Why does English pronunciation differ from spelling?

The easy answer is “no”.

The more complicated answer is, English speakers mostly learn their words by sound and trial and error and not by pronunciation.

As far as a speaker not hearing a word correctly: it happens. Whether you are an L1 or L2 learner of English, you have surely run into this problem: when you try to pronounce an English word you’ve never heard spoken often your pronunciation is incorrect. I can’t pronounce French and some Italian words to save my life on the first or second try either. I think the incorrect pronunciation is just due to a lack of exposure to the language. (At least this is how it’s been with Chinese for me…after 2 years I hear most everything correctly, but at first it was VERY spotty).

One of the reasons why English is a stupid language (and I mean that every language has weaknesses and stupid points) is it’s pronunciation system. George Bernard Shaw, borrowing from a spelling reformer, came up with the word “Ghoti”. How do you say that? You probably say got-tea, goat-tea, goat-tie or something like it. But actually the pronunciation is the same as fish.

I live in Washington State and I remember up until my 5th grade class they taught English phonetically. In the 6th grade that changed and they went to the system that @jlelandg mentioned where it was more of a “how do you think its pronounced – trial and error thing”.

My mother pulled me out of public education so fast and put me in a private school so I could keep learning right through junior high. In 10th grade I went back to public school and I was well a head of my class mates because I was taking 11th grade English in the 8th grade.

Anyways long story short… the US education system is terrible. I do not blame this on the teachers but on the way they are instructed to teach.

@jlelandg Pronouncing “Ghoti” as “fish” makes no sense. “Gh” only makes an “f” sound when it is at the end of the word, and “ti” only makes a “sh” sound when it is followed by “on” (to my knowledge). Ghoti is as good of a case against English pronunciation as saying the word “ffffiguurn”, which I just made up, is pronounced “Lexus”.

English is not phonetic in many ways because it has undergone many pronunciation shifts over time and it has borrwed words from other languages that have different pronunciations of their own (the “ph” sounding like “f” for example, comes from Greek, so does “y” as a vowel). English borrows from lots of other languages, including Latin and Greek which are not Germanic in origin like English is. English also has the dreaded “schwa” sound which can be made by any vowel as in “entrAnce”, “papEr”, “cannIbal”, “creatOr”, “circUs”, “analYsis”, etc., which could help while vowel sounds can be troubling for English speakers and learners. A language like Italian, where each vowel only makes one sound, is pretty foreign to an English speaker.

The interesting thing about English is I don’t know any other languages where two words can be spelled the same but pronounced differently (i.e. read vs. read, bow vs. bow, dove vs. dove, etc.) English orthography is very complicated, inconsistent, and variant. There are some patterns to the irregularities, but for the most part, you just have to learn it. There’s no real reason why “busy” is pronounced “bizzy” and there’s no recognizable pattern to lead you to that counter-intuitive pronunciation; it simply has to be memorized.

I wonder how may other languages have the diverse word etymology that English has? If English were derived primarily from Latin, it would be much more concise in pronunciation. However, according to the entry for etymology on Wikipedia, English language borrows words from more than 300 other languages.

@chocolatechip toughness…that’s not at the end of a word (I know I’m using a suffix, but still), martian (see there’s other examples). Ghoti is only an example of the oddity of English pronunciation so it’s not to be taken so seriously.

you make no sense!

@jlelandg

Good point. What I should have said is, “gh” is never pronounced as “f” at the beginning of the word, and “ti” is never pronounced as “sh” at the end of the word. Ghoti disregards all rules of the English language. Well then of course it’s an oddity. “Lorg” being pronounced “puq” is also an example of the oddity of the Zulu language.

English spelling and pronounciation is difficult. Many rules, and exceptions to the rules. As mentioned above some of it has to do with the fact that we have adopted and assimilated words from many languages. Many times keeping the rules from the old languages. Knife, silent k, silent p’s, gh can be silent or sound like an f, vowels change depending on the consonants around it or an e on the end of the word. We say Cartier as the French would, my SIL, who is Spanish speaking says car-tee-er, pronounces the r on the encd Not sure if all Spanish speaking countries do that? Honestly, I find it very odd to pronunce a name incorrectly like that, but we do it in English sometimes too I admit. Americans generally are taught to read phonetically as part of their education.

English is an amalgamation of several languages, especially German and Latin plus a little French, and some early British languages.

English, like French has many extra letters in many words, probably because they were derived from other languages or from slang. That is probably why spelling bees are so popular in the U.S. You have to really good memory skills to be able to spell much of this language. If you want a real challenge, try reading and pronouncing medical terms or names of medicines. I expect that hundreds of those names are invented each year.

Because English isn’t a language where someone sat down and came up with all the spellings and simply decided to be a dick. It’s a conglomerate of several other languages that intertwined and then evolved over several centuries. What we have isn’t a constructed language, but a natural language. It’s like the difference between (good vs evil aside) an Imperial Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon.

You may be interested in Esperanto.

History and the refusal to plan and implement a serious

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform

I’d like to see a language that’s completely phonetic. Of course, I’m not really sure how transliteration works with languages utilizing a cyrillic or character-based envelopes.

@iamthemob – Esperanto claims to be completely phonetic. Italian and Spanish are close.

@mattbrowne – Dialects and various accents in both Italian and especially Spanish would probably make the phonetics claim a little difficult to practically demonstrate. The whole Castillian “we’ll lisp because the kind does” situation is a good example. ;-)

Esparanto is interesting. Of course, it’s easy to create a phonetic language.

@iamthemob Spanish is very close. Very few exceptions.

It’s not that English is pronounced inconsistently with its spelling. Spelling came second. It’s that we aren’t able to spell some of the sounds we use in a way that’s consistent across words—because English is derived from languages with different rules.

Take a look at the roster for a class in a multicultural society. Some of the names on it are going to be a real challenge to pronounce—not because they’re unpronounceable but because you may not recognize the language group they come from. And even if you can identify a Finnish or Mandarin or Hungarian or Welsh name from a single instance, you might not know all the rules for pronunciation in that language; and even if you do, you might not know how they transliterate into conventional English spelling—or how this particular family has chosen to represent them.

English as a whole poses a similar problem. It is not a stupid language, and I really get tired of hearing that. But it can trip up even its native speakers because it isn’t strictly phonetic.

And that’s a good thing!—because we rely on spelling to distinguish among words that are pronounced the same or very similarly and to give us clues to meaning by way of roots and affixes. We’d completely lose control of our written language if we tried to spell it phonetically—never mind the fact that English is spoken with so many drastically different accents that the idea of “phonetic” is almost meaningless.

English seems pretty stupid at first sight but actually its ills stem from it suffering from having too many systems and too many sources for its vocabulary. English is made up of 2 types of French, 2 types of German, Latin & Greek and number of other etymologies all with their own spelling systems. Then there is the Phonetic system, the Lexical system, the Morphemic system and the Graphological systems to add to the above Etymological systems. Also English runs its own vowel system which is the product of the Great Vowel Shift alongside the European one at the same time; it is shot through with silent letters that do not conform to any of the above systems and you have the appearance of a dumb spelling system. In fact its spelling system shows all the signs of English being a creole.

It can not be emphasised enough that all this cultural richness comes at a cost: 23% of our children fail to reach their literacy milestones at the age of 11 and a similar percentage of our working population have the reading age of 13 year-olds. This impacts on social inclusion and on our economy in general and is at the heart of a host of other social evils. The social costs are where the English spelling systems cashes out as being dumb (note the spelling of dumb). To be literate in English it really helps to have a photographic memory as the learning burden in learning all the odd spellings is too great otherwise – few of us have this.

Re: Spanish: we have bi-lingual children in Spanish/English and Welsh/English who are also dyslexic. The interesting thing to note is that their dyslexia is a problem when they use English and not the other languages that have rational spelling systems. Dyslexia is diagnosed far less often, and is less of a handicap, in countries whose languages have rational systems.

I’ve spoken with the English language directly but have yet to receive a satisfactory response.

My thinking in regard to spelling was why there was no reasonable method of phonetic spelling based on English using the commonest spelling for English sounds. It would avoid strange looking symbols. This led to the development of truespel phonetics. The English language is respelled in truespel phonetics at truespel.com. You can use the text converter to see text in truespel phonetics (USA accent). Note a stress ed syllable in a word ison the vowel after double consonant. If there is no double consonant, stress is on the first syllalbe. Reading the phonetic text can give good USA accent for communication.

Your heading is about face.
Pronunciation and talking ar natural and basic,
Spelling is secondary and artificially created. Human-made.
Standard spelling should aline with standard pronunciation.
It doesn’t. It needs fixing.

Wait a second… isn’t speech also “human-made”?

@AllanJC “aline”

I see what you did there.

With the spread of the printing press in the 17th century, a standard spelling was agreed on. But after that point that several important changes in pronunciation took place. For instance the sound represented by “gh” (as in “though”) disappeared.

The spelling was also complicated by the large input of French words. English is a Germanic language. But it has a large French-derived vocabulary, and along with French words, it borrowed French spelling. So “g” can be soft in French-derived words like “gesture”, and hard in Germanic-derived words like “get”. Sometimes the French spelling was transferred to Germanic words. For instance the French “gu” spelling, which represented hard “g” in a word like the French-derived “guide”, was used to respell Germanic-derived words like “guilt”. (The whole soft/hard G situation in English is much more complicated than that but you get the idea.)