Re: OT: Language etc. Was: British GP

Yazoo <yazoo@myself.com> wrote:

On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:45:47 -0000 (UTC), Mark <mpconmy@gmail.com>
wrote:
 

The fact the letters look the same fool us into thinking we know how to
pronounce the words.

 
Well, southern Slavic languages such as Croatian (my native), Serbian,
Bosnian, Montenegrian are much simpler in that regard: the main rule
is "read as it is written", letter by letter. So everything is written
fonetically.
The main complication with those languages is very complicated grammar
and word forms with lots of prefixes, sufixes, etc.
 
Aactually all those languages are almost the same with more than 90%
common words and rules, so we can understand each other normally. Only
politicians and nationalists insist on differences (Serbian is not
Croatian and vice versa).

We can all agree that English isn't phonetic. Even allowing for regional
variations, it shows the thousand years of development and evolution in
all of its variants.

But take Irish (as that's one I'm familiar with). That's essentially
phonetic even though it sounds very different based on which region your
spoken dialect comes from[1]. The complicating factors for an English
speaker include the rules on slender and broad pronunciation (too
complicated to explain right now) which add additional characters to
resolve (meaning there are often unspoken vowels included) and
digraphs (like mh and bh[2] which are pronounced as "w" when broad, "v"
when slender) that don't exist in English.

Take Siobhán. If you try to pronounce all of the letters according to
English pronunciation rules, you'll come up with something like
see-o-barn (the bh doesn't really exist in English...but that is nowhere
near the right pronunciation...yet it really is phonetically spelt in
Irish.

How? Well, the "S" becomes "sh" when before a slender vowel (e or i).
The "io" has a number of rules depending on the following consonent, but
is normally "i". "bh" is "v" when slender. The "a" is broad and, coming
ahead of the "n", pronounced "or". There you have it:

    Siobhán = sh+i+v+or+n = shivorn

Ta-da!

1 Irish was almost killed off by the British, but survived in small
  pockets of native speakers. That has led to there being some
  significant differences between Standard Irish (defined to support
  Irish language use in Ireland generally) and the versions that have
  been spoken natively throughout in Connacht (especially in Mayo and
  Galway), Munster (Cork and Kerry) and Ulster (Donegal).
2 In the traditional Irish writing, these were (amongst others) wholly
  different letters to m and h, but had a "dot" (the "séimhiú") above
  them. That's not very common in languages, so one of the many changes
  to Irish orthography was to eliminate the accent and instead use "mh"
  (also "bh", "ch", "dh", "fh", "gh", "ph", "sh", "th") to make typing
  easier.