From: Mark Odegard
Message: 847
Date: 2000-01-11
1. English doesn't offer regularity between the written way and the spoken form. It seems it has a systematic anarchy (excuse the words) in this matter. One sign has several sounds and also there are sounds without a specifical sign for them.
This first factor can mean a troublesome situation for the layman, i.e. he has to use his memory to overcome it and "record" in his mind the "rules" and the copious exceptions.
You are saying nothing new. I spoke on this in an answer to one of Alexander's posts. Native-speakers are quite aware of how our spelling frequently does not accurately represent what is actually said. The bad news is that nothing is going to really change. To reform English spelling is the same as breaking English into at least four separate daughter languages: Scots, Anglican, American; Sothron, and Strine (Anglican would be RP, Southron is what you get in the Southern US, and Strine is Australian).
English spelling is difficult for native-speakers. At times, you learn how a word is spelled much as you learn a Chinese character.
2. Something as simple as vowel system doesn't fit with the "common" values present in other modern languages. For instance, Spanish plain "o" has no correspondence in Standard English.
I have observed Spanish natives speaking English with German natives and noticed that they tend to replace the English o-like sounds with the plain "o" heard in Spanish and German.
The 'continental' values for the vowels are not what you find in English. Once upon a time, before the Great Vowel Shift, the value of our vowels pretty much represented those in other languages. English also has more vowels than the other European languages. In my own dialect, I count at least 16 distinct vowels and diphthongs.
3. Since English is poorly inflected and very shortened, it has to compensate these lacks with a variegated collection of sounds; imagine that non-native speakers (with narrower spectrum of phonemes will try to assimilate them), thus losing the quality of the language.
'Poorly inflected' is not quite right. I think you mean 'minimally inflected', in the sense that we don't change the stem very much, and then for the most part, only with a transparent suffix. The lack of overt case structure and grammatical gender is one of the 'simplifications' of English. You don't have to learn the article with the noun, and you don't need to learn case forms.
What little real inflection we have left is under severe stress. In the pronouns, the distinction between subjective and objective is failing: It is I vs It is me; A friend of him vs A friend of his; Us Americans vs We Americans. What I report here is everyday downmarket native-speaker usage (i.e., your regular 'low-register' dialect vs your high-register one).
4. Irregularities on inflections (mainly verbs) are the dinosaurs of the museum. Once more a challenge for the learning layman.
There are something like 250 irregular verbs. These have to be memorized.
5. Another important issue: a World Wide Language should be able to adopt new foreign words with least change; this is achieved by widening the sounds inventory.
For example, a common sound as the palatal nasal " ñ " in Spanish ("gn" in Italian and French, "nh" in Portuguese), has no phonemic correspondence in English.
To overcome this, English speakers only have two ways for a borrowed word (like "lasagna"); one:to learn how it is pronounced in the source language, possibly breaking the rules of pronunciation established in E.; or... to invent a new pronunciation for that.
We don't so much 'invent' a new pronunciation as apply the usual rules of English to the word. Other languges do the same to words they borrow. We're pretty good with Spanish, tho', at least here in the States.
5. Finally shortness in spoken realm is threatening the effectiveness of communication (giving besides economy). Many final consonants, clusters and even medial sounds are dropped by the fashionable speeches. Today we can hear them in mass media inclusively: advertising, TV, websites, etc.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. British English, particularly the Estuary variety, swallows half of everything, to my ears -- you have to be fresh, alert, and listening acutely to catch it all.
I admit there is a lot of contraction in everyday mid-to-low register American speech. If you've ever heard Mark McGwire, the baseball player, you get a very good sample of just how downmarket we Americans can get. In the last couple decades, certain hyper-contractions seem to have established themselves as 'standard'. This includes the cliticization of 'have', as an epenthic schwa as in woulda, coulda, shouda.
When your English is good enough to catch such things, and is good enough to complain about it, we can welcome you to the club. It's like Americans kvetching about the Spanish you get in Chiapas state, or Puerto Ricans suggesting to Dominicanos that they speak English instead.
Within a couple of years, there will be online dictionaries that represent English in digital IPA -- Unicode (utf-8). Computers are also becoming cheap. At a certain point, it might be better to teach E2L students to read and write English in IPA, and on those occasions when then need to make this English readable to a native-speaker, they just translate what they have on their WP (with something tagging for homophones). The student would have to make a choice up front about what kind of English they would learn, and the choice would essentially be between RP or American Midlands.
Mark.