Written English is basically phonetic

My friends Mr Cholmondley-Warner and Mr Featherstonehaugh wish to disagree with you.

Compared to Spanish, written English is absurdly non-phonetic.

Citing exceptions is not evidence here. English is "basically phonetic" because there are some simple phonetic rules that work in the vast majority of cases.

True, but the exceptions can be very hard and are more common than in any other language I have studied. Although I haven't studied many languages. I do know that learning to read Spanish and Hebrew (with vowels) was fairly trivial, although I already knew the basics of how to read by then. But then, I knew the basics of how to read when learning Braille, and that didn't make Braille trivial.

Sadly, I have only my own experience to draw upon while refuting this claim. As it stands, 100% of the languages I vaguely know, other than English, have more phonetic spellings than English. Any bilingual types out there wanna weigh in?

bad reasoning-by-comparison. just because every other sports ball i know is rounder than a rugby ball doesn't mean a rugby ball isn't basically round.

The only other argument on this particular line is an appeal to authority, which I would prefer to avoid. Perhaps instead you would like to point out examples of alphanumeric (by which i mean Greek would be an appropriate example, Egyptian hieroglyphics an inappropriate example) based languages which are written less phonetically than English?

English is not as phonetic as a less bastardized language, but it's still strongly phonetic. Some of the phonemes are just weird.

In discussions with native speakers, it's apparent that they don't hear as many phonemes as I do, which to me serves to explain informally how the notion that English is not phonetic can persist. That's dangerously close to treating anecdotes as evidence, of course, and so won't do for rigorous purposes. But I'm satisfied with this idea.

D'A

Ben, why do you insist on comparing it to other alphabetic ones? can you define alphabetic for me? I would say that alphabet-based ones are inherently basically phonetic, which is my point -- english, being based on an alphabetic writing system, is basically phonetic.

basically.

If you don't have a phonetic language and you have an alphabetic one, you have to memorize the spelling for each word, and thus you don't get any advantage from using an alphabet. You might as well have characters with various components and make up your words out of those components, unlinked to sound entirely.

OK, then explain the different pronunciations of "photograph" and "photograph", based on how they are written. Or, guess what a learner of the language will pronounce "recipe."

(to address Tim's examples specifically -- I am a native speaker of the language, and I know only one way to pronounce photograph, so I don't know what that's about. A new learner could be misled into saying "REEsype" and i know that and i don't care, it's not my point.)

Cheese on Rice, people! What part of "basically" do you not understand? I am not saying that it's perfect. Hooked on phonics doesn't work all the way, the rules break down, yes yes yes. But English is written with glyphs (which we call letters) which are tied loosely to the ideas of sounds -- they were inspired, according to some historians, by drawings of real things, sometimes which made noises or were named with words that contained noises somehow related to the noises the drawings represented at some point -- but at this point, they're just abstract symbols that represent sounds, fundamentally. That's what an alphabet is, I believe.

Those symbols are used to represent the sounds we make when saying the word -- not the meaning of the word, just the sounds we make. Yes, those representations are a little vague, a little inaccurate by the best and most complete of rules, and we sometimes steal words from other languages and leave the spellings and pronunciations the same in a way that violates many of our pronunciation guidelines. but fundamentally -- "basically" if you will -- the letters still represent sounds and therefore, i put it to you that the language is written basically phonetically.

French is amazingly phonetic and has about 5 exceptions in their whole language, and "je ne sais quois" (which is used in English) is pronounced about 95% percent differently than English rules would hint at -- but it's still phonetic. the J and S just happen to represent sounds they are not often used to represent in English -- they still represent sounds.

"photograph" has another pronunciation? Please tell us.

I am a native English speaker raised in a different state than Vynce, and I have only one way to pronounce it.

The verb and the noun are accented differently.

not when i say them.

Funny... Anyway, English is not my native tongue, therefore I came across many-many examples of exeptions you native speakers probably never realized. Recipe is one of them, and I guess I can invalidate a claim by coming up with an example that disproves it :)

that doesn't dispove it.

the claim does not say "completely" or "every word in English is promnounced exactly the way you'd expect" -- it says "basically" meaning "in general" or "on the whole" or "fundamentally"

English is probably the least phonetic of European languages. It's impossible to predict with greater than 50% accuracy what the spelling of a word should be from its sound. It's only very slightly easier to predict the sound of a word from it's spelling.

In the other not-terribly-phonetic European language, French, you at least have a pretty good chance of figuring out the pronunciation from the spelling, but of course not the other way around.

This is because both languages use what are called "etymological spelling". The spellings are there as a clue to the origin of the word. This in turn gives you all kinds of useful information about how the word can be used, and in what context it works, what language or dialect it came from, etc. This sort of thing is lost in a more phonetic language like Italian.

Ok, even the "basically" statement is false, as the accent falls on "random" places, and it's never explicitly marked.

Umm.. No, it doesn't. There are exceptions to all the rules, but there *are* rules.

If written English were not basically phonetic, we couldn't use an alphabet when producing it. English does have many more phonemes than the Latin alphabet has characters, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Even more strictly phonetic languages have more phonemes than characters; diphthongs are fairly rampant, for example.

D'A

I do see the superpedantic argument in favor of this, but since I find the comparison between English and other languages most compelling, I am going to come down on the non-pedant side of the fence. For once.

To Nic in comment #1 -- I will stand you a drink the next time we gather in the Drones club for darts and bunging rolls at policemen. Excellent work!

Thanks Eilonwy... mine's a vat.

Inglish iz naht veree fonetik at awll... Pronownsiashuns ov vereeus lehder kombinashuns r offen redikuluslee hard to figure owt.

...

How does "tion" == "shun"?? That is used in enough words to become a problem. This whole "silent e" business is ludicrous.

I have to agree with Mark J. After studying German in highschool for four years, I must say that German is by far more phonetic than English. Whether it's because of the arrangment (uhraenjmint :D) of the letters or because of the rules of the language, however, I am not sure.

This is my favorite example of the ridiculousness of the English language (and I'm sure there are more such examples):

Ghoti is pronounced "fish." How?

Tough uses 'gh' as an 'f' sound.
Women uses 'o' as an 'i' sound.
Vacation uses 'ti' as an 'sh' sound.

In fact, that 'sh' sound is produced by MANY different letter combinations:

Shirt, sugar (soo-gar?), chute (cu-hoot-ee?), action (akteeohn?), issue (issoo?), ocean (o-kee-ahn?), conscious (con-sky-oh-us?), mansion (man-si-on?), schwa (skha... I don't even know) , anxious (X's are funny), and special (speh-kee-al) are just some examples.

A few things you should probably know:

1. "tion" and "shun" sound different.
2. "silent" E's aren't
3. of the words you list, at most two have the same sibilant
4. "Basically" basically means basically. If English wasn't basically phonetic, you couldn't have written that first paragraph.

D'A

"That is used in enough words to become a problem." i'd argue that it's used in enough cases to prevent the problem, and people learn it.

i would also argue that phonetically, "tyun" is closer to "shun" than you think.

"Compared to Spanish, written English is absurdly non-phonetic." -- gladragkraken.myopenid.com

Try Turkish. If you can speak a word, you can spell it. I think Russian is the same.

Lots of languages are more phonetic than English. Nobody contested that. Nor does it affect whether English is basically phonetic.