Comment by flohofwoe
3 hours ago
> German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken.
Lol, written vs spoken German is just as ambigious as any other language with too few letters in the alphabet. Just look at "ich" vs "ach" (and then of course there's dozens of local dialects that don't even have spelling rules and would need even bigger alphabets if "done right").
No, not all languages are the same about the correlation of spelling and pronunciation. Of European languages, English is the least predictable, Spanish is the most predictable, and German is (about equidistant) between them. Spanish had a spelling reform the shortest time ago, English never had one.
Source: Read it somewhere a long time ago, sorry.
English never had a spelling reform? Noah Webster might beg to differ...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform
Maybe you meant a "complete" spelling reform, but hardly any reform is 'complete' if you look at it closely.
> He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick.
Isn't most of it just the difference between british and american english? I was definitely taught the "old" style in my english education and still see it being used. So it does not seem to have been really universally acknowledged/adhered to as a reform?
Not that english language has not changed but it seems that there is not as much of a centralised, widely adopted and intentional reform to match the written form with the spoken one.
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I'd perhaps go for "major" spelling reform. German has had a small one around 2000 as well, but such reforms don't do much to change the overall situation (unless repeated every 10 years, I guess).
That’s still nothing like the reform other languages have had.
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The editors of major English dictionaries have certainly had significant impact on English as She is Spoke, but we cannot ignore the fact that the Spanish language is centrally codified and prescriptive (like the French language), while English is distinctly decentralized, and its dictionaries are correspondingly descriptive, more often than not.
Spanish has notably gone through some orthography reforms since I learned it in high school, in the 1980s, and so among other things, the idiosyncratic "sort order" which we learned doesn't really apply anymore. In school, we also learned to be aware of the vosotros first-person plural, but we didn't really learn all the forms, because we were chiefly learning Mexican/LatAm vernacular Spanish.
"You speak what you see" does not mean that every letter or combination of consonants is pronounced the same, but that there are clear rules that determine how every thing is spoken (with exceptions being rare). The fact that "ch" is pronounced differently depending on the vowel before is a consistent rule. In contrast in languages like english you do not have consistent rules like that for a big part of the language, to the extent that a native speaker encountering a new word (eg a street or town name) may not know how to speak or write it.