>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
English does use a phonetic script. The letters represent phonemes and carry no semantic meaning on their own, as opposed to an ideographic or logographic script. That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.
There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
>English does use a phonetic script. (...) That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.
The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
> The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.
The fact that it uses Latin letters doesn't make it phonetic if the same letter consistently resolves to different phonemes or lack thereof, depending on its context.
You may argue it's not a very good phonetic script, with all of the special cases present... But letters mostly represent sounds, unlike written languages where characters represent concepts.
A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
I don't know what kind it uses, but it's not phonetic, because the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your claims.
If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.
If it was not phonetic, what "idea" would the letter "r" represent? That it can represent different phonetics depending on other rules doesn't change that it represents phonetics.
English is an alphabetic language not a phonetic one.
In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.
Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.
You are not wrong in idea, but you are wrong in specifics. Does English use a 1:1 phonetic language? No. Of course not. Just like most "functional programming" languages have a lot of differences between them. The colloquial use of the term is not nearly as precise as many think it is.
Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D
People confidently stating as fact stuff they know little or nothing about. Ask any competent linguist: English has a phonetic script. (Not a very good one, perhaps, but phonetic nonetheless.)
The issue in this thread is confusion between two separate ideas: "English is a phonetic langauge" and "English uses a phonetic script".
The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.
The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.
"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.
There were blog posts that surfaced in the '10s trying to make a case for official inclusion of emoji into the written language. Thankfully that concept got little traction.
It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word (like Chinese or Japan).
Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".
> Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English (...)
I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.
Japanese is phonetic, unlike English. In Japanese spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent. Words sound like they look and look like they sound. Even someone who’s never studied Japanese before could read a text written in romaji and be understood without trouble (unlike someone studying French, for example).
Nit, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. But, largely Japanese is not phonetic in written language, as they also have a logographic set which makes up a large portion of most texts.
English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The distinction wouldn't mean much.
It's entirely possible for a distinction that contrasts a large majority with a small minority, or even an actually-existing totality with a hypothetical set of counterexamples, to be meaningful.
If it is not phonemic, what is it? It is not necessarily "regular" or "uniform" in the phonemes that are represented, but you can't consider it anything other than phonetic, as the characters represent phonemes. Pretty much period.
As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.
I'm assuming it isn't deception as much as it is a bit plain ignorance. I confess I have harbored the thought that English is not phonetic in the past. Is a common thing for folks to say; especially when trying to point out that English is hard.
For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
> For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
Yes, exactly.
If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).
English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji.
In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling, many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40 phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet).
The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple:
* Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/).
* Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter.
* Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).
* Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation.
Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).
Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are present throughout the language (H/CH, Ż/RZ, Ó/U); voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always sounds like PSZ...); Ą and Ę have a rule where they are fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part. Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja" from your example).
Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
A phonetic script is one where the symbols represent sounds. The Latin alphabet is a phonetic script. In contrast, consider the shared numeric system used in both English and Polish. How do you pronounce "1"? What about "10" or "11" - does using the same symbol in all three numbers give you any hint about whether they sound the same? What if I'm saying the numbers in French?
The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.
If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard.
Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw