Serito
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- Dec 24, 2013
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The world would be a much nicer place if something easier than English (such as Spanish) would be the international language.
I'm primarily referring to pronunciation which makes zero sense in English and is extremely frustrating to learn. In my native language, everything is spoken the same way it's written. Same in Spanish. In English, everything will have different pronunciation just for the fun of it. To this day I find it incredible that in languages like English once you learn a new word you need to learn how to pronounce it (yes, you can guess the pronunciation but you'll never be sure).
This reminds me of a book i read many years ago. Western alphabets try to define a linear correspondence between oral language and written one, writing letter after letter to compose a spoken word, suggesting a perfect one-to-one relationship between grapheme and phoneme and the idea that you can put letters in line as you do with sounds. This is notably not the case for the English language, as you are pointing out (Ghoti - Wikipedia).
I recall that almost every Chinese symbol has a “semantic part” (the meaning) and a “phonetic part” and that their system is very well structured and very flexible. It has a completely different approach, since it is not a “transcription” of the spoken language (a sign for every sound).
On a side note, also the Korean alphabet, which has a correspondence between symbol and phoneme, differs from the latin one in how it is written (syllables, and not letters, are written in sequence) and is very well defined and organized (it was created from zero between 1400 and 1500).
We might think (we are "scripted" to think?) that our alphabet is the best way of representing our spoken language (and often we look at eastern systems thinking they use “exotic” alphabets), but this affects how we learn: in the book it was stated that a Chinese child learns faster than a western one, despite the fact you may think that 40 thousands symbols of the Chinese system are harder to learn than 26 letters of the alphabet.
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