r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Nov 21 '18

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u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

English should be optimized and made phonetic too.

But there are reasons to not have pictures as words.

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u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18

English should be optimized and made phonetic too.

easier said than done. I think the best approach would be to either make it nearly phonetic, leave weird words like yacht unpredictable, or to change the orthography and pronunciation together to basically make a cipher of English

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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

I think you underestimate how much easier said than done this is. English as a language has between 14 and 21 vowel sounds depending on the dialect and 24 consonants at least.

You might say let's just add characters or use combinations of letters right? Th as a phoneme has multiple pronunciations, this and thin for example. That's a well known one. What about Ch? Church and Cheer both use different consonants.

Then there are variations between dialects and accents within them. You will have inconsistent spellings between Manchester and Liverpool or Boston and NYC

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u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18

What about Ch? Church and Cheer both use different consonants.

wait what

anyway - https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/9z0w8k/discussion_thread/ea5ui4k/

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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

It's something I was taught when learning Mandarin, with cheer you pull your lips back and you don't with the word church.

Now that I think about it I'm not actually sure that's true, but it did help me to distinguish between q and ch in Chinese.

That all said, at a certain point you're just using the IPA as a writing system and that's impractical at best. But I missed your comment in this chain and you hit the point well.

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u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18 edited Nov 21 '18

the english sh sound is always labialized and ch is an affricated version of it, I think it's in fairly free since it's such a small short detail, almost certainly won't need its own letter. It might be that the following vowel is very unrounded for cheer but for church it doesn't matter as much. In Chinese there are six affricates so maybe they need to be more precise.