Oh look! it's english! the tongue with the most complicated and absurd system of vocal phonemes

3:

Is Esperento very coherent? Not that anyone cares.

I was referring to actual 'natural' languages, not artificial ones. Didn't know about Lobjan though, interesting

All Germanic languages have large vowel inventories, so I'm not sure why you've singled English out.

Study Optimality Theory and understand that all phonological systems are the result of conflicting constraints on markedness (rooted in physical and physiological constraints of the human vocal tract) and faithfulness constraints (rooted in the necessity of a language to have a sufficient repertoire of differentiated sounds and syllables)

English is really fucking autistic desu, and most of the time it works completely randomly.

I know that this board is filled with Spaniards to the brim, but how come none of you thought about Italian? Italian is more transparent than Spanish, it has 5 vowels and you can't go wrong. A is A, E is E, I is I, O is O, U is U. Some may claim that E and O can have two different sounds (È and É, Ò and Ó) but those are mostly regional differences. All consonants have unequivocal sounds, although G and C can be soft or hard depending on what vowel comes after. But all in all it's extremely intuitive and autistic kids have barely no problems learning Italian.

>English is really fucking autistic desu, and most of the time it works completely randomly.
maybe the spelling, but the phonology is systematic, as it is for every language

I'll take your word for it. I always thought Italian was almost on par with French regarding bullshit complexity, I wouldn't have thought it was even more transparent than Spanish

But that changes as soon as you change region. C sounds like f as soon as you say Barcelona.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I once asked an English girl to tell me the difference between similar words (dead/dad, etc) and she couldn't tell. She also admitted that the transliteration rules (from sounds to letters) is mostly random.

>I always thought Italian was almost on par with French regarding bullshit complexity
That's probably for the same reason this user is stating here Italian is extremely subject to variations when you move from one region to another, and dialects are extremely different and they often appear in literary texts. However standard Italian has super easy pronunciation and phonetics. The trouble starts with grammar...

Not the same user but what he means is that if you read a word you've never seen before you'll know how to pronounce it correctly regardless of your variety of Spanish, whereas in English if you see a new word its pronunciation isn't always obvious

>I always thought Italian was almost on par with French regarding bullshit complexity
That's probably for the same reason this user is stating here Italian is subject to variations when you move from one region to another, and dialects are extremely different and they often appear in literary texts. However standard Italian has very easy pronunciation and phonetics. The trouble starts with grammar...

Exactly. That's what 'transparent' means. It's a characteristic we inherited from Latin.

>diphthongs are phonemes
nice chart

>the trouble starts with grammar
This is what I was referring to regarding complexity. French is a complex language but it's also fairly straightforward phonetically.
And yeah, non-Italians don't realize how diverse Italian is, almost as much as Arabic

Yes, but if you hear it (what phonemes are) you can't necessarily write it. I mean you can write and read Chinese and never pronounce it. For someone in Madrid to hear Barcelona first by someone from Barca, they can't write it down. Just like to two and too can't be written without greater context. Or saying Madrid won't have two of the same d sounds. Or saying Quijote in modern Castilian won't get you the original spelling, while saying Quixote in Peruvian Spanish will.

stay mad pierre

Yeah, and funnily enough, a lot of Italian words come from Arabic

Attached: image.jpg (820x485, 16K)

good point, I suppose it's not fully transparent the other way around

>it has 5 vowels and you can't go wrong. A is A, E is E, I is I, O is O, U is U
This also applies to Spanish, m8.

>Therefore C is useless
Not sure how you even reached that conclusion. You can just change every ce and ci into se and se because for legacy reasons lots of words would be spelt the same.
>G can sound like J but J can never sound like G so that shols get fixed
?

>A commie English speaker w no experience of a2nd language

absolutely seething ESLs itt

Yeah of course, but it has more exceptions when it comes to consonants, as this user exemplified

And that's all you have. It's a lot of language sounds together but the word order is fixed, 3 cases, 1 mood, no gendered nouns almost no conjugation. Gee so hard weird how everything speaks it

>ESLs with barely intelligible English trying this hard to defend it

jesus christ how cucked can you get

Wtf is your accent if dead and dad sound identical

>trying to overplay its difficulty
You're not theoretically correct nor applicably.

Those are not exceptions at all, but rather the inner rules of it.

I'd imagine it'd be dead/dad/did but I might be wrong

Discuss.

Attached: images (2).png (465x181, 6K)

That's just an example, dude, I don't remember what I asked her exactly. Probably something more spot-on.

I'm not overplaying its difficulty so much as contradicting those who underplay it. English is the default international language due to historical reasons, not linguistic ones

If did sounds like dad or dead I'm going to fucking laugh at English for the rest of my life holy shit

You can thank Samuel Johnson for that

Englishlets mad their language is incapable of being as expressive

So are you saying grammatically 1 mood is more complex than the standard 2?
You can't just say shit also everyone who speaks no languages thinks and spreads the propaganda that it's hard. You have a legion of American leftists doing your bidding there's clearly no injustice. You can't prove it's harder except pluralism of sounds you get used to

>eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml
If we're going to discuss anything, why is Ireland the only one with a ?

And what the fuck are Wales and Estonia doing? Lithuanian is interesting too

English vowel sounds are fucking absurd, bro, and they vary wildly between dialects

Read this He's talking shit on English but it's true it's a dead simple language. The standard American accent is dead flat. You have almost no arguments that English is difficult

Calm down kiddo, people are just discussing about languages in a civil context.

>B/v sound the same yet are written differently
They used to sound differently but then as time passed they sounded the same and the spelling stuck for legacy reasons. If you went for one or the other it'd mess the entire lexicon because of the homophones.
>C sometimes sound like Z
Only in Spain. Certainly not in Hispanic America.
>C sometimes sound like K
>Therefore C is useless
?
C has always been the preferred spelling for the C sound as in Capulets. The K is a mostly foreign spelling like in karma or kilo.
>G can sound like J but J can never sound like G so that shols get fixed
I don't even understand what you're saying. Ge and Gi sound like Je and Ji. But Ga, G and Gu don't sound like Ja, Jo, and Ju. You must add a u like this Gue and Gui for the G to sound like it does in Ga, Go, Gu.

Spanish is actually pretty consistent once you know the inner rules. Just don't be retarded or autistic.

It doesn't. The guy you're talking to had a retard accent.

:c

He could be talking about how Catalan speaking regions will pronounce g like the h sound you get in Javier

Japanese is the language that makes the most sense with its writing and pronunciation

>writing
All my wat on so many levels. In terms of stress and articles and conjugation though you are right, but seriously, wat?

Sure, fine, English obviously isn't nearly as hard as Mandarin or German or French but calling it a dead simple language is an exaggeration IMO. Phonetically it's a clusterfuck, conjugation is harder than people think due to a large number of irregular verbs, and its bastard nature makes it etymologically inconsistent.

Debating how 'difficult' or 'complex' a language is is a fool's errand anyway. Any truly difficult language wouldn't be spoken in the first place

Damn man this graphic is pretty fucking useful, do you something similar in other languages?

Jfc yall don’t know literally anything about linguistics

Thanks for sharing

What's wrong with the Japanese writing system? Do you mean kanji? The actual phonetic alphabet makes perfect sense. Each symbol represents one sound and is always pronounced the same way and each character is a single mora. If you see a word written in Kana you know how it sounds and it is very easy to spell any word you hear

English is difficult only on a level that no one cares about, that of phonetics. However it's extremely counter-intuitive for anyone who's approaching it, and children with cognitive problems or slight forms of autism have a lot of trouble learning English. This is due to its mostly oral nature, as evidenced by American English above all. English became the international language for this reason, because it's inherently oral, so it's the best for business, trading, movements. Italian vulgar was also a mainly oral language when it became the language of merchants in Venice, Florence and Genoa. Literally the same thing as English. With the difference that Italian was later transformed into a literary language by Dante, Petrarch and Bembo. So the irregularities and variants of the oral were fixed into standard forms, making Italian more similar to Latin. From its vulgar origins it became a highly erudite and elitist language. Almost the same happened with Spanish, Portuguese and French. German was also fixed into a literary language, although much later. English, instead, has always been inherently oral, more flexible and free than Romance languages, and and you can clearly see that in its phonetics. That's why it became the language of capitalism and globalization. For no other reason than the one I explained.

t. I study this shit at university

Yeah but kana is there specifically because kanji makes you genius level if you can read a newspaper in it and kana is not always there. I thought you might be writing romaji too, which just illustrates how fucked Japanese writing systems are that you need three writing systems on one sign for anyone to understand wtf is going on

I mean, it's not even like there is one kana either

I've always have some questions regarding English, bros, can you help me?
>Does the Y in yes sound like J in jest or like the Y in yak?
>Why are there words with double R (rr) like berry if there's only one R sound (unlike in Spanish where single R and double R are different sounds)?
>The graph says the S in has sounds like the Z in zebra, is this accurate? I thought it sounded like S in see. Is it hazzz?
>How do you pronounce Thomas: tho-mas or toh-mas?
>The A in what and the O in not sound the same according to the graph, is this accurate??

It couldn't be that time when England was split in two and adopted Lingua Franca, could it? Or how about that time that Caxton solidified the various Englishes into print to avoid such differences as egges and eyren? You might want your university to look into English history a bit more.

Anglosnob BTFO

That doesn't make any sense. All of those languages are oral as well as literary. You think Hispanics speak with the flowery language of a García Márquez novel? lmao

Yak
Ber ree. Two syllables and an r in each
Has is a good example of that s sound. Especially in hasn't
Tom as. Some say Thom as but the m is always in the first syllable. Hence the shortened Tom
In some dialects it is like not. Some have it closer to a in cat or bat but the uwotm8 meme captures the accent that rhymes it with knot.

Romance languages are simple in inventory, but possibly due to that they are complex and highly irregular in allophones. Presenting simple inventories of phonemes hides the whole of phonology, phonemes are not real either. No language is some pure, logical, systematic thing. Don't mistake familiarity for superiority, and challenge of the foreign as inferiority.

>>Does the Y in yes sound like J in jest or like the Y in yak?
Y in yes = y in yak. Y and J are different sounds in English and would only converge orthographically due to loanwords retaining similar spelling of their origins, though I can't think of a case where they do converge off the top of my head.
>>Why are there words with double R (rr) like berry if there's only one R sound (unlike in Spanish where single R and double R are different sounds)?
Not sure what the historical origin of those spellings are, but in the far past consonants could be long (gemination). Now that only exists when the end and start consonant of two words are the same. Perhaps that's the origin of the doubling. Or maybe it was for indicating a tap, but that doesn't hold 100% in any dialect as far as I know.
>>>The graph says the S in has sounds like the Z in zebra, is this accurate? I thought it sounded like S in see. Is it hazzz?
S is voiceless, z is voiced. Yes, it is accurate. The spellings are a result of history and trends. There is no authority with power over the language and people stick to tradition.
>>How do you pronounce Thomas: tho-mas or toh-mas?
Toh-mas, though there may be dialects where this is not true, for the main varieties it is.
>>The A in what and the O in not sound the same according to the graph, is this accurate??
Accurate to most speakers. But there are different dialects. Aside from some key differences in how consonants are used consonants are mostly the same, but vowels are very different between dialects.

Then why'd you argue it was?
>does exactly what you expect an obfuscating leftist moral relativist would do
Literally make a point and then when proven wrong attack yourself for having brought it up because being told you're wrong is too robust for you to handle

Also every language has a lot of irregular verbs. It's avery simple conjugation because it's only based on tense and not gender or subject. Get your garbage opinion out of here

Are you retarded or your reading skills are ridiculously bad?

We are talking about phonetics. In English the pronounciation comes before the transliteration. Words aquired a written form on the basis of how they were pronounced. In Romance languages it's the opposite. When Dante wrote "differenza", people stopped saying "diferenza", "diferenzia", "deferenza", "deferencia", etc. Of course, these forms remained in the regional speech, but Dante settled a form once and for all, and that was Italian. This was obviously an inconvenience for merchants, because they had difficulty drawing up their documents in a correct Italian. They didn't know it, nor they knew Latin. Their language was just the vernacular. This situation remained the same until the Fascist period, when Mussolini forced the teaching of Italian to all the masses.

The question is: how could English become the language of business and capitalism if Italian merchants and banks were vastly more powerful, at least until the end of the 16th century? There's a linguistic reason to it. Italian was becoming an increasingly literary language: difficult to write, difficult to learn, difficult to teach. Something in communication was broken, a gap between the top and the bottom of society appeared. English, instead, maintained a strong oral ground. Not only: it was BECOMING more oral, because the transliteration used to indulge the speech, to go along with it. English remained a primarly oral language for 4 centuries, and this made it easy to use in trade, in business, in fast and large communications. Anyone could learn it, because it was an inclusive language, just like today. In Italy, instead, most people couldn't write in Italian even in the 19th century, and it was very hard to understand a speaker from another region, due to the fragmentation of vernacular forms.

See? I was not devaluing English. I was just explaining the difference. Romance languages (the history of French, Spanish and Portuguese is very similar to the Italian one) are literary constructions. They were directly born as written languages, and this made it hard for common people to speak such languages. Writers were techinicians of those languages. The formal aspects (phonetics, grammar, etc) are very sophisticated, but open to anyone who wants to learn them. In English the formal aspects are less important than the usage. If you want to learn English you don't need many books: you have to speak it, read it, write it. English presents many more particularities and exceptions than Romance languages, despite having less rules. That's because the usage is everything.

> If you want to learn English you don't need many books: you have to speak it, read it, write it.
>this is the power of American education
Quite the Anglocentric response, as expected. And bold of you to assume all the Romance languages had the same difficulties as "Italian merchants" allegedly had.
>They were directly born as written languages.
Except Spanish, in particular the oral form was pretty much poured into written form so the written language represents quite exactly the oral one and not the other way around. Having inner logical rules and aspirations for precision makes it "born as a literary language"? No. But you can't just write nonsense. Even oral speech wasn't nonsense, it just needed to be properly represented. And I'm afraid what you call "born as written languages" only applies to Italian, since Dante wrote in Toscan, which went to to become modern Italian. I'm nor familiar with French or Portuguese, but I believe they were also just normalized as Spanish.

>They were directly born as written languages, and this made it hard for common people to speak such languages.
This absolute bollocks. Commoners were illiterate. It made no difference to them how the lenguage was written, for they communicated perfectly via oral speech and those who rarely used the written word had small mistakes and that was it. You're making it sound as if a deaf German guy was trying to communicate with a blind Japanese guy, both while being fucked by mute Russian men. Whoever retard or senile professor told you that must be executed and if you came up with it yourself please consider suicide.

thanks anons

Ah, yes, its domination is completely unrelated to the massive cultural and political power of the US, it's actually just some obviously pseudoscientific "linguistic" reasons. And you even wasted money to study this shit.

Russian is also extremely literal in spelling. I think many languages are. Korean is famous for it too.

>The question is: how could English become the language of business and capitalism if Italian merchants and banks were vastly more powerful, at least until the end of the 16th century?
Because the Dutch Portuguese and English were massive naval powers in the age of exploration and owned significantly more colonies than Italy. Keep in mind even Americans know Colombus had to go to Spain for funding. You're acting like the Italians had an East India company. They did not.

>most complicated and absurd system of vocal phonemes
I guess you've never seen any languages from the Caucasus
>Ubykh has consonants in at least eight, perhaps nine, basic places of articulation and 29 distinct fricatives, 27 sibilants, and 20 uvulars, more than any other documented language.

This is Yea Forums: I didn't expect anything else. Zero reading comprehension, zero knowledge of history, pretentiousness and saltiness over someone who studied this shit at university.

>anglocentric response
? I'm not an Anglo. Also, Spanish was formalized by writers just as much as Italian. It derives from Latin, so IT NEEDED to be formalized. This is what all of you don't get. A language that derives from another one has to be formalized, even if there is already a substrate of speakers. Italian is not simply the Tuscan, it is a variety of Tuscan built upon Latin. Every Romance language was built upon Latin. Not English. English is the idiom of the people who spoke the Anglosaxon variety of a Germanic language.
But again: you did not study linguistics, so you misunderstand everything I say. It's okay, stay mad.

>You're making it sound as if a deaf German guy was trying to communicate with a blind Japanese guy, both while being fucked by mute Russian men
I did not say anything of the kind. English was an oral language, so it was easy to teach and to learn in person, in the flesh. People from different parts of the world learned English even without getting involved in writing. It was a dynamic and vital language, so it was perfect for commerce. What you don't understand is that I'm not drawing a drastic, dramatic gap between English and Romance languages, I'm simply describing what happened in the long term, with extremely slow and gradual change. Of course, in the 16th century most commerce was just oral, even for an Italian or a Spanish merchant, but when the elites begun to impose the national languages – and this happened LATER, much later, not in the Renaissance – people had trouble. The question here is not the Renaissance or the Modern Age, but contemporary age: why English, and not Italian, Spanish or French, is the international tongue and the language of capitalism. The reason is simple: during the configuration of modern States, the communication in Romance countries was slowed down, because there was a gap between what the people spoke and what the elite spoke (and wrote). This gap did not exist in Britain. So English was destined to surpass the Romance languages and become more suitable for practical use. Italian had been the language of business for the entire Renaissance, then it was replaced by Spanish after the discovery of America, and finally French became the diplomatic language of Europe in the 18th and 19th century. Then why not a Romance language? Because English was more suitable for use to an enlarged class of merchants, businesspeople and customers. Capitalism is inherently founded on the characteristics of English language.

>You're acting like the Italians had an East India company
They did. At least until the discovery of America. The Maritime Republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa, but there were others) had the monopoly of trade routs with the East, and an undisputed dominance in the Mediterranean. Every product from the Middle East, from the Far East, from Eastern Europe and from Africa arrived in Europe via Venice or Genoa. Venice and Genoa had the most advanced ships and navigation techniques of the Western world. The notarial and documentary production was also the most advanced in Europe (see the history of Bologna), and it allowed trading companies to keep track of every exchange. This situation remained untouched since the discovery of America. After that, in the 16th century, despite being still one of the major powers, Italy gave ground to the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish. The trading routes to continental Africa and America became more important than the trading routes to the East, so Italy was left out and lost its supremacy. When talking about history, my dude, you need to make some periodization. The "massive naval powers" you mentioned arose only after the 16th century. Study history, read more.

Japanese is a retarded fucking bastard language yoj dumbass gaijin.
t. nip linguist

based

>The Maritime Republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa, but there were others) had the monopoly of trade routs with the East, and an undisputed dominance in the Mediterranean.
No, Ghana controlled the gold price of the Mediterranean in the 12-13 century, and those republics were dependent on Arabic empires. You might as well say Singapore was controlling the East under the Dutch. They weren't, the Dutch were controlling Singapore.
>Venice and Genoa had the most advanced ships and navigation techniques of the Western world.
Again, because the Arabic actual Empires of the Med allowed them.
>The notarial and documentary production was also the most advanced in Europe (see the history of Bologna), and it allowed trading companies to keep track of every exchange
Again, that comes from the Arabic empires, and you should look into how all the medical schools and philosophy is dependent on Arabic translation (see the history of Salerno)

>This situation remained untouched since the discovery of America
It did not because alternate trade route to the Arabic overland routes are what started the Age of exploration. Colombus was looking for an alternate sea route to the East by going West, but it was not to replace any Italian sea route (which there never was because they were subcontractors to Arabic empires which did control the sea route) but to replace the sea route to the East which went around the coast of Africa. You're bad even at Italian history.

>Of course, in the 16th century most commerce was just oral, even for an Italian or a Spanish merchant, but when the elites begun to impose the national languages – and this happened LATER, much later, not in the Renaissance – people had trouble.
African and Asian languages still have special words for the Dutch and none for the Italians. Dutch and Portuguese are still spoken in a lot of these areas and Italian is more likely to Arabic loanwords than Arabic is likely to have Italian loanwords. Because Italy was at the behest of Arabic empires. Not the other way around.

>The reason is simple: during the configuration of modern States, the communication in Romance countries was slowed down, because there was a gap between what the people spoke and what the elite spoke (and wrote).
I think you want to think for a moment when Italy became a modern state. You might also want to think of Savoy and Lombardy and all the Islands.>This gap did not exist in Britain. So English was destined to surpass the Romance languages and become more suitable for practical use. Italian had been the language of business for the entire Renaissance,
No, if you wanted shit from the East, you need to learn how to Arabic. That is how Italy got more medical schools and philosophical schools, by learning Arabic. The actual language of the trading empire.
1/2

2/2
>French became the diplomatic language of Europe in the 18th and 19th century.
French was a court language. That's why English and Russian kings and queens spoke it, and why the commies banned it as decadent

Seriously if you're getting taught this at uni, or even in secondary education, you need to demand a refund.

How does their pitch accent system make sense? How can I look at a Japanese word and know the pitches I should use?

>Each symbol represents one sound and is always pronounced the same way
Even that isn't true, for example は (ha) is pronounced (wa) when used as a particle.

>What's wrong with the Japanese writing system? Do you mean kanji? The actual phonetic alphabet makes perfect sense.
Of course he fucking means kanji. What does it matter if hiragana and katakana are simple to understand when you have to use kanji to actually be able to read at any significant level?

I speak English every day and mostly I do fine. But sometimes I get absolutely disgusted by the language, and find the sounds I am making ugly and annoying to vocalise.
What language should I learn to feel good about my tongue and mouth again? What languages are a joy to speak?

>English was not in any way normalized
>Every Anglo writer did whatever the fuck he wanted with orthography and that's okay
This is your brain on Anglo cock. If Spanish was "formalized" by writers then so was English. The written and oral forms are fundamentally different entities but both ultimately complemented each other whatever the language. English was not something abnormal.
>People from different parts of the world learned English even without getting involved in writing.
>what is imperialism?

Italian. And some variants of Spanish and French.

For all the vowel sounds English has I sure have a hard time vocalizing languages with simpler vowel systems.

>this entire thread

Attached: vomiting goose.jpg (484x461, 117K)

>The Maritime Republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa, but there were others) had the monopoly of trade routs with the East, and an undisputed dominance in the Mediterranean.
>BYZANTIUM NEVER HAPPENED
nigga you went full retard