> I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. There's too many oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people think.
Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of sanity that some people try to portray it as.
This article feels to me as it was written in bad faith, trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing the point was proved.
The author happily start the article by submitting:
>The purpose of this page is to describe [...] the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time.
but then they quietly show that with their whole page of rules, the reader will not actually pronounce 85% of the words correctly as they just claimed, but actually less than 60%. By arbitrarily deciding that a number of errors can be considered small, the author bumps the number of "correctly pronounced words" to 85%.
Are we talking about 85% of the whole language? No, just 5000 words. Even if they are the most frequent in the written language, they would still only account for around 95% of all the words.
The author position is:
- people complain about the English spelling all the time, saying it's horrible
- the English spelling is actually pretty systematic and this page will explain the rules to understand it
- when you will have mastered these rules, you will pronounce half of the words perfectly - for extremely common words such as "give", "get", "real", "very", "put", "half" you are still SOL
- the english spelling is not so horrible after all: as a perfect student you will only butcher more than 1 word every 10 spoken
To me, the author has proved the point he was trying to disprove.
(and in which rule do /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)
All languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue these days to single out english and use it as a punching bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are logical. They all have irregularities and illogical aspects.
It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn by speaking. It's not unique to english.
Amongst niche circles of linguists, maybe. It's easy to single out for the average person because it's popular- english is a language learned around the entire world.
Besides, I'd rather have some more word pronunications than memorizing a table of der/das/die,dem/dem/der and a word's gender on top of learning the word itself. Or changing the position of a verb depending on if I used a modal verb or not.
We were talking about the orthography specifically. There are certainly areas in which English is much simpler than other languages, including those that you mention. But its orthography is objectively very bad.
Your examples are more or less regular though. English is a stress-based language, so it's expected that pronunciation might change when you add an extra syllable, if the stress moves (syllable -> syllabic is another example, btw).
> wind, rewind
This one is trivial, no? the "wind" in "rewind" is pronounced the same, with /aj/. The "wind" with /ɪ/ is unrelated.
Could you please share your list? I have this discussion a few times per year and I'd love to hand that list to people that think written English makes sense.
I was thinking of writing a blog article on it but I don't think I'd need to anymore!
Believe me or not, I kept the list in a chat with my girlfriend on a certain social platform and got my account banned (just yesterday). I'll bother her to find it, check this thread in a week if I don't get it in the next hour. Although the list is not as extensive as you may think
