have to depend on knowing how it is pronounced. We only think that is the case because we tend to forget that writing and speech are two distinct even if related things.
> 
> Most writing systems have some degree of polyvalence. Whilst the more complex the system the longer it will take to master, the fact remains that, at least for native speakers, there is no real problem. Even second language learners cope with complex systems better than would be expected. The fact that complex systems can be mastered without that much apparent effort is perhaps surprising except when you remember the complexities of language itself. So, whilst the complexities of English orthography are impossible to reduce to rules that will tell you how to pronounce every word and the exceptions to any rule you formulate may be numerous, the fact is that in practice it does not present as much difficulty as is often represented.



I am a proficient user of English, but still, after years of thinking a word is pronounced one way because I don't bother to look it up in a dictionary, I still regularly get surprised when I hear it pronounced by native speakers. It is a difficulty I have not encountered with any other language using a letter-based script. Chinese is another thing, but even there you have phonetic elements indicating how a character may be pronounced.


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## Hulalessar

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I am a proficient user of English, but still, after years of thinking a word is pronounced one way because I don't bother to look it up in a dictionary, I still regularly get surprised when I hear it pronounced by native speakers. It is a difficulty I have not encountered with any other language using a letter-based script.



If we compare English to French, whilst in French you may have difficulty knowing how to spell a word you hear, you can, at least once you get into, usually correctly pronounce a word you have never seen before because certain groupings of letters will always have the same pronunciation. English is far more unpredictable. Even though the sound /o/ can be written in dozens of ways in French, <beau> is a realiable guide to the pronunciation any word containing <eau>, but <foot> is no help when it comes to <hoot> or <flood>.


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## yong321

Not specific to Germanic languages, but as a general concept, look at "orthographic depth"
Orthographic depth - Wikipedia
It measures "the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence". I'm not sure where we can find a list of various languages with the calculated depth scores.


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## Hulalessar

yong321 said:


> I'm not sure where we can find a list of various languages with the calculated depth scores.



A quick Google does not yield any lists.

It is probably not too difficult to compare shallow orthographies and score them. It does though get trickier with deep orthographies. That is because there are two aspects: complexity (i.e. the number of rules there are) and irregularity/consistency (i.e. how many exceptions there are to the rules). If in a system initial <d> is always pronounced /d/ and final <d> is always pronounced /t/ that is a complication, but there is consistency. If though final <d> is sometimes pronounced /d/ and sometimes /t/, the system is inconsistent. If there are many words spelled with a final <d> and the instances where <d> is pronounced /d/ is roughly the same as where it is pronounced <t>, is the system "deeper" than where only a few words have the <t> (or <d>) pronunciation? How do you compare a system where the rules are complex, but the exceptions are few, with one which has fewer rules, but a lot more exceptions?

Another consideration is what sort of text you are looking at. Most of the irregularities in English spelling are distributed amongst the more common words. The more learned words you include the fewer deep points will be scored - not that that will stop it winning the competition.


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## yong321

Hulalessar said:


> A quick Google does not yield any lists.
> 
> It is probably not too difficult to compare shallow orthographies and score them. It does though get trickier with deep orthographies. That is because there are two aspects: complexity (i.e. the number of rules there are) and irregularity/consistency (i.e. how many exceptions there are to the rules).
> ...
> Another consideration is what sort of text you are looking at.



The second consideration is easy to deal with. Either use a large, fairly comprehensive corpus, or select a set of textual sources proved by research to be a good representation of all the text.

Your concern about deep orthographies is a good point. On the other hand, in my opinion, ranking or scoring anything in social sciences can be done in two ways. For lack of a good term, let me call them internal and external. For example, the difficulty of a language when studied as a second language is a forever-debated topic, because people discuss, justifiably, the characterists of each of the languages. But the difficulty can also be measured externally, such as by the length of time for a specific group of students to take to master the language (see e.g. How hard is Chinese?). Similarly, researchers may find data from school teachers around the world to see which foreign language gives how many spelling errors, or something like that.

By no means does such external measurement replace the internal analysis and scoring. In fact, the latter is important when the external measurement needs a theory to base a reasonable explanation on.


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## thegreathoo

French is one of the worst, as is Danish.
Robert in Danish is pronounced something like Hue bear or hoo bear

English has its weirdness.  Just look at letter U in: rush, bush, busy, puke.


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## Kevin Beach

I sometimes wonder whether all languages should abandon alphabets in favour of pictographs, similar to Chinese, which would have the same meaning in each language but with different pronunciations (as in Mandarin and Cantonese). We do it with numbers, after all, which are recognised all over the world. We also do it to some extent with road signs, which are just another form of pictograph, understood by people of many languages. (But perhaps I am diverting from the topic. I'll shut up now ....)


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## Red Arrow

The English language already exists for that purpose. Europeans learn English as to be able to communicate with each other.


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## Hulalessar

Kevin Beach said:


> I sometimes wonder whether all languages should abandon alphabets in favour of pictographs, similar to Chinese, which would have the same meaning in each language but with different pronunciations (as in Mandarin and Cantonese). We do it with numbers, after all, which are recognised all over the world. We also do it to some extent with road signs, which are just another form of pictograph, understood by people of many languages.



John Wilkins proposed this and set out a system in 1688 in *An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. *See here: An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language - Wikipedia. The article says that the general opinion is that his effort was "brilliant by hopeless". It also says it was in part inspired by a misunderstanding of the way Chinese writing works in practice. Chinese writing contains ideographic elements, but is not fully ideographic. It is not the case that all Chinese can look at a text and read it in their own variety in the same way that the English read <9> as "nine" and the French "neuf", but rather that there is diglossia. You cannot read Standard Mandarin in Cantonese any more than you can read Portuguese in Latin.

Symbols such as road traffic signs convey ideas rather than exact words. An upward pointing arrow can mean, according to context: go straight ahead; one way street; this way up; upstairs.


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## Nino83

The Chinese had a hard time when they had to transcribe the Sanskrit terms of Buddhism.
The Chinese characters fit well the Chinese language which is monosyllabic (one character, one word in Old Chinese, today there are a lot of compounds, expecially in Mandarin) and without inflections and affixes.
For example the Japanese had to develop syllabaries in order to write inflections of verbs and adjectives and for particles. Both the Vietnamese and Koreans abandoned this script because it was hard, inefficient and excluded many people from literacy and alfabetization.

It doesn't surprise me that this proposal came from a native speaker of a language with few inflections and where a noun can be used as verb without any affix.

Another thing is that this system wouldn't say anything about how a word is pronounced so we would need another alphabet for this purpose, because when an Italian goes to the UK he *speaks* with other people. We don't walk in the streets with tons of sheets and pens.


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## Wilma_Sweden

Stoggler said:


> Why are Norwegian and Swedish split by Icelandic?
> 
> And what about the two written standards for Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk)?  How do they fit into the equation?
> 
> I can't speak for Nynorsk but the standard Norwegian courses you can buy in bookshops here cover Bokmål and that seems more consistent than Swedish to me (I am on thin ice with Norwegian though - I can talk about Swedish and that has issues with the sk- and sj spellings, nothing too difficult but there are inconsistencies in their spellings)


Out of the languages I'm familiar with, I would definitely say that English and Danish have the weakest link between pronunciation and ortography. Judging by Wikipedia, Swedish is more inconsistent than Norwegian, so instead of this order:



Nino83 said:


> So it would be: Dutch, German (vowel lenght ambiguities), Swedish, then Icelandic (predictability but too many rules), Norwegian, Danish.


My order is Dutch, German (I'll take your word for it), Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, English!

If I spell correctly in English it's because I've had to memorise the spelling AND pronunciation of every single new word in my basic vocabulary. From experience I can guess the pronunciation of most new words, but certainly not placenames like Leicestershire! I still make the odd spelling mistake in Swedish, however, where my vocabulary floats around the brain in the form of combinations of morphemes rather than letters, because I learned the pronunciation before the ortographic representation. It's the same for native English speakers: you learn to speak, and then when you start school you are shellshocked by a seemingly random combination of letters to form these words! Is this why English kids start school already at 4 or 5 years of age? ;-)


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## berndf

Wilma_Sweden said:


> Nino83 said:
> 
> 
> 
> So it would be: Dutch, German (vowel lenght ambiguities), Swedish, then Icelandic (predictability but too many rules), Norwegian, Danish.
> 
> 
> 
> My order is Dutch, German (I'll take your word for it)
Click to expand...

I don't think Dutch is much much better than German in terms of "vowel length ambiguities".


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## Olaszinhok

thegreathoo said:


> French is one of the worst, as is Danish.
> Robert in Danish is pronounced something like Hue bear or hoo bear
> 
> English has its weirdness. Just look at letter U in: rush, bush, busy, puke.



Sorry, but I have to disagree. Once you have learnt the basic rules of French spelling you can manage very well. Obviously there are a bunch of exceptions but nothing compared to the English Language. If I come across a totally new French word I generally know how to pronounce it, also thanks to the common stress on the final syllable. On the other hand, new English words are so unpredictable as far as pronunciation is concerned, I need to look up in the dictionary or listen to a clip on the internet, most of the times.


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## berndf

Moderator note: This Thread is about Germanic languages. Please don't discuss French here.


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> I do not doubt the practical difficulties involved in trying to learn a language without knowing how it is pronounced, especially if written in a script the learner is unfamiliar with. My point was to stress that writing and speech are two distinct if related things and that understanding writing does not in fact have to depend on knowing how it is pronounced. --.



Theoretically you are right.

But in real life: The majority of people will be able to memorize more of what they have learned when they can also imagine what it sounds like, when spoken.


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## Sepia

Nino83 said:


> I don't contest anymore
> If you all say that it is useless there will be some reason.



It is useless to people who cannot cope with a rule or guideline that doesn't work at least 90% of the time - that makes them claim that you'd have to memorize the spelling of every single word anyway. The sad thing is when they don't let their students decide for themselves. Some people can work with a fuzzy rule that works about 45-50% of the time, combined with some sub-rules and almost-exceptions, resulting in them only having to memorize a fraction of what the one-rulers have to memorize.
It is similar to the people who claim that you have to memorize the grammatical genders of nouns, when there actually are a lot of rules that can be applied.


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## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> I don't think Dutch is much much better than German in terms of "vowel length ambiguities".


It is. Vowel length is 100% predictable in Dutch in both reading and writing.

I'd say it's more like this:
Dutch > Norwegian > Swedish > German > Icelandic > Danish > English


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## Stoggler

Red Arrow :D said:


> It is. Vowel length is 100% predictable in Dutch in both reading and writing.



I agree with that.  I never had any trouble with vowel length when learning Dutch, while German threw up a few issues (although compared with other languages other than Dutch, not many).


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## overdrive1979

Red Arrow :D said:


> Sorry for bumping this thread, but I really wanted to response
> 
> This also counts for all other Germanic languages.
> 
> All other Germanic languages have these difficulties as well. Dutch just has way less.
> 
> *Dutch spelling difficulties* (8)
> ei / ij
> au / ou / auw / ouw
> c / k
> c / s
> t / th
> sj / stj / ch / sh
> qu / kw
> s / z
> 
> I left out certain suffixes with pertified spelling. I will leave them out in German and Swedish, too.
> 
> *German spelling difficulties* (15)
> aa / ah / a (long)
> ee / eh / e / äh / ä (long)
> oo / oh / o (long)
> y / ü / üh (long)
> i / ie / ih / ieh (long)
> ö / öh (long)
> e / ä (short)
> y / i (short)
> ei / ai / ey / ay
> eu / äu
> f / v
> chs / x
> t / th
> sch / sh
> kw / qu
> 
> In Dutch there are two ways to write a long vowel, but there are proper rules for which spelling should be used when.
> 
> *Swedish spelling difficulties* (10)
> ä / e (short)
> o / å (short)
> o / å (long)
> m / mm (long)
> n / nn (long)
> k / kj / tj / sh / ch
> sj / stj / skj / sk / sch / ge / gi / j / sh
> rs / ssj / sch / sh / che / ge / sc
> j / g / hj / dj / gj / lj
> c / s
> 
> *Danish spelling difficulties* (∞)
> About everything.
> 
> I think the easiest spelling is Afrikaans



For me as a native Spanish speaker who speak English and French as foreign languages and having few basic knowledge of Dutch and German as well, I would say Dutch one is the easiest Germanic one, but only in terms of spelling and pronunctiation.
So, I wonder if Dutch eventually adopts an easy grammar structure like English and eventually remove its big cluster consonants whilst keeping its current, predictable Dutch pronunciation, then Dutch should be the easiest Germanic lingua franca to be mastered so far, at  least for us native speakers of predictable Romance languages.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> ee / eh / e / äh / ä (long)


Contrary to short e and short ä, long e and long ä are not homophone in standard German. They only are in some colloquial varieties.


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## iezik

overdrive1979 said:


> So, I wonder if Dutch eventually adopts an easy grammar structure like English and eventually remove its big cluster consonants whilst keeping its current, predictable Dutch pronunciation, then Dutch should be the easiest Germanic lingua franca



Oh, again one look into possible future. It's hard to say which language is going to become the most phonetic. Looking into the past is often easier as we know what criteria were most important. For Swedish in 1944, it was more important to be similar to Danish and Norwegian (åvägabringa nordiskt samarbete på språkvårdens område) than to be highly pronetic. And the Swedish is then not very phonetic.

I wonder what could the future criteria be. I see two differences compared to year e.g. 1900. 

Nowadays, the computers, unicode, and English are ubiquitous in Europe. New technology can mean new possibilities for grammarians.

New requirements can come from the large number of foreigners. In the last hundred years, several states in Europe acquired a sizable non-native population. The indigenious population (i.e. French, Germans, Italians etc) shows an aversion against the foreigners. Some spellings could be better for integrating foreigners that the others.


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## Red Arrow

overdrive1979 said:


> For me as a native Spanish speaker who speak English and French as foreign languages and having few basic knowledge of Dutch and German as well, I would say Dutch one is the easiest Germanic one, but only in terms of spelling and pronunctiation.
> So, I wonder if Dutch eventually adopts an easy grammar structure like English and eventually remove its big cluster consonants whilst keeping its current, predictable Dutch pronunciation, then Dutch should be the easiest Germanic lingua franca to be mastered so far, at  least for us native speakers of predictable Romance languages.


Does Dutch have harder consonant clusters than English? Could you give examples? Don't forget you can drop T's and D's between other consonants.
Postzegel => possegel
Tandpasta => tampasta
Nederlands => Nederlans

W and B are also silent in this position: erwt, ambt etc.
SCHR is often pronounced SR in the Netherlands. I don't know if this could be considered proper speech.


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## Peterdg

Red Arrow said:


> Does Dutch have harder consonant clusters than English? Could you give examples?


"a*ngstschr*eeuw" is usually considered to be a little problematic


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## Red Arrow

But that word is barely used  If it were used often, then it would be pronounced angschreeuw, and as once Bibiben has pointed out, even *angsreeuw* in the Netherlands. (he/she is right)

Note that you can add an extra consonant in English 'angsts': /æŋ(k)sts/

I still find angstschreeuw easier than Swedish västku*stskt.* (_onzijdig verbogen vorm van westkustelijk_)
Or what about Swedish tä*mjd*?


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## iezik

Can you list few examples of Dutch spelling change in 1934 that removed final -n in inflected nouns? I tried to read few older texts (one (is it updated to the current spelling?), two), but my Dutch is limited and anyway they were probably not many such forms.


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## overdrive1979

Red Arrow :D said:


> Does Dutch have harder consonant clusters than English? Could you give examples? Don't forget you can drop T's and D's between other consonants.
> Postzegel => possegel
> Tandpasta => tampasta
> Nederlands => Nederlans
> 
> W and B are also silent in this position: erwt, ambt etc.
> SCHR is often pronounced SR in the Netherlands. I don't know if this could be considered proper speech.



Perhaps I didn't explain properly myself.
I mean, looks like many Dutch words have many consonats and few vowels, e.g, some names of towns and provinces such as Winschoten or Overijssel.
For proper large consonants cluster, 'tijdschrift' is another good example.


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## berndf

overdrive1979 said:


> For proper large consonants cluster, 'tijdschrift' is another good example.


The longest cluster in this word has three phonemes, _s-ch-r_. I wouldn't call that "large". Three phoneme consonant clusters are normal in Germanic languages. Overijssel has no consonant cluster at all, only a geminate _ss_. The only cluster in Winschroten is two phonemes,_ s-ch_.


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## Red Arrow

iezik said:


> Can you list few examples of Dutch spelling change in 1934 that removed final -n in inflected nouns? I tried to read few older texts (one (is it updated to the current spelling?), two), but my Dutch is limited and anyway they were probably not many such forms.


_"De naamvals-n in lidwoorden (op den stoel) en verbogen *naamwoorden* verviel."_

"Naamwoorden" stands for nouns (zelfstandige naamwoorden) and/or adjectives (bijvoeglijke naamwoorden). In this case it stands for *adjectives*. In spoken Dutch, the grammatical cases were gone in the late Middle Ages. In written Dutch, the grammatical cases were abolished in 1934.


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## Red Arrow

overdrive1979 said:


> Overijssel


Four vowels: o e ij e
Four consonants: v r ss l

The French spelling would be "Auverèycel". (hypothetically) Lots of vowels. Are you talking about written Dutch being consonant-heavy rather than spoken Dutch?

Dutch doesn't have more consonants than other Germanic languages. Yes, it has "sch" and "s(ch)r", but German and Swedish has got several other tricky ones. Italian also has several tricky clusters. (sdr-)

What about these Dutch words? 
*zeeooievaar *(sea stork)
*bemoeien *(interfere)
*mooie *(beautiful)
*met zijn drieën *(with three)
*koeienuier *(udder of a cow)
etc. etc.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> SCHR is often pronounced SR in the Netherlands.


Interesting. Do you hear the merged _sch_ = [s̺x] as [s̺] in Dutch Dutch? I hear it as a range from [s̺x] over [s̺ç] to [ʃ] but not as [s̺]. It maybe it is an illusion because [̺s̺x] > [̺s̺ç] > [ʃ] is what happened to_ sch_ in German and I just imagine to hear the same development at an early stage in Dutch Dutch, but I definitely don't hear [̺s̺]. Of course, [̺s̺] and [ʃ] are sometimes tricky to distinguish, at least I don't know any language with a stable phonemic opposition of /̺s̺/ and /ʃ/.


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## overdrive1979

Red Arrow :D said:


> Are you talking about written Dutch being consonant-heavy rather than spoken Dutch?



I'm not aware about differences between written and spoken Dutch because my skills are very low as I only know basic greetings, numbers from 1 to 10, the verb 'hebben" and that's all.
I hope I will learn more within the next months.


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## iezik

Red Arrow :D said:


> In spoken Dutch, the grammatical cases were gone in the late Middle Ages. In written Dutch, the grammatical cases were abolished in 1934.



Are the following examples correct?

pre-1934: Goeden nacht Marie; de goede auto wint; in vetten grond; vette grond
post-1934: Goede nacht Marie; de goede auto wint; in vette grond; vette grond

So it was harder to write Dutch before 1934 as the grammatical case needed to be observed.


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## Stoggler

berndf said:


> Overijssel has no consonant cluster at all, only a geminate _ss_.



Does (spoken) Dutch have geminate consonants?


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## berndf

Not any more. But it has reflexes: the preceding syllable stilm counts as closed even though the consonant isn't geminate any more and intervocalic voicing is inhibited; compare _wijzen_ and _wessel_, the former has an etymological /s/, the latter an etymological /ss/.


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## Red Arrow

Stoggler said:


> Does (spoken) Dutch have geminate consonants?


Not really. In West-Flemish, "binnen" could be considered [binn] but there is a tiny nasal pause inbetween both N's. (I can't hear it) Same with other words ending with -nen.

ve*r*assing and ve*rr*assing are pronounced differently as well. You can clearly hear that the R belongs to a different syllable. (not really gemination, I know)
verassing [və*ɾ*.ɑ.sɪŋ]
verrassing [və.*ɾ*ɑ.sɪŋ]

In the Netherlands, the letter R is pronounced differently in coda:
verassing [vɛ*ɻ*.ɑ.sɪng]
verrassing [vɛ.*ɾ*ɑ.sɪng]


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## Red Arrow

iezik said:


> Are the following examples correct?
> 
> pre-1934: Goeden nacht Marie; de goede auto wint; in vetten grond; vette grond
> post-1934: Goede nacht Marie; de goede auto wint; in vette grond; vette grond
> 
> So it was harder to write Dutch before 1934 as the grammatical case needed to be observed.


The post-1934 examples are correct. My knowledge of German grammar is long gone so I am not sure about the pre-1934 spellings


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