[HN Gopher] Who invented the alphabet?
___________________________________________________________________
Who invented the alphabet?
Author : diodorus
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-09-29 02:51 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.asor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.asor.org)
| gumby wrote:
| The short answer: the equivalent of today's text slang (esp for
| languages that use roman letters when using the phone).
|
| It's a nice idea.
| natroniks wrote:
| Adding to other resources shared here, archaeologist Denise
| Schmandt-Besserat has written about the evolution of writing (not
| strictly the alphabet), and much is available online:
| https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
| The roots of writing seems to be in counting/tallying marks, i.e.
| accounting. Another great book, "Against the Grain" by James
| Scott, describes how both tallying and writing developed hand-in-
| hand with the state.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I know it is not a popular opinion, but I think Hebrew came
| before Phoenician. As far as I can tell, the data could point in
| either direction.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| adrian_b wrote:
| That seems completely impossible, regardless of the ages of any
| surviving inscriptions.
|
| The reason is that the initial North-West Semitic alphabet had
| 27 consonants, whose order is known from the Ugaritic alphabet
| derived from it.
|
| The Phoenicians have merged 5 pairs of consonants (KHA with
| HOTA, SHIN with THANNA, DHAL with ZETA, ZU with SADE and AIN
| with GHAIN), and they have kept only one letter from each pair,
| the result being a simplified alphabet with only 22 consonants.
|
| There is no doubt that all the other later North-West Semitic
| alphabets have been derived from the Phoenician alphabet and
| not from any earlier Semitic alphabet, because all of them have
| started only with the restricted set of 22 letters, even if
| their languages had more consonants than 22, so the Phoenician
| letters were too few for writing all the sounds of those
| languages.
|
| Because of this mismatch between the Phoenician alphabet and
| the sound inventory of the languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and
| Arabic have been forced initially to use a single letter for
| multiple sounds, which has been corrected later by inventing
| various diacritic signs to distinguish the multiple meanings of
| a letter, like in the Hebrew SHIN and SIN (which are
| distinguished by adding a dot to the letter, in different
| positions).
|
| If the Hebrew alphabet had been older than the Phoenician, it
| would have included more than 22 letters, e.g. by having
| distinct letters for SHIN and SIN (whose pronunciations were
| different from the modern pronunciations, which have merged SIN
| with SAMEKH).
| olah_1 wrote:
| I am struggling to find information on this initial northwest
| Semitic alphabet that you mention.
|
| Your logic is sound, but I'm just not finding any info that
| backs up what you're saying.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| my first google result was a wikipedia article
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script that
| led to: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19299-revisiting-
| proto-sina... (see pp8-9 for letter inventory) fwiw
| adrian_b wrote:
| The article discussed here shows examples from older
| versions of the Semitic alphabet, many hundreds of years
| before the appearance of the Ugaritic, Phoenician or Hebrew
| alphabets.
|
| The reconstructed Proto-Semitic language had 29 consonants,
| so it is likely that the oldest Semitic alphabet also had
| 29 letters.
|
| However, this cannot be known for sure, because the very
| few preserved inscriptions do not contain all the signs of
| the alphabet. Ugaritic proves that there were at least 27
| letters.
|
| At some point in time, the Semitic alphabet has split into
| two variants, a North-West variant and a South-West
| variant, the latter being used for writing various South-
| Arabic languages.
|
| While the Northern and the Southern variants have diverged
| in their graphic forms, the most significant difference is
| that they have completely different orders of the letters
| in the alphabet. The reason for the two orders is unknown.
| Perhaps they have used some mnemonic technique, like
| reciting a poem for remembering all the letters, and the
| North and the South have chosen different poems.
|
| The North-West Semitic alphabet is the one having the order
| alpha-beta-gamma ..., which has been inherited by many
| later Semitic alphabets and by the Greek, Latin and
| Cyrillic alphabets, in all their many variants, including
| the English alphabet.
|
| The oldest Semitic alphabet for which all the letters are
| known, together with their alphabetic order, is the
| Ugaritic alphabet. In Ugaritic, two pairs of Proto-Semitic
| consonants have merged, so it has only 27 consonants of the
| original 29. Moreover, Ugaritic does not provide any
| information about the graphic forms of the older Semitic
| alphabets, because in it all the letter glyphs have been
| replaced with forms that can be written on cuneiform
| tablets.
|
| Even so, the Ugaritic alphabet remains the most complete
| source of information about the Semitic alphabets that have
| preceded the Phoenician alphabet.
|
| You can see the 27 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet in the
| Unicode, from "U+10380;UGARITIC LETTER ALPA" to
| "U+1039A;UGARITIC LETTER TO" (besides these 27 letters
| inherited from the older North-West Semitic alphabet,
| Ugaritic has created 3 additional special-purpose letters,
| appended at the end of the alphabet).
|
| All this information can be found in the literature about
| the older Semitic languages from the second millennium BC,
| including Ugaritic, and about Proto-Semitic and comparative
| Afro-Asiatic linguistics.
|
| There is abundant data demonstrating that Hebrew, Aramaic
| and Arabic had more than 22 consonants at the time when
| they have adopted the inadequate for them Phoenician
| alphabet with only 22 consonants. Arabic has retained 28
| consonants until today, so, like Hebrew, it has multiplied
| the original 22 letters by combining them with diacritic
| signs.
|
| If any of these languages would have adopted the older
| alphabet that was the source of the Ugaritic alphabet,
| instead of adopting the simplified Phoenician alphabet,
| they would have had distinct letters for their consonants
| since the beginning, with no need to invent later new
| diacritic signs.
|
| Hebrew SIN was a lateral fricative, which is a sound that
| did not exist in Phoenician. When the Hebrews have adopted
| the Phoenician alphabet, they did not have any letter for
| writing SIN, so they were forced to write it with the
| letter SHIN, which was somewhat close in pronunciation. At
| that time SAMEKH was pronounced in a different way, so it
| would have been a worse choice.
|
| If the Hebrews would have invented an alphabet of their
| own, or if they would have adopted another Semitic alphabet
| variant, and not the Phoenician alphabet, they would not
| have needed to use a single letter for multiple sounds.
| This was clearly not a satisfactory solution, because later
| they have invented the SHIN and SIN dots, to disambiguate
| the letter with multiple readings.
| someone7x wrote:
| Given that neither of them "came first" in the topic of
| inventing the alphabet, what does it matter if Hebrew or
| Phoenician preceded each other?
| User23 wrote:
| Funny how the images of early manuscripts look suspiciously like
| capchas.
| orionblastar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
| nemo wrote:
| The Rosetta Stone is from c. 200 BCE, issued by the Ptolemies
| in Egypt, ruling after Alexander had conquered Egypt. The first
| examples of writing in an ancient ancestor of our alphabet
| writing in Western Semitic are from c. ~1500 BCE where they
| were using Egyptian hieroglyphs as a model. People were writing
| in descendants of that alphabet for more than a thousand years
| when the Rosetta Stone was carved, the Greek script derived
| from Phoenician which evolved from West Semitic, while the
| hieroglyphs on the same stone were the model for West Semitic
| writing a thousand years before.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I was about to write that I was under the impression it came
| from ancient Egypt, via the Near East and into Greece.
| continuitylimit wrote:
| OP's author is a prof. of religious studies and has a book on
| Hebrews so possibly his point of view requires the
| preeminence of Hebrew alphabet.
|
| I also found some of the reasoning questionable. The reason
| Latin teaching was the job of Greek slaves was precisely
| because they were Greeks and Roman nouveau rich were adorning
| the education of their children. Who teaches the children of
| elite today? Millionaires or smart poor people? The second
| questionable idea of his is that "sex" and stuff like that
| are not of interest to "elite". This confused thinking
| disregarding content for medium also was a rather weak
| argument. Maybe the elite were using writing as a private
| very exclusive chat app and sending textual selfies.
|
| Hebrew must be first if you are a religious person who
| believes in God speaking Hebrew letters and creating the
| world. It just doesn't work if it turns out the Egyptians
| created the alphabet.
| effnorwood wrote:
| [dead]
| meepmorp wrote:
| The Greeks. They're the first known group to explicitly represent
| vowels, unlike the older Egyptian derived systems which only
| represented consonants and thus were abjads rather than
| alphabets.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the Greeks have invented the most significant improvement
| of the writing system, after that when some Semitic people have
| simplified the Egyptian writing system by eliminating all the
| multi-consonant signs, any discussion about the Greek alphabet
| cannot omit the fact that they did not invent the alphabet, but
| they have only improved the Phoenician alphabet, by reusing
| signs corresponding to consonants not used in Greek to write
| the Greek vowels.
|
| This was a huge advance, but it cannot be named as "inventing
| the alphabet".
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| It depends what you mean by alphabet. In the narrow sense
| (consonants AND vowels) Greek was the first language to have
| one - Phoenician had an _abjad_ (consonants only), probably
| because most words had 3 consonant roots, with vowels varying
| with their grammatical role.
| Archelaos wrote:
| [delayed]
| fnovd wrote:
| The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly
| represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which
| could only represent emotion through character combinations and
| thus were lame rather than complete.
| gascoigne wrote:
| Not sure if /s, but I recently read about emoji history. It
| apparently originated from pagers and then "graduated" to
| phones.
|
| https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/story-of-the-emoji/
|
| Doesn't talk about kaomoji though which I think are
| supercool. Like this table flip: ( + deg # deg ) + ( + - +
| lherron wrote:
| Came here looking for "Sergey and Larry". Guess I'm the only one
| feeling a little silly on a Friday afternoon.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| oh definitely - that must explain why I saw a guy with a white
| shawl and a black box filled with written prayer, tied to his
| forehead today.. counting grains, no doubt!
|
| to be very clear - the ways of sacred writing are very old, and
| not the same as counting grains.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar hell.
| That's the last thing we need here.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708558.
|
| Edit: we've had to warn you about this specifically once
| before, as well as several other past warnings about breaking
| the site guidelines. Would you please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules from now on? We have to ban accounts that won't, and
| I don't want to ban you.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| what ? this is not flamewar? I am being completely
| misunderstood here.. I am not guilty .. dang - honestly, I
| meant to be fully supportive of prayer and I am deeply
| wronged in this sequence.. I regularly support religious
| topics if you read my writing
|
| note: I will re-read the guidelines in an abundance of
| caution, but I repeat.. I am being misunderstood deeply ..
| this is not at all meant as some kind of problem thing to say
| dang wrote:
| I'm sorry. I obviously misread you.
|
| Unfortunately, the comment is still a flamewar starter even
| if you didn't intend it that way, because it didn't make
| your intent clear enough. I wasn't the only person who took
| it the wrong way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709050. If we had
| left it in its original position, there would likely have
| been others.
|
| The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent in
| such cases (I was just writing about this elsewhere -
| perhaps it will help explain:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709303). And as the
| site guidelines say, " _Comments should get more thoughtful
| and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._
| "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mistrial9 wrote:
| ok - I deeply apologize and since we are detached, I will
| also add that I study the Bible myself, and my first wife
| was in fact Jewish. Please, really sorry to be in this
| awkward moment
| dang wrote:
| No worries! These things happen.
| natroniks wrote:
| If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being
| the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and
| cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and
| which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have
| things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets,
| this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of
| these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of
| writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of
| wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could
| produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were
| hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so
| much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah
| was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of
| the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the
| writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns
| as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of
| oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been
| invented, but because it was not used for literary material.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Something important to remember is that the transient
| documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian days
| were scratched into clay (a medium which allows it to be
| easily erased and adjusted if necessary, and is plentifully
| available in quantity). One consequence is that if you have
| these things in a storage building that catches on fire, the
| clay is baked into pottery and essentially permanently
| preserved for archaeologists to uncover. Texts written on
| organic parchment or papyrus are far less durable, as they
| tend to decompose unless properly stored.
|
| This means we probably have an exaggerated abundance of
| economic documents due to survivorship bias of the things
| they wrote economic data on.
| adamlgerber wrote:
| odd thing to be snarky about. organized religious practices
| coevolved with agricultural societies. I don't think this is
| that scandalous?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yeah - downvotes.. the comment is meant to be supportive of
| prayer and dismissive of accounting.. yet it is apparently
| "snarky" .. online forums are a cursed medium?
| thewakalix wrote:
| If you're unaware of what "snarky" means, I suggest
| consulting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarky.
| codeulike wrote:
| _Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDY30tiD98
|
| A song for children by They Might Be Giants
| havblue wrote:
| "Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC's? Thank the
| Phoenicians - they invented them." -Dame Judi Dench, Spaceship
| Earth
| dmbaggett wrote:
| An authoritative source on this _Inventing the Alphabet_ by
| Johnanna Drucker. She covers not only the modern evidence but
| also attempts to classify alphabets throughout history, with
| particular focus on the Middle Ages. The first half is a bit dry
| -- how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th
| Century made up about the history of the alphabet? -- (a lot was
| made up), but the second half looks at the modern archaeological
| contribution to the study of alphabetic origins and is very
| interesting.
|
| There are also lots of scans of really interesting Medieval
| manuscripts cataloging alphabets in the book.
| meatmanek wrote:
| If you're interested in fascinating deep dives into the history
| of a few odd letters, the jan Misali channel on Youtube has a
| video on the letter W (which, along the way, covers F and Y) and
| another one on the letter C. w:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y c:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chpT0TzietQ
| [deleted]
| narag wrote:
| The article makes a difference between "learned scribes" and
| "creative people at the margins" forgeting a third possibility:
| learned scribes working not for the religious or secular
| bureaucracies, but for the merchants.
|
| A parallelism: programmers have different styles working for an
| established corporation and for a startup. The bureaucracy tends
| to stand for the old practices, resisting change. The dynamic
| environment favours starting from scratch and simplicity.
| Merrill wrote:
| >>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do
| show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the
| rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as
| sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure
| ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets
| we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers
| used it unprofessionally.
|
| Perhaps they were early physicians?
| hinkley wrote:
| It's interesting how people in this space study twins, and I
| wonder sometimes if that isn't more on the nose than we give it
| credit for.
|
| Twins likely created the first languages - who does the first
| person genetically capable of speech talk to, except someone
| genetically and environmentally identical? Likely had the first
| verbal families, and then verbal tribes. Written secret codes
| might have started the same way, and ended up either being
| tribal or trade secrets. Success leads to imitation. Partial
| success leads to theft, or acquisition.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Another semi related thing I've thought about is how the
| invention of words comes about. I know most words today have an
| origin that can be traced back through text over hundreds of
| years, but what about the time way way back, Indo-European era,
| was there anything to trace back to? Was it just one or a few
| people who realized there as no grunt sound that meant "cold" or
| "elbow" so decided one day that that was the grunt sound they
| were gonna use and it spread naturally?
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| _... it is clear that a theory of the alphabet as a casual and
| playful mode of knowledge explained all of our evidence when I
| first tackled this back in 2004, and still (encouragingly)
| explains all of the new evidence discovered in the 20 years
| since. What we lack is a theory of play as a mode of creativity
| and knowledge production in ancient writing, which I suggest as a
| new frontier for research on the early history of writing._
|
| An interesting theory for much innovation, reborn. How much
| creativity comes from play? How many get their start in games -
| within games, doing things within the gaming world, either their
| play-fort or an online world or their imagination about their
| book or their role-playing game.
|
| Remember SV companies used to encourage play, with rooms designed
| for it? (Do they still?)
| hilbert42 wrote:
| A fascinating subject, and there's an extension of it about which
| I've been curious for years, it's why English doesn't use
| diacritics or accents on alphabetical characters as do many
| European languages--French, German, etc. For instance, in French
| the letter _' e'_ can take four forms--without accent, grave _e,_
| acute /aigu _e,_ circumflex _e._ This makes the letter much more
| flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation.
|
| So why doesn't English use them? It's clear the language needs
| them with words such as _through, thorough_ and _thought_ which
| are confusing enough for native speakers let alone those learning
| English as a second language. And how about inconsistencies such
| as the verb _to lead_ and the metal Pb _lead,_ or other strange
| _' gh'_ words such as _cough?_
|
| Similarly, proper nouns such as _Wycombe, Warwick,_ etc. defy
| logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit
| from diacritical marks.
|
| I've never considered myself a particularly good speller and I
| reckon I would have benefited from diacritics had English used
| them.
| Merrill wrote:
| It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate
| documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second
| paragraph would be:
|
| s@U waI d^znt 'INGglIS ju:z dem? Its klI@ d@ 'laeNGgwIdZ ni:dz
| dem wId we:dz s^tS aez thru:, 'th^r@ aend tho:t wItS a:
| k@n'fju:zING I'n^f fo: 'neItIv 'spi:k@z let @'l@Un d@Uz
| 'le:nING 'INGglIS aez @ 'sek@nd 'laeNGgwIdZ. aend haU @'baUt
| ,Ink@n'sIstnsiz s^tS aez d@ ve:b tu: li:d aend d@ 'metl Pb
| li:d, o:r '^d@ streIndZ 'gh' we:dz s^tS aez kaf?
| adamrezich wrote:
| I think I can speak for many many people who casually read
| Wikipedia articles by asking: how does one go about
| practically learning the IPA, so as to be able to read (not
| even write) something like that? every time I come across a
| Wikipedia article that uses IPA to explain pronunciation,
| it's wholly inscrutable gibberish, completely useless if
| there isn't a listen-to-someone-saying-it button.
| akavi wrote:
| Just like you learn anything else. Flash cards, pure
| repeated exposure, reading about the symbols long enough
| that you have a framework to fit them into, etc.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Transcription practice really helped me associate IPA
| with speech sounds.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Usually those pronunciations are also links to the IPA
| helper page. I've used it to figure out pronunciations in
| the past.
| akavi wrote:
| Non-rhotic accent, eh? Estuary English?
|
| "'th^r@"'s was interesting to me, I'd render "thorough" in my
| ideolect (Southern-inflected General American) "th^row". Is
| your pronunciation "standard" in British English (or whatever
| the prestige variant where you're from is)?
|
| Also, I think you meant "d@ 'metl Pb led"
| goalieca wrote:
| English has so many accents that spelling would still have to
| be memorized to be used as a universal writing system.
| jcranmer wrote:
| English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you
| understand that you are spelling words largely according to
| Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely
| not reflected in English spelling.
|
| As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis
| is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia
| article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels +
| unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or
| /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one
| with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels
| and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using
| different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus
| ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy.
|
| The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long
| vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3
| sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with
| clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel
| spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their
| corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in
| particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the
| Great Vowel Shift, too.
|
| [1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity
| to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign
| spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to
| some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology
| to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can
| actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most
| English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular)
| phonological changes from Middle English.
| marktani wrote:
| very interesting!
|
| can you share a couple examples of words borrowed with
| foreign, non-Latin script? I'm having trouble imagining how
| this could look like
| jcranmer wrote:
| Words like 'manga' or 'anime' come from Japanese (written
| in kanji) or Greek words like onomatopoeia (Greek is a
| different alphabet from Latin) are ones that come to mind.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Algebra, from Arabic
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The
| vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for
| the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of
| native adults seems wrong.
|
| Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and
| dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't
| sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what
| would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for
| zero gain?
| bojan wrote:
| Maybe one of the reasons the pronunciation varies across time
| and regions is exactly because the pronunciation rules aren't
| really standardized, so people can get creative.
|
| I wonder if the languages with strict pronunciation rules
| tend to change less. In my native language we tend to get new
| words of course, but if I read a text from 100 years ago I
| will be able to pronounce every word correctly, even if the
| word is now archaic and fallen out of use. I might get the
| accent wrong, and indeed accents do vary across regions, and
| sometimes even between neighboring towns.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| That reason doesn't make sense, because pronunciation has
| always varied across time and most people were illiterate
| in the past. the written word, is not the normative form of
| a language. words aren't made of letters, and letters
| aren't made of sounds.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems
| decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is
| a single reason for English.
|
| But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many
| European languages derive from Latin, and most other were
| influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have
| diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania"
| could mean "mania" (madness) or "mania" (a kind of spirit).
| With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g.
| "orphanus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I
| suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of
| Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were
| different from Latin words. It was even more useful because
| Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across
| centuries).
|
| By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be
| sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some
| studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient
| to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow
| down when reading a text that contains rare words, while
| English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first
| encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and
| "gaol" in English.
| seszett wrote:
| > _French and English are languages were you can 't be sure
| of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen._
|
| English yes of course, but French pronunciation is very
| regular and only a few loanwords don't follow the rules.
| "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other
| -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Etienne). The
| most difficult rules to master though are those that take
| into account the origin of a word (Latin, Greek or a Germanic
| language), especially for how to pronounce "ch", but these
| are essentially loanwords.
|
| The reverse is not true though, there are many different
| potential ways to write a word that produce the same
| pronunciation.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The rules of pronunciation in French are... hard to
| describe. Maybe it's because French is a natal language for
| me. I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs? No, French
| has lots of particularities to it, just not as many as
| English. Spelling in French is definitely a lot more
| regular than in English, but the rules of spelling in
| French have lots of exceptions anyways (e.g., all words
| that start with 'af' have a double 'f' except [long list of
| words like afrique]).
| Quekid5 wrote:
| > I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs?
|
| Just like 'hour' and 'our' in English I assume. They just
| happened to sound exactly alike for different(?) reasons.
|
| EDIT: Probably similar reasons, actually? The "h" here
| participates in in a vowel sound (effectively silencing
| it) and the 's' suffix is _often_ (but not always!)
| silent in French?
|
| Spelling is a tension between going purely for sounding
| things out (e.g IPA) and being able to find commonality
| with other pronunciations (dialects spoken by neighboring
| peoples), etc. It's going to get ad hoc because people.
| detourdog wrote:
| I have always loved the Jean Shepherd line:
|
| Its as if the french don't even know how to spell their
| own language.
|
| This is from an perspective english. I want to also add
| that english developed as part of a frontier colony.
| goalieca wrote:
| Where I'm from, the f in plural oeufs is silent. Also,
| note the correct spelling of oeuf
| wongarsu wrote:
| > The reverse is not true though, there are many different
| potential ways to write a word that produce the same
| pronunciation.
|
| For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a
| 1-1 mapping in both directions.
|
| French tries really hard to embed everything required for
| pronunciation in the spelling, but because of dialects and
| phonetic drift that leads to some pronunciations having
| multiple viable spellings.
|
| German seems more concerned with the other direction: for
| each pronunciation (in high German) there is one obvious
| way to spell it (barring some baggage around c/k/ck and
| s/ss/ss, but even that has rules that can be applied to
| mostly clear it up). The other direction also mostly works,
| the spelling-pronunciation mapping is fairly obvious even
| if you don't know the word, but it is more ambiguous than
| French (no way to differentiate e e e or e; and e is mostly
| inferred).
|
| English somehow seems to neither try to maintain a
| consistent spelling-pronunciation mapping nor a
| pronunciation-spelling mapping, nor a tradeoff between the
| two. At least unless you know the origin of the word and
| are aware of pertinent linguistic history of the last ~200
| years, or develop a good heuristic understanding for those.
| Probably because of the amount of coordination required to
| maintain a decent mapping in either direction. Both France
| and Germany have influential central control on spelling.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to
| have a 1-1 mapping in both directions.
|
| As far as I know, Finnish is very very close to 100%
| phonetic: one letter, one phoneme, with some slight
| exceptions and some wiggle room when it comes to
| dialectical variation and loanwords, especially those
| with nonnative phonemes like /b/ or /g/. The velar nasal
| NG is the biggest exception, featuring in "nk" and "ng"
| (like in many other languages) and the rules aren't
| entirely straightforward. Another exception is that in
| spoken language a glottal stop or gemination can appear
| at some morpheme boundaries but isn't reflected in
| written text.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's also that french and german have somewhat purer
| linguistic roots, english started as a west germanic
| language, got admixtures of old norse, followed by
| massive injections of french and latin (roughly a quarter
| of the modern vocabulary, each), and uncontrolled
| pronunciation shifts.
|
| Written old english was quite regular and phonetically
| sound. It also had a fair number of diacritics (after
| latinisation).
|
| > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to
| have a 1-1 mapping in both directions.
|
| I understand korean is rather good in that perspective,
| but also that it has a relatively simple phonology and
| the korean script is constructed, it was designed from
| scratch for korean.
|
| Interestingly and not dissimilar to TFA's assertions, for
| a very long time it was only used by the common class and
| disdained by the aristocracy, 19th century nationalism
| and separation from china led to its revival.
| litoE wrote:
| "The New Yorker" magazine uses umlauts to mark the different
| pronunciations of doubled vowels. The write "cooperate" to
| distinguish the way you pronounce its double o from the sound
| of the double o in "chicken coop".
| gumby wrote:
| If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is)
| and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement,
| but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves
| meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling
| is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's
| historical semantics.
|
| You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or
| "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their
| disconnect from pronunciation.
| cryptonector wrote:
| IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his
| (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly.
|
| English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going
| to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the
| current way of doing things.
|
| Also, FYI, the circumflex in e in French isn't there to change
| how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used
| to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is
| for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, etre is not
| pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but
| I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the
| circumflex accent in French.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not
| going to happen
|
| Sure it is, continuously and gradually.
|
| > Also, FYI, the circumflex in e in French isn't there to
| change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e
| there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how
| it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, etre
| is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as
| etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the
| essence of the circumflex accent in French.
|
| IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made
| use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel
| there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be
| exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-
| elided "s", so the circumflex serves both historical and
| phonetic purposes.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Sure it is, continuously and gradually.
|
| There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the
| spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the
| New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on
| using umlauts? :)
|
| I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only
| that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than
| the rest of the language.
|
| > IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or
| made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each
| vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there
| may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the
| now-elided "s", so the circumflex serves both historical
| and phonetic purposes.
|
| Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I
| would pronounce chateau and chateau substantially the same.
| I would pronounce fantome slightly differently from
| fantome. Etre and etre, on the other hand, would have
| substantially different pronunciations.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g.
| tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for
| "sch". In Czech, these are c and s respectively. Polish has
| similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters"
| orthography.
| gsich wrote:
| 'Q' could be used for that in German. Rename all other words.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might
| be because diacritics would just make English even harder to
| read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very
| confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there
| was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in
| the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on
| letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't
| sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax
| pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and
| strong romantic language influence, would make it even more
| confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially
| as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an
| "easier" language than the very complex Latin.
| NeoTar wrote:
| It's a fascinating subject.
|
| I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come
| from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to
| English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of
| Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling
| conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to
| coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages -
| contrast 'television' from Greek and Latin in English, with
| Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German.
|
| With respect to dialectical marks, I'm not sure why English in
| general doesn't use them (although some might argue we do if we
| spell words cafe or naive), but they don't seem to be
| 'fashionable' in related languages - Dutch doesn't seem to use
| them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - a, o
| and u can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g.
| where the accented forms aren't available) and ss can be
| replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German
| demands this.
| euroderf wrote:
| > contrast 'television' from Greek and Latin in English
|
| I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were
| complaints that this new word coinage "television" would
| never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.
| jl6 wrote:
| > dialectical marks
|
| Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.
| wahern wrote:
| I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android
| and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that
| someone had used the term dialectical before? Are
| autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest
| dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or
| received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we
| could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European
| English word probability database as in European discourse
| dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)
| lainga wrote:
| Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation
| years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the
| Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and
| pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers'
| minds
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a
| diacritic or like "1/2 of one"
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