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I‘m disappointed to see no mention of Tibetan orthography, which was formalised approximately 1000 years ago and has not changed since then — despite Old Tibetan having split into around 50 different Tibetic languages during that time. This results in, for instance, the current Dalai Lama’s name being written བསྟན་འཛིན་རྒྱ་མཚོ bsTan-'dzin rgya-mtsho despite being pronounced Tenzin Gyatso, or the city of Shigatse being written གཞིས་ཀ་རྩེ Gzhis-ka-rtse. The effect is rather like writing French as if it were Latin.
Quite a few languages do this now, or did until recently, e.g Greek (speak Modern Greek, write in the fossilized katharevousa standard), Finnish (speak spoken Finnish, write in the fossilized kirjakieli standard), and Arabic (speak an Arabic "dialect" -- mutually unintelligible separate languages at this point -- but write in the fossilized fusha standard), etc.
Regarding orthographic depth, I think you can test your claim by asking people to read aloud some written text (or to write down something that you say). At least in Finnish, I think you will hear the "written standard", that is, the speaker won't translate from the written language to the spoken language as if there was orthographic depth.
(In the other direction, you may have to ask people to "write in the dialect", because it's so common to "clean up" text by removing the colloquial features of speech.)
The alternative, more common explanation is that there are two different registers of the language, one more suitable in writing and one more suitable in talking.
> At least in Finnish, I think you will hear the "written standard"
I wouldn't expect that to be the case at all, except for a small amount of intellectual, pedantic people. The vast majority of Finns reading kirjakieli aloud are going to subject it to many of the puhekieli sound changes. And of course, like with many other languages, if they speak a regional dialect with significant phonetic changes, they will apply those sounds instead of what is represented in writing.
> The alternative, more common explanation is that there are two different registers of the language…
Yes, exactly. The languages I gave as examples above, are typical examples of diglossia.
Finnish puhekieli could be compared to AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) in that in comparison to standard written Finnish, it has certain grammatical deviations that are nevertheless highly regularized.
Should be noted that most Finns do write in puhekieli in casual contexts like instant messaging, and it's just as phonemic as kirjakieli, just with contractions and slight grammar differences.
Those are a little different, though. As far as I’m aware, for the languages you listed, the orthography still corresponds fairly closely to the spoken language, even if there are some phonological and grammatical differences. (To add to your list of examples, this is also the case for Welsh.) I was talking about a situation where the relationship between the written and spoken languages is quite substantially obscured by sound change.
And English is also rapidly approaching this situation.
"English, followed by Dutch, is the most opaque regarding reading." An observation very relevant to continuing discussions about the difficulties involved in teaching reading in American public schools, particularly among children for whom middle class English itself is tantamount to a foreign language.
"Esperanto, Arabic, Finnish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish are very shallow both to read and to write." Borne out in my anecdotal experience as a peace corps volunteer in very rural Korea, where universal literacy among very young children was taken for granted.
Serbo-Croatian goes too far with phonetics.
For example, "free of charge" is "besplatno". However, the first syllable is actually "bez-", with /z/ devoiced to /s/ by the last consonant of the cluster. The prefix "bez-" will appear undisturbed in other words, where the root starts with a vowel or a voiced consonant.
This is also done with loanwords, like "apsolutno" (absolute).
However, it comes from a general pronunciation pattern for consonant clusters, something that could be defined outside of the actual spelling. Why obscure the internal structure of a word like that?
It also exists in the opposite direction, by the way. Compare Serbo-Croatian "udžbenik" with the more elegant Slovenian "učbenik" (although Slovenian spelling has other, more serious problems than Serbo-Croatian, regarding some of the vowels).
This is very similar to how Latin spelling reflects consonant assimilation of prefixes (like in- and ad-).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/immanis#Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alloquor#Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/illumino#Latin
Most modern English words starting with a- or i- and a double consonant are inheriting or borrowing a pronunciation spelling from Latin that showed the Latin pronunciation of the ad- or in- prefix in context.
There's a challenge in transliterating Arabic because Arabic does what you suggest with the definite article al- <ال>. The /l/ assimilates in pronunciation to the following consonant if it is a so-called "sun letter".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters
So you could transliterate either al-shams (morphological or etymological or letter-by-letter) or ash-shams (pronunciation).
> For example, "free of charge" is "besplatno". However, the first syllable is actually "bez-", with /z/ devoiced to /s/ by the last consonant of the cluster.
Why is that bad? Other Slavic languages also use the same approach. Consonant clusters usually sound a bit indistinct, so you have to make a choice which pronunciation you want to standardize for writing.
I'm a native Slavic speaker, and I know a bit of Serbian, and "besplatno" _does_ sound more closer to "s" to me.
> However, it comes from a general pronunciation pattern for consonant clusters, something that could be defined outside of the actual spelling. Why obscure the internal structure of a word like that?
To stay closer to phonetic accuracy. It's a trade-off. If you are a native speaker, you learn the spoken language first, so spelling being close to the actual phonetic pronunciation helps to learn writing.
>I'm a native Slavic speaker, and I know a bit of Serbian, and "besplatno" _does_ sound more closer to "s" to me.
Yes, it should be an /s/ for sure, but the spelling doesn't need to represent the /s/ sound in this case.
The /s/ sound could be spelled "z" here, and be represented by a rule that says "the voicedness of a consonant cluster is determined by its last consonant".
Serbo-Croatian phonetic spelling is like hardcoding stuff that shouldn't be hardcoded. And it focuses on the wrong stuff - why aren't there any accent markings in everyday writing?
I think it has to do with being morphophonemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Morphopho...
"This means that the spelling reflects to some extent the underlying morphological structure of the words, not only their pronunciation. Hence different forms of a morpheme (minimum meaningful unit of language) are often spelt identically or similarly in spite of differences in their pronunciation."
This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform. With the computational tools and linguistic libraries available, we could truly create an extremely shallow orthographic English language. Learning Spanish and Russian really illuminated how poor English spelling is. Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee! There's no spelling bees in Russia or Finland.
Although many here have surely seen this before, for those who haven't -- the famous "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling" by (supposedly) Mark Twain. It made me wonder if I really would want reform after all! Here you go:
----
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Just because something looks weird to us does not mean it's bad. I can read the last sentence at about 70% speed, and I suspect you can too; that means within the 20-year time frame (facetiously) proposed, we could both easily adapt to this. And that's with bad choices intentionally cherry-picked by Twain to ridicule the idea. If the reductio ad absurditem is not really all that absurdum, that's a point in favor of the idea.
It should be possible to do orthographic replacement using an LLM-based browser plugin and a trivial prompt to subjectively test the hypothesis.
Why is this replacing "y" with "i"?
I naturally read "iear" as "ear", not "year". And I read "awai" as something similar to "uh-why" (I'm having trouble translating the exact sound to text).
Other than that, I see no issues with the changes through year 5. It's not that hard to read and I'm sure I would quickly get used to it with practice. Past year 5, I don't understand what is happening and I literally can't read it.
> wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
It technically needs to be a different letter to mark a "short i", like "й" in Russian or Ukrainian. If we use "ï' for it, the "year" will become "ïear", "yellow" will become "ïellow". The "y" that reads as "i" will just switch to "i", and "my" will become "mai".
> There's no spelling bees in Russia
... but there are constant dictation exercises (диктанты) in school to force children to memorize the thousands of exceptions in the orthographic rules of literary Russian. A written Russian sentence is (usually) easy to read - but the reverse task, writing down a spoken sentence, can be rather complicated for a child. Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
In reality in Russia there has been planned a very ambitious reform aiming to radically simplify the orthography in the Khruschev time, but as he fell out of power, everything Khruschev was condemned and undone :(
https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/105625...
Back when I was at school in Russia, one spelling mistake in the final examination essay meant minus one mark ("A" to "B", "B" to "C" and so on). From today's point of view, this seems somewhat egregious.
> Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
Uhh... Russian doesn't have a lot of clitics. There are compound words like in German, but they are still understandable if you read them phonetically.
And most children learn to read first by sounding aloud individual letters, and then just training to do it faster. It's called "reading by syllables".
But Ukrainian is still even better. It's almost completely phonetic both ways and you usually can write down any word you hear without problems, even if you hear it for the first time. There are still some double consonants and a small amount of reduced vowels, but even they are still somewhat reflected phonetically.
It loses the ready access to the relatively deep history available due to spelling being nearly frozen since the rise of early modern English. Shakespeare, from circa 1600 is readable with only slight difficulty. In contrast, Chaucer, circa 1400 while recognizable, is a puzzle to decipher. This deep history also shows in etymological roots.
It's also completely impractical given the wide variety of very differently pronounced English dialects and accents. In other words, it requires massive pronunciation reform too. If that's on the table, why not alter everyone's pronunciation to fit the orthography...
I'm not very interested in redesigning English spelling. However, it seems feasible to automate most of the encoding. I'd think most words could be rewritten with a lookup table, except for a short list of heteronyms. For printed material, I'm not convinced teaching kids how to read "Obsolete English" would be harder than teaching them to read cursive.
Updating grammar would be a giant pain in the neck. Saying "we're gonna write 'cat' as 'kat' now sounds a lot simpler. It would also greatly reduce the number of times I'd have to say things like "I'm about to use a word I've read a thousand times but never heard anyone pronounce, so forgive me if I'm butchering it." My kid was hugely into cats as a little kid, and it was cute when they wanted to tell us cool things about lee-oh-pards. It's less cute when I'm in a meeting talking about a whitepaper I've read about something I've never heard spoken.
People don't read ancient manuscripts but recent reeditions of old works. Those can be done using new spellings, as they are in, for example, Spanish. Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times.
> Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times.
And this is actually a loss. I have a fantastic edition of the Song of Roland with facing pages in Modern English and Medieval French, and there are nuances that would be lost in a straight translation to either Modern English or Modern French.
One of the challenges with this is that the phonology of English as spoken varies quite a bit -- even among nearby regions -- particularly with vowels, but sometimes with consonants especially medial ones.
https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o
Swiss German[1] is a related example for this. Even though Swiss German varieties are mostly unintelligible with Standard German (Hochdeutsch/Standard High German), German writing in Switzerland is mostly done with a variety of Standard German[2]. One of the main causes being, different varieties of Swiss German are so different that it would be difficult choosing a "standard" Swiss German orthography, so a very far variety closer to Standard German is used instead of Swiss German. There are other reasons for this, but this is one of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German
A challenge, yes, but an insurmountable one? No. There is no fundamental need to keep the written form of a language across various dialects unified. If people can understand each other's accents and dialects when speaking, they can also understand those same differences when expressed through writing (assuming that the writing system is capable of expressing those differences accurately enough, which the current English orthographies are not). In fact, writing in your own dialect and accent in informal contexts (e.g. on social media) is quite common in some language communities, and it doesn't particularly hinder communication. Thus, you could theoretically let the spelling vary by dialect and everything would work out just fine for the most part.
I’ve read phonetic English and it’s really hard at first but you eventually get the hang of it. Are you proposing that people just write out whatever they say in IPA and force the interpretation on the reader like we do with spoken language?
I wonder how this would affect communities that speak AAVE for example.
since pronunciation shift, this leads to a drift from semantic (definitional) spelling.
At least when you encounter an unknown word in English you can more likely understand it even if you aren't sure how to pronounce it. Languages with periodic spelling adjustments to re-align spelling with (ever shifting) pronunciation strip this info away.
> Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee!
Pfui. In France there is (or was -- I no longer live there) a popular prime time spelling bee, not just for kids.
I'm mostly against such an idea. While it's intuitive to think this is a good thing, I believe we take for granted a lot of the etymological information embedded in our spellings.
That probably seems like an intellectual concern divorced from day-to-day language use, but I think we take for granted how easy it is to figure out a word's meaning from its spelling once one has a grasp of written English. Words we typically think of as being clearly related, and pronounced as basically similar sounds are actually vastly different in basic pronunciation, and, thereby, reforming spelling in this way would eliminate visual relationships between related words that are otherwise totally non-obvious.
And all this to perform a phonological mapping that would be out of date almost as soon as it was settled on. To say nothing of the actual practical concern of arriving at a consensus on which phonemes in which words should be spelt which way, what of the absolute deluge of different accents to be dealt with for instance. That's before we get to the part where now English speakers lose access to all pre-existing literature after about 2 generations. The longer you look at the proposal, the more counter-productive it obviously is.
> This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform.
That has already happened, which is part of how we got into this mess.
See isle vs island.
IMHO The only real solution is to invent a time machine and keep England from getting conquered again and again and again. If you keep mashing languages together you are bound to get a mess.
This also reflects Britain's hands-off approach to language. If desired, the government could establish a council to police the language like the French:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
This is how Turkey ended up with its shallow orthography: the government designed a new alphabet. Before that they used Arabic.
Every language has had spelling reforms. Orthographies would certainly be worse if we never had spelling reforms. Some have just worked out better than others
I used to hate English spelling, but I live it now English's spelling is part of the world's cultural heritage. Centuries of history are captured within it.
I'm surprised Dutch ranks so opaque for reading. Opaqueness in writing, I could understand - as 't kofschip and its ruder cousin evidence, writing Dutch has always been a problem of having more graphemes than morphemes.
But reading? There are constant and consistent spelling reforms of Dutch, which partially aim to make it easier to read. My experience of it is that it's overwhelmingly regular (minus your odd melk surprise.) And apparently despite this, literature going back to 1994 empirically finds Dutch opaque for reading.
I mean if it's just single letter to phoneme then I can understand, most vowels are pronounced differently depending on if they are stressed or not, there is quite a long lists of vowels that use two letters and then there are some consonants that change sound in the presence of other consonants. And then there's the ij, which despite what other languages think is really just one letter.
Hungarian is probably one of the shallowest languages — it is almost exactly phonetic except for j and ly, which are pronounced identically so the specific spelling must be memorised.
Hungarian has other irregularities. For example, színház ‘theatre’ is written with a long i, but it is pronounced short. Also surnames being spelled in a variety of ways but pronounced the same, e.g. Veress versus Vörös, or with pre-modern orthography like Széchenyi or Bereczki. I vaguely recall some instances where fel- was alternatively spelled föl- well into the twentieth century.
Sure, but compare that with English, where there are more words are exceptions than follow the rules.
"Citation needed" for "Aarbic" is Wikipedia at its best! ;-)
(Especially in the given context, where this specifically refers to "unvocalised Arabic", which implies that the written language doesn't include vowels.)
I don't understand your comment or the citation needed? Arabic, like Hebrew, is typically written without most vowels and that makes reading words like "sfr" or "ktb" a guessing game. Theologians still squabble over how "yhwh" is supposed to be pronounced (Yahweh? Jehovah?).
You can add diacritics to both Arabic and Hebrew to show all vowels, but this is rarely done outside religious texts.
Jehovah was formed by taking the vowel points from Adonai and putting them over the tetragram (Yhwh) in order to remind the reader not to say the actual name of God but to instead say "my lord." https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/840-adonai
It's that I do not understand the "citation needed" annotation applied to "Arabic", because of the very reasons, you mentioned. (What kind of mindset is behind this?)
Korean is given as an example on par with Russian but Hangul is basically a purely phonetic writing system.