I think most of that is actually a weirdness in our orthography. To linguists, languages are, fundamentally a thing that happens in the mouth and not on the page. In the mouth, the hardest thing is basically rhoticism… the “tongue curling back” thing often rendered with “r”. The Irish, Scottish, and American accents retain this weirdness, but a classic Boston, NYC, or southern British accents tends to drop it.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives two IPA transcriptions for “four”: the American /fɔr/ makes sense to me and has an “r” in it, but the British is /fɔː/ has just totally given up on curling the tongue or trying to pretend in the dictionary that this is happening in human mouths.
That tongue curl is quite hard. Quite a few five year olds in rural Idaho (and maybe regions where rhotic dialects are maintained) often struggle with it, and are corrected by teachers and parents (and maybe made fun of by peers) for not speaking properly… for spontaneously adopting “a New York Accent” due a very common a childhood “speech impediment”. Many ESL speakers drop it, hence the city dialects dropping it, not just in practice in the mouth, but officially.
English orthography is kind of a disaster, I agree. It attempts to shoehorn a german/celtic/french/norse pidgin-or-creole into the latin letter system, and … yeah. Tough task. It was never going to be clean.
If I was going to offer a defense of the status quo here, I’d say that there is no flat/simple orthography to switch to.
Every accent would need its own separate “spelling reform” and their texts would be less mutually intelligible, and it would hurt science and the letters quite a lot, and also probably lead to faster drift into a world where “English” denotes a language family rather than a language.
Interestingly, Interslavic is an attempt to “design by hand” a similar thing for slavic speakers to what English still has bascially for free: common words with stable spellings and meanings, and huge tolerance for how they are pronounced. Once you see the overarching vision for “a written language system” with these properties as a desirable end point… since English is already at that desirable end point, why change it? <3
I think most of that is actually a weirdness in our orthography. To linguists, languages are, fundamentally a thing that happens in the mouth and not on the page. In the mouth, the hardest thing is basically rhoticism… the “tongue curling back” thing often rendered with “r”. The Irish, Scottish, and American accents retain this weirdness, but a classic Boston, NYC, or southern British accents tends to drop it.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives two IPA transcriptions for “four”: the American /fɔr/ makes sense to me and has an “r” in it, but the British is /fɔː/ has just totally given up on curling the tongue or trying to pretend in the dictionary that this is happening in human mouths.
That tongue curl is quite hard. Quite a few five year olds in rural Idaho (and maybe regions where rhotic dialects are maintained) often struggle with it, and are corrected by teachers and parents (and maybe made fun of by peers) for not speaking properly… for spontaneously adopting “a New York Accent” due a very common a childhood “speech impediment”. Many ESL speakers drop it, hence the city dialects dropping it, not just in practice in the mouth, but officially.
(“J” is a runner up for weirdness in the mouth, but I think that’s just because the voiced postaveolar affricate /dʒ/ is a pretty rare phoneme.)
English orthography is kind of a disaster, I agree. It attempts to shoehorn a german/celtic/french/norse pidgin-or-creole into the latin letter system, and … yeah. Tough task. It was never going to be clean.
If I was going to offer a defense of the status quo here, I’d say that there is no flat/simple orthography to switch to.
Every accent would need its own separate “spelling reform” and their texts would be less mutually intelligible, and it would hurt science and the letters quite a lot, and also probably lead to faster drift into a world where “English” denotes a language family rather than a language.
Interestingly, Interslavic is an attempt to “design by hand” a similar thing for slavic speakers to what English still has bascially for free: common words with stable spellings and meanings, and huge tolerance for how they are pronounced. Once you see the overarching vision for “a written language system” with these properties as a desirable end point… since English is already at that desirable end point, why change it? <3
You’re right. I said “pronunciation,” but the problem is more exactly about the translation between graphemes and phonemes.