Comment by samgutentag

By the way the source was a Mr Shield's letter to the Economist rather than Twain https://web.archive.org/web/20200311221105/http://www.letter...

> fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all

But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"

I remember a version which ends with how we'll end up speaking German.

Recommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”

The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.

I'm convinced that this is Just The Right Thing To Do. Like ridiculously strong benefits, and practically no drawbacks at all.

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Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.

Only in writing. The disambiguation is already needed when spoken and the context does this.

Some other languages do the same with diacritics.

Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.

If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.

How is it that you can say these words without confusion?

Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.

And cause confusion with needless heterographs?

practice / practise licence / license

In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.

Almost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.

I kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words.

Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.

One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).

Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.

OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.

Bring back þ!

Why would it? "u" generally doesn't follow this pattern in English after "k" any more so than it does after "c".

That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.

Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)

kyube or kyoob would definitely be the way to go.

It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.

"Caesar" was pronounced in Latin with a hard C, which is preserved in German ("Kaiser").

> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh

It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.

Seconding this. C should be the ʃ sound, and then TC should be the "ch" in "church." The fact that there's no one letter for ʃ is the real tragedy.

In Dutch and German Ch is pronounced as 'g'.