| Tuesday, July 18, 2006 |
17:49 - Repartée
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1153098556.shtml
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Dean Esmay started an interesting discussion the other day on the kooky nature of English spelling. As I noted in the comments:
To the best of my knowledge, English is the only language that is so free and easy with using diphthongs as standard vowel sounds.
The way we pronounce the letter "A"—a "long A" sound, like in "same"—is what in every other language would be transcribed as "ei". Which makes perfect sense if you think of the five standard vowel sounds as used in just about every other language: "ah", "eh", "ee" oh", "oo".
The same goes for our "long I" sound—what every other language would write as "ai". And the name of the letter "U" ought to be spelled "iu" or "yu". It's likewise ridiculous that our name for "E" is "ee", which every other language would write as "i".
And then we do wonky things with consonants too—"j" is what ought properly to be transliterated "dzh". Why does that get a single letter? It's about as strange as Cyrillic, with a single letter for the "shch" sound in "fresh cheese" (or "Khrushchev").
About the only other language I know of that even aspires to English's funkiness in orthography is Dutch, with its graphemes like "ij" (which is pronounced like our "long I" sound). Small wonder that Dutch and English are cousins long sundered...
The really perverse thing is, once you get to know it really well, English's quirks are what make one love it so.
Now, later commenters weighed in with thoughts like these:
English has developed a habit of following other languages into dark alleys, mugging them, and then rifling their pockets for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
And then lets them use "OK" in restitution.
Yes, well. Here's the thing about English: when English absorbs words from other languages, it bends its own rules to adhere to the spelling and pronunciation of the words in their source languages. We (or at least the Americans) pronounce "jalapeño" with a rough "h" at the beginning, and spell it with the "ñ" character. From French we took not only the majority of the verbatim dictionary in 1066, in more recent times we've adapted such words as ballet and fête and résumé and retained the French pronunciations and vowel diacritic marks, even when things like circumflexes and cedillas and grave accents don't officially exist in English. We'd rather agglomerate foreign pronunciations and spellings into our own rules than batter the words around until they work in our own orthography.
For contrast, consider what the Institute de la Langue Française (a body that doesn't have any analog in English, naturallement) did when confronted with the vulgar anglicisme "CD-ROM": they decreed that it be spelled cederóm.
And let's not even get into what Japanese does when absorbing English words, an act that has become a national pastime over the last fifty years. In order to approximate English pronunciations within native orthography, you get words like "lemon" turning into remon, "beefsteak" into bifuteku, and "productivity" into purodakuchibichi. And explain, if you can, this. Who's doing the mugging and mangling now?
If you ask me, English's treatment of foreign vocabulary is pretty darn "enlightened" and "international", not to say unnaturally tolerant and open-minded; and advocates of other languages ought to be reassured by it, not revolted.
I wonder if that has contributed to the role English plays, for all its quirks, as the modern lingua franca.
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Brian Tiemann
