English Spelling Pronunciation

The issue with English is not just orthography, it's pronunciation. The lack of a correspondence between spelling and sound means that pronunciation is free to change. And since it became different in each region or country, to enforce a writing system that matches phonemes would either cause the language to be written differently in each region, or people to modify their pronunciations in accordance to the new writing system. We're talking about Americans starting to speak in British

The spelling of English words gives you two separate clues:1. How it is pronounced.2. Its etymology and what it means.Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to etymology and meaning.For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that "native", "nation" have related meanings becaus

The issue with English (I think) is that its a mostly germanic spoken language, with Latin (French) spelling imposed over it. Plus there are an enormous number of foreign words added sometimes with their original spelling, sometimes with a hacked phonetic version.I assumed all languages were like this (spelling only loosely/occasionally linked to pronunciation). But German manages it just fine.I always found it frustrating being told to sound out words and everyone acting like this sy

The problem is that there is not one correct pronunciation of English but myriads of dialects.While some Languages do have a standard like High-German, for English there isn't one that feels neutral and that most English speakers would agree one. Received Pronunciation? Yeah, that is going to piss off a lot of people. Try to create some form of "accent free" American English? Maybe go back to using Transatlantic accent? That one was one fun!If you want a close relationship b

The part about spelling being inconsistent with how it sounds is likely due to "great vowel shift" [1].My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner a

But you can spell "pronunciation", which many english speakers have difficulty doing :)

"Just pronounce it the way it's spelled" might make sense in some languages, and it probably makes a lot of sense in Russian, say, where the person who transcribed a name from Latin letters has already decided how it should be (mis)pronounced (though the position of the stress makes a big difference in Russian), but it doesn't make sense in English because the spelling is rather inconsistent even if you're looking just at ordinary everyday words like "machine",

English spelling is inconsistent. English phonology is complex. These are different things.

English pronounciation is so irregular it looks like it's written in a wrong alphabet and would benefit greatly from some Cyrillic equivalent.

Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written.English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.)Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess th