Look up Russian. All the advantages of English you've listed, but also virtually no inconsistencies between written and spoken forms. English is far from "best system around".
+27182818284590452354e-19 -"o" is pronounced as "o" or "a" depending on punctuation - writing e/E instead of ë/Ë is more and more common (even though they sound different and are used different) - the punctuation is only understandable if you've heard a native say it correctly - dialect is a thing
+27182818284590452354e-19 Most Slavic languages have better consistency between written and spoken because "сви знају шта је најбољи језик на свету царе."
+MyGdoggy Not at all. Subject first, (usually); just 3 tenses, careful of suffixes, words sound like the spelling. Its the alphabet that intimidates - a few hours work. English (and its subtleties) is far more complex. You have to read and read to really "get it". Far more complex.
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
+IshayuG yeah, it's like making a satire about feminists or creationists, you can't make a proper satire out of them without looking like you're talking like an actual creationist ;-)
+SrgGoofy O my GOD, I lov it! Zis perfektly underlins burokrasy in al its horibl short-sitednes! And at forst I totaly belivd zat zos ver ze aktual plans for som reform in ze vorks :D
I can write Chinese. However, the Chinese dictionary is actually way thinner than the English dictionary. There are prominent character "bits", where characters that bring similar background are grouped under there. Then, the characters are grouped by stroke counts. It's somewhat rare to see any character with a lot of strokes. It's a lot simpler than you put it, but it is pretty complicated. There's no way to learn "phonics" in spoken dialects of Chinese, however. So that's just tough.
+2Dtube1 Yeah, I used to regularly use a Chinese-Korean-English dictionary where all the entries were sorted in Chinese, and it was way simpler than whatever he's going on about. Count the strokes and pick a radical (I'm not great at picking the radical sometimes, but there are only so many to choose from).
+2Dtube1 nope i have the same one. actual chinese reading, you actually dont need to know too many words, only a couple... thousand (unless your a scholar). easier than it sounds, because the writing is pretty structured. its hard to explain without pictures, but it is surprisingly easy when you understand the concept. the starting 'bit,' the number of strokes, a couple of flips, and your done.
+2Dtube1 Actually, Chinese dictionaries are the worst to use when you use the prominent character bits version. Even as a native Chinese I can never tell which is the prominent bit. Also, stroke count is not easy, because there are some types of strokes slightly more complicated than 1 slash pointing whichever direction.
+Dan Bull People told you to see one of his worst videos then. The gigantic egocentrism and the absurd fact that he compares two of the worlds HUNDREDS of languages instead of the language families is just a tiny scratch at the surface. I'm surprised and frustrated to see this kind of video in this otherwise fine channel.
Sagramorbald chill dude. Having an apprecation of one's own language is fine. Not wholly disagreeing with you, but I think you're being disproportionately passionate here.
McJaews I'm deeply disappointed. His videos are usually so good exactly at debunking the type of thing he just did here - "My language is just so good it's the best in the world" is not better AT ALL than calling Katanas the best swords in the world, something he always makes fun of. He clearly has very little knowledge about languages. Maybe he should call an expert to talk about it if he intends to touch the subject without sounding like a 10 yo brittain-centric brat.
+Sagramorbald Well, Lindybeige has been an expert in "talking like he knows everything" for years. He's probably got a master's degree in "knowing everything". He sure know a lot of stuff, but he is often oblivious of how much he doesn't know, and so he makes bold statements like this in the video. I enjoy his videos a lot, and I love his historically-related stuff, but sometimes he misses the point. It happens, we all do it.
The languages that have 1-to-1 pronunciation have all the same advantages that you mention English language having. Words can be identified instantly, no one thinks about individual letters when they're spelling. Also while people living in different parts of a country all have their dialects, the proper written language is universally the same, it works just exactly like you describe English working. Using the proper language is always acceptable, but usually people like to pronounce their words as the like, always being something very close tho.
But when you speak, you can make the difference. I know that if I say I have /tu:/ cows, it means the number, there is no ambiguity. Why would there be an ambiguity when you write?
It's bizarre to me how so many commenters make this observation and yet... it's not even remotely true? Did none of you watch the video? Spelling purely by phonetics obscures etymology and blurs morpheme boundaries and word relationships. It's also a pipe dream since dialects are a thing. Granted I'd already come to a similar conclusion myself before watching this video (that English spelling is morphemic rather than phonetic, similar to Chinese but with more pronunication clues) so maybe I picked up on things not stated clearly.
@@Wlerin7 Written English is said to be morphophonemic rather than consistently phonemic. However, highly phonemic writing systems can be mastered in 3 weeks or less. One never completely masters the English writing system but 50% of the students can read children's books after 3 years.
@@erickinley5557 Why should the writing system add heterographic homophones. The spoken word doesn't remove such ambiguity. People who are interested can read read up on the etymology of a word. The clues found in historical spelling are generally not understood and ignored. Written words with historical baggage usually obscure the pronunciation of the word.
Some say that English is a combination of many languages, but I think English just follows other languages into dark alleys, then beats them up looking for spare syllables.
I have a dictionary for chinese characters used in japan. The way they categorize it is by main component first and then sorted by amount of strokes. (like 日>早>時>木>床>校>言>話>議)
@@wikipediaintellectual7088 it's not. Kanji aren't made up of random parts. They are made up of radicles. Even if you don't know the Kanji itself, you can find it easily by knowing which radicals it is made up from.
***** EVERYBODY leaves out the P in cupboard. The word (at least it's spelling) has two bilablial plosives right next to each other, one voiceless and the other voiced. They naturally run together, and the voiceless one gets left out, because they're impossible to say together unless you make the deliberate effort to say as if it were actually two separate words, with slight pause between the P and the B.
***** Well then you don't pronounce the word cupboard like anybody else I have ever heard of. It's one of those words like Worcestershire which has an entirely correct pronunciation where not every letter is pronounced.
Your argument is that English preserves meaning in the word that is not preserved in pronunciation. Guess what... Romance languages (and probably a lot of the latin/cyrillic based languages) are pretty good at preserving the roots at the same time it preserves pronunciation to a similar level of complexity and consistency. The problem with English was inventing its current written form before big pronunciation shifts, having so many imported words from so many places, trying to preserve the original spelling and snobness (made more complex for class status, including "restoring" original spellings that ended up being wrong). Modern China uses Pinyin to dictionary search, to write, to learn to read, etc, which is basically using latin characters.
Hum, do you speak any other European language Lindy ? Because all the points you listed will apply to most of them I think. English pronounciation is actually quite messy with like you said words coming from Latin, French, Saxon and others barbaric tongues, I particularly can't stand how the i is sometimes a normal latin i, like in "infinite" and sometimes a completely unrelated aï sound, like in "like". Plus you probably have the worst accent differences of all languages, and I'm not talking about GB vs US I'm talking within the British Isles, it's hard for foreigners to believe Scotland and Wales utter the same words. But to be fair it has more to do with history (and how the UK failed to be a nation but succeeded as an empire ;)) than with the actual language itself. A friend across the Channel
+iopklmification Accents don't mean the language is bad, though, and actually prove lindy's point about it being a very good written language. Also, he does give credit to European languages in General.
+iopklmification The different accents in English are not worse than those in Dutch/Flemish. We just managed to compress all these differences in a plot of land about a fifth of the size of Great Britain.
+iopklmification Wow... Failed at being a nation? Probably one of the most successful unions of nations. And I think you'll find English people find European dialects vary far more than English ones. Just look at German!
+VintageLJ No, he really didn't. He claimed that english words are uniquely self explanatory and that english is unique in its borrowing of words. Which isn't just a tad wrong, it's wrong evolved to the new stage of super-wrong, the wrongest of wrongs.
I have been learning English for 20 years and reached a solid C1 level and I'm still finding out words I were pronouncing wrongly or would pronounce wrongly if I only knew the spelling and not the sound on a regular basis. It took me a couple of weeks, months at max of learning Dutch and Romanian, barely reaching A1 level, to pronounce these languages more reliably than English.
Well I learned English since I was a child but I still make plenty mistakes too. For example once I said “I’m gonna ‘titty’ my room up” instead of “I’m going to ‘tidy’ my room up” because i didn’t know when to use the I sound or Ee sound
Don't get me wrong, I love the English language, but all of the advantages you described here aren't unique to it at all. This video is a breakdown of some of the advantages of alphabet writing- systems, most of which have spelling systems that aren't crap.
Your comment is like seeing the comment I wanted to write, except you've already done it for me. Thank u for that. I'm guessing Lloyd doesn't know many languages, this is one of his less truthfull videos.
As someone who is from Sweden, and tries to study English, it really pains me to sound OK. You Englishmen have no idea how hard it is to differentiate from Though and Thought first time you see it.
+Potato Dragon By trying to inform the audience on a topic of which they are most likely ignorant, the informant is claiming a position of authority on the topic. Whether this is his or her intent is irrelevant. As the audience doesn't know any better, they'll trust that this supposed authority who's actually going off of half baked knowledge and assumptions knows what he or she is talking about and take his or her word as the truth. This is where the spreading of wrong information often starts.
His example is rather awkward. After all, he is giving the example of a dictionary in which you know the meaning of a word and are looking for the character for it. Admittedly, that is difficult to find in Chinese, but it is difficult to find in _any_ language. I can't very well open up an English dictionary to find the word for "a large burrowing African insectivore." Dictionaries are only useful when I'm looking up the meaning of a word I've already seen on a page, not the other way around. So in that case, I assume Chinese dictionaries must be arranged in some way related to how they are written like how alphabetical dictionaries are arranged according to how they are spelled. It's still clearly much harder to alphabetize a Chinese dictionary than an English one, but not as bad as he makes it out to be.
In Spanish writing is 100% phonetic, and even the stressed part of the word is accented (if it deviates from where you would normally expect the stress to be). For this reason, in Spanish, we do not really make spelling errors when we write, whereas in English, even an educated person might misspell here and there, or mispronounce a word they have read for the first time and never heard pronounced (for example, epitome). But yeah, I agree with your point, languages like French and German have a highly irregular spelling system too (from what I understand), and those ones are only in Europe, I do not even know how Korean, Hindi, Persian, etc. function and doubt Lindybeige does either.
I am going to venture to say that almost no one uses a character dictionary in the manner described. You don't go scrolling down a list of animals until you hit upon the one you want. If you see a character you don't recognize you search for it based on stroke order. If you hear a word you don't recognize you look it up based on pinyin. Though there are picture dictionaries for children that group like objects for easy study.
Lindybeige doesn't care. To him everything english is superior to the rest of the world. A very small world he lives in even though he seems to be interested in many things.
Carbon 12 *"You don't understand! it is impossible to look up a symbol it is the symbol you are trying to remember!"* I don't quite follow what you're trying to say here but I'll repeat the relevant bits of my previous post concerning character dictionaries: 1.) If you hear a word you're unfamiliar with you look it up by its pinyin (or kana or romaji or hangul - I never got the hang of the Taiwanese look up method, so no clue there) 2.) If you see a character you're unfamiliar with you look it up by its stroke order (no need to thumb endlessly through a list of animals until you find the one you're looking for) 3.) If you want to look up a word but can only remember the meaning (and not the sound or the character) then you're in the same situation you'd be in with a language with an alphabet. There are lots of ways around this particular problem when dealing with characters, however. This is all I really wanted to say; sorry for any confusion my first post may have caused. Cheers!
English spelling is fine, it's amazing, it's all dandy. I love it. It's just the pronunciation that's messed up. All of our spelling existed first (for the most part), then we just started saying everything differently (thanks to the Great Vowel Shift). If you go back to Old English and Middle English, things were pretty much said exactly how they were spelled. It's only after the Great Vowel Shift that we starting saying most of our vowels differently (which lead therefore to some other changes in pronunciation) that our spoken English and written English didn't add up. Fun Fact time: if you ever wonder why English doesn't have that characteristic Germanic sound for the most part, it's because of the Great Vowel Shift. Had that not happened, English would sound *a lot* more Germanic even given its French influences. (Don't believe me? Listen to someone speak Middle English)
+thinkpol Today completly different pronounciation: knight, blood... Here some comparisons blood blut (EN, GE) cake kuken kuchen (EN, NL, GE) thou du two twei zwo zwei (EN, middle high German, GE dialect, high German) laugh lachen circus zirkus (note the different pronounciation of ci and cu) PS: Germans introduced ä ö ü to prevent confusion when words became too similar
also the stupid norman-french scribes didnt bother to learn to write english properly so they just used inconsistent, unfitting french spelling conventions and ruined everything.
Juan Cruz Spinosa -ight words are really fun. The "-ight" spelling is left over from a phonetic sound that English used to have but we lost (it's the throaty "ch" that German has now, both kinds). But originally, we did say the "k" in "knight." But those come from the Old English words "niht" and "cniht"
Chinese dictionaries are sorted alphabetically by the pingyin of the sound each character makes. It's pretty straight forward. Also, i would argue that the whole recognize a word like a face idea applies to any writing system, once you read a word in say, (insert language), you learn to recognize that word at a glance without having to say each syllable every time. With phonetically based writing systems you're not stuck if you don't know the pronunciation of a word as you can read it flawlessly just by saying each syllable. I'd say they're the best of both words.
I've never seen a dictionary like that. I learned Chinese for a few years and to look up characters, I was taught to jump to the category ("radical") and then under that radical, to look for characters of that number of (additional) strokes. If you think about it, the components of Chinese characters are just their letters, and they have roughly 200 of them. Not brain breakingly many. 🤷🏻♂️
That sounds like a silly system. We can spell everything in Japanese and Chinese using an expanded version of Greco-Latin script- the international Phonetic Alphabet
Spelling in english is so hard, that you even have freaking spelling contests - and you are telling me that this is the best system around !? I renember when i first heard about spelling contests. Pronunciation and spelling are so integral thing in my native language, that concept of spelling contest was really hard to grasp.
Yeah, while studying, I remember having something of a revelation when I realized that word that means "to spell" in Japanese is relatively unused. It wasn't until that point that I really thought about the fact that 'spelling competitions' are a totally foreign concept in some other languages lol
They oh I'd say every country that has a history pre-napoleon gets to complain. For future reference its not how many wars we've won its our win rate. 14/16 is pretty all right. 88% a solid B+
Using the same points you described in the video, Spanish is better than English. Because the pronunciation of the words do not change so drastically like in English.
Even though I have learned English since I was 4, it is really hard for me to guess how a new word which I have come across is pronounced. Being an avid reader, it is a problem for me because I prefer reading in English. Especially because in my native language, words are said exactly the way they are written.
one thing is that American spellings are sometimes more consistent than British spellings. the immediate example I have is tiger not being spelt with -re despite it having the same ending as "centre" in French. I don't remember the others but this is just something that's crossed my mind.
+Nitori ShogiPlayer He was referring to reverse lookup when you know spelling and you don't know how to write that word. Japanese language has phonetic system as well while Chinese seem to lack any way to write word phonetically
Actually many Chinese characters are written phonemically. It's a lot more so in Old Chinese but since pronunciation has changed since then the correspondence between the sounds and words are less apparent.
Nitori ShogiPlayer I think phonetical characters are not really possible because china has several different languages and all use same symbols, so phonetic spelling will be quite different. the fact that characters do have significant phonetically component is really dark side of Chinese script, because very often you have no clue what is the meaning of that character.
They are phonemic characters already. I am not saying there needs to be. For instance the character 蚊 has a bug on the left (signifying meaning) and the character 文 on the right, telling you its pronunciation. How you pronounce the latter depends on your Chinese variety and ultimately affects the pronunciation of 蚊.
actually, chinese dictionaries work with radicals, that is the first section of the character you can find. They're also categorized under number of strokes. It's still rather inefficient, so they use pinyin, Latin alphabet, to spell out the characters, which makes it somewhat easier to look up words, but Chinese has so many homonyms that that solution doesn't help much either.
+Alexander Salt There's an alternative system I prefer that goes by the first two strokes, then stroke number. Basically, there's a definition of five types of strokes. Straight vertical, straight horizontal, going left, going right or squiggly. You look at what the first two are, then just count strokes and check the list of characters fulfilling both criteria. Sounds complicated, but it's actually really fast when you get used to it.
+irrlicht321 Stroke counting can be difficult as well, but i agree it's far better than the example in the video. Though i think he was trying to provide the description of the radicals type without getting too far into how simplified Chinese is written.
+Alexander Salt Yes, obviously they would look for more ways to order the characters, but always you have to have some knowledge of the character to start you off. True, one can get the initial letter of a word in English wrong. What does sykolojee mean? Look under P...
That sounds like a silly system. We can spell everything in Japanese and Chinese using an expanded version of Greco-Latin script- the international Phonetic Alphabet
I'm a 3rd year Japanese learner and I know about 1,000 characters, and everything you say that's an advantage in English also applies to the character system. Memorizing characters and memorizing spelling really aren't that different. The strokes aren't random, there are simple characters, and those simple characters (called radicals) just combine to make the more complicated characters. Sometimes it makes sense, like how 娘 (daughter) 姉 (older sister) and 妹 (younger sister) all have the character for woman 女 on their left side, or how characters that have 反 in them are usually pronounced "han." Sometimes it doesn't make sense and you just have to memorize them, but it's the same for spelling, and spelling gives away the meaning like you describe just about as often as the consisting characters give away the meaning of a character. You develop immediate recognition over time, like in English. You learn the associated readings, and you learn to sound out words you don't know out. If you want to look something up in a dictionary, you go by the phonetic pronounciation, and if you want to look up a character you don't know, you go by radical. The characters make reading go much faster and like spelling, different characters can indicate different meanings for the same pronounciation like in "to" "two" "too." It's hard at first, but like for English, you learn the patterns and develop an intuition. I love how characters have so much meaning and history in them - much more than the "sign" in "signal" - so I don't think you can say English is just better. They're not as different as you think.
+The Examined Life (of Gaming) Is that reply entirely sensible or sencible? Its "sible" as the second syllable and the extra "c" sound is no longer required so dropped.
English is still horrible. And most in most languages, after you know the word, you recognize it as a whole, but if you don't know the word the letters give you a pretty certain way to say it. In fact most latin derived languages (italian, portuguese, french, spanish) have derivative spelling.
yeah he makes all these points like they don't apply to other languages. fact is: english pretty much only has disadvantages compared to romance languages, with very few actual advantages (like gender neutrality of objects)
@Lindybeige When I came to live in Germany in 1970, I was 16 years old and couldn't speak or read a word of German. Within 6 months I was quite proficient, not fluent, but I could read and understand, say 90% of the language. What helped me to become so good in such a relatively short period was of course my young age, but more than that it was the phonetically written language - German is practically always written the exact way it is spoken, or vice-versa. Unlike English - just take the word "bow"; it could mean an archer's bow - or, to bow to somebody - or, the bow of a ship ! Furthermore, " bow" as in the last two examples, can be pronounced exactly as the word "bough", which is of course a part of a tree ! So here you have one word with three entirely different meanings and a similar word, pronounced exactly the same way as two of those words, but meaning something completely different again ! I am not even going to start with words like " enough" ! How the hell can "GH" be pronounced as an "F", but it is - " e-nuff"!!! So, enough is enough and enough of that then ! (Poor foreigners). So comparing written English with German, I must say the German language wins hands down. German only gets really, really complicated when words are combined to make another term. Example; " Schiff" means ship ; "Schiffahrt" means shipping ; "Schiffahrtskaufmann" means Shipping Clerk ; as you see, by combining words, completely different terms are constructed. It gets even better with words such as ; "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft" which literally combines four different words to mean "Danube Steamship Company". Ha! 😜😜😜 P.S. We might all understand each other written on the page, as you said, but when I was in Newcastle in 1974, I asked a railway platform attendant this question " Could you please tell me which platform the train to Hexham leaves on?" - 45 years later I am still trying to work out what his answer was, because I couldn't understand a single bloody word he said as he replied !!! 💥💥💥
Like my grandpa told an Englishman when he was stationed in europe when he was told he had an accent, there's more Americans that there are you, so you're the one with the accent.
Technically we all have an accent. Im from America & i doubt the two of us speak the same. Not unless your from the same part of the south i am anyway. Even here in the south there are around 16 different dialects. They even have their own words that none of the rest of us use.
+Ryan Jackson By King Sejong the Great(well, and his staff). If I remember correctly Hangul didn't become widely used until centuries later since it was seen as a bit vulgar and "peasantlike" at first.
There are a lot of English words that are spelt with a c in the noun form and an s in the verb or adjective forms. Like there is defence and offence, but defensive and offensive; you have a licence, but you are licensed and the process is called licensing. Someone may have a practice, which is where they practise. It's very consistent, and the way I was taught to remember which is which is that c comes before s alphabetically, and noun comes before verb alphabetically. US English changed offence to offense, defence to defense, licence to license, and practise to practice. That is, they made some of the words always use an s, and some of them always use a c, and there's no rhyme or reason as to which is which; you just have to remember.
The languages that have 1-to-1 pronunciation have all the same advantages that you mention English language having. Words can be identified instantly, no one thinks about individual letters when they're spelling. Also while people living in different parts of a country all have their dialects, the proper written language is universally the same, it works just exactly like you describe English working. Using the proper language is always acceptable, but usually people like to pronounce their words as the like, always being something very close tho. - stolen comment from a guy named Mixa
Way back in college, I knew a couple of Japanese guys. This was a few years before the internet became accessible to the general public. I got to look at a letter that one of them was writing to someone back in Japan. He used mostly Japanese characters, interspersed with English words. He indicated this was a common practice because some things are just easier to write in English. Apparently learning the English alphabet is pretty easy to someone who knows how to use kanji characters. If I remember correctly he even wrote a few Japanese words using the English alphabet. I'd be interested to know if this is really a common thing or if the guy was just being odd by Japanese standards. Are there any Japanese readers out there that would care to comment?
+Propellor Mous They actually do use roman lettering often, though. Look at how many of their songs with English titles are written with them. Katakana is more reserved for loanwords that they've adapted into their own language.
I believe that the use of Latin alphabet to form Japanese words was known as Romaji. It came in three forms. 1 Hebon-shiki, which is the most widely used. 2 Kunrei-shiki, which is pretty much obsolete. 3 Nihon-shiki. The three are alike in structure but Hebon-shiki is considered the easiest.
You have no idea how Chinese dictionaries work. What you've said was not true, as that what you have described is a thematic dictionary; we have them in European languages, too.
I don't know, but I suppose every dictionary with Chinese characters is a dictionary of a certain language using it. And then words could be put in order of pronunciation.
The Chinese dictionaries can use something called "拼音" (pin yin), which is a sort of government standardized romanization system. If you know the pronunciation, you can just flip to the letter the pinyin starts with. We also use 拼音 to type in Chinese on a qwerty keyboard. Alternatively, Chinese dictionaries have an index at the front sorted by number of brush-strokes that lets you choose a part of a character. Once you choose the first part, it points you to a spot in a second index to find the actual character, which then points you to the actual entry itself.
@@Halera- But if you do not know the pronunciation, then you will not be able to find it. Many charters have more than one pronunciation, especially in Japanese, but in Chinese it is also the case to a lesser extent.
@@partialintegral The most typical dictionary by far is usually one that integrates characters by their 部首 (lit. Head Section/ Head Part). Essentially, since Chinese is a language revolving around drawings, there are main parts in a character that provide a meaning. Most characters involve this meaning, plus an additional character for the sound it makes (for example 艸 which symbolizes grass/nature, applied into the top part of 花 - the top part. The character means flower and the pronunciation is akin to 化, where it takes its sound from). However, the reason why it's less popular nowadays is because of simplified Chinese completely ditching this concept.
Lindy, I love you, but you have no earthly idea what you're talking about anytime you go on about language. 1. Chinese characters do not represent ideas, they represent morphemes, individual units of meaning. There are two differences. First, 'Un' would be a morpheme, but so would 'in' as in 'intractable'. These two morphemes mean the same thing, but would be different symbols. Second, and more importantly, you still need to understand the language in order to understand what is being said. In English, you need to understand how the word 'not' works in order to differentiate, "I'm not thinking of what to do," and, "I'm thinking of what not to do". The Chinese language is not magic, it probably works because having that symbolic language for so long has meant that, while pronunciations have moved apart a lot, the morphology, how those units of meaning get put together, has not so much. It wouldn't work between English and German. Also, I don't know what Chinese dictionaries you've been looking at, but from my experience with Japanese, I would expect them to be leveled: words sorted by initial character, characters sorted by radicals (a certain piece of the character), and radicals by number of strokes. If I were looking for big, I would start browsing the radicals (which there really aren't that many, no more than fifty, compare to English's 26 letters), look for one that meant something like big, and move up from there. It's not that involved. 2. I had no trouble figuring out what your phonetic writing was saying simply looking at it. It really isn't that hard. Then again, maybe that's because I'm so used to looking at phonetic writing (IPA, to be exact), but still, you're going too far with exaggerating the difficulties. 3. Fences haven't been associated with defense for well over a century, and who do you know defends themselves with a SWORD!?
+helios5868 It would probably be "defence themselves" or "defences himself/herself" anyway. :P And "defense" is from French _defense_ and Old French _defens_, and Latin _defensus/defensum/defendere_. As the Online Etymology Dictionary says: " _Defens_ was assimilated into _defense_, but not before it inspired the alternative spelling _defence_, via the same tendency that produced _hence_ (hennis), _pence_ (penies), _dunce_ (Duns)". So, it's "defence" that is actually a bastardized form and Americans returned the word to its roots. Imagine that! :D
+helios5868 yeah chinese dictionaries work similar to japanese ones, they're first differentiated by stroke then by level, like *drumroll* english first stroke similar to first letter. though modern mainland china have butchered chinese with "simplified chinese" which, like the american english have ripped words out of their meaning and context and because in chinese meaning is in each character and can be seen, they've basically destroyed the meaning of words.
Wise Lum Read my comment above, as it happens the whole "defense/defence" is completely missed example, since it's "defence" that is taken out of the original context from French by English and bastardized without regard to its Latin roots. :P Americans - willingly or not - did not "simplify" anything in this instance. They returned the word to its "proper" form, actually.
Tomasz Wota its a bit of a tricky situation that one, how long does something have to have changed before it's considered an original spelling, french is bastardised latin, english is bastardised germanic and neo-latin languages so it really depends on how many step you want to go back by
3:54 "It begins with [...]" a radical and stroke count. I suggest you learn fundamentally Chinese characters work before using them as an example. Also Chinese doesn't usually create a new word for each new concept (if not necessary). There is no single character for telephone. It's just the character for electricity and speaking (machine implied) so the lists aren't actually that long. 5:30 Well since we don't look at each word and break down the individual letters, isn't reading in English an awful more like Chinese than you think? Radicals and components are akin the Latin letters.
you have to remember that a writing system is secondary to a language, the spoken system always comes foremost and the writing system is just a way to transcribe what was spoken. native chinese people already know the spoken words for all of those things, and since each chinese character represents a specific sound AND specific concept, it is very easy for them to read a word, and quickly recognise it from their real life experience. you can think of it almost as if people have a library of spoken words in their mind, and with chinese characters they are able to filter that list by both sound and meaning, quickly figuring out the intended word. all that is provided that they actually know the characters used, however. in some particularly uncommon or old words, that might not be the case, making the entire word unrecognisable if they fail to recognise a single character.
@@mattgolka6266 Interesting question! It's because 電話 is always known to be "phone". To use Lindy's example, why do you know a cupboard as a cupboard, and not literally a board with cups on it? Well, it's because cupboard is just a word which means, well, cupboard. It is exactly the same in Chinese.
English spelling merely reflects how many facets of culture and tone and history it has. That 'color' is probably the greatest thing about english, the sheer variation that I have yet to see exist in any other language. When you write english, you can play around so much, and there is always something else to learn and do with it
+Entraya Korsbakke I always prefer writing English over other languages for exactly that reason. There are countless ways to write even simple phrases, which gives you so much room to play around and make it read well. English feels good to read in general, Danish just seems clunky in comparison.
But then why is English the best system? You basicly discribed every language that uses the latin alphabet, so why not say finnish or serbian or german are better? I mean, it's not like the only language that you see derivation is English. And those languages have the addition of pronouncing the words like they are actually written and vice versa, whilest still being able to tell where they came from. Heck, even Polish is way simpler than english. It's just that nobody is used to it's seemingly odd writing system with all the ł ó ć ż sz cz etc, but they actually make way more sense then having pronounciation all over the place.
Because he is english and to english people everything English is the best in the world. Even their disgusting food, miserable weather or stupid units. Every single thing British- the best in the world 🙄
Because it uses a simple alphabet of 26 Latin letters, which are capable to represent all the sound of English, and many non-English sounds, while keeping consistent spelling of morphemes, and reliably preserving international vocabulary.
@@pg8220 it's the world's most widely, useful languages. thanks to our empire (the biggest in history) and for all it's good and bad points, we have given the world the world's easiest Lingua franca . good luck changing that any time soon. (I especially throw this point to those who have answered in English and not Cornish, or Cambrian or Welsh etc)
@@pg8220 He says, speaking English. We don't chose to learn your language because we don't need to, we trust you'll do the hard work for us like the good lil boys you are :)
*Anyone can learn to read and write Korean*. It's just learning how to speak it or understanding it that is the challenge (which is something you learn anyway by using it). Hangul is the most modern form of writing, and the most innovative. It is geared around making it easy to learn to read. I was expecting you to say Korean over Chinese, seeing how Hangul shares a lot of characteristic with the English writing. I would even argue that Hangul is much easier to learn than English. English has so many rules and exception when writing words and sentences. The rules are so vast that is is common for schools to teach english grammar all the way to 8 grade, while in Hangul is usually stops at most 5 grade (because there is not much more to teach)
XxDemonicGamer are you taking about Korean or Hangul? If you are talking about Hangul, then yes, it is very easy to learn. There is one drawback though. Hangul isn't very flexible when it comes to Western languages because it can't handle clustersnof consonants without using more syllables. Korean is a whole other matter. I don't speak it myself but I know a lot of people who tried to learn it. They all say it's very hard.
I find Hangul to be interesting because it's actually capable of representing SOME English words better than the English spelling system. For example, the word "cook" is a mess. The c in cook sounds way different than the c in many other words, such as ice, where the c sounds more like an s than anything. You can't even say the c in cook sounds like the k in cook, because the c and k actually make different sounds. But Hangul handles it like a pro: 쿡. /Obviously/ that's how you write "cook", who doesn't know that? :P ...but then there is also stuff like what you said, where Hangul was designed specifically with Korean in mind so there's a handful of consonants and vowels it can't accurately represent because those sounds don't exist in Korean. Though it's not a problem with the system, just its implementation; if someone were to make a "Hangul 2.0" to be used universally, where would the downside be? As for the Korean language itself, I actually can't say it's very hard. Most things about it feel "natural". Whereas in many other languages, words seem completely arbitrary. Even when you get down to their origins, even their origin sounds completely made up a lot of the times. (Signal? Why do we call signals "signals"? What about a signal makes you think "signal" aside from the fact that you were told that's what it was called?) Not the case with Korean (in my opinion, anyway), where it feels like sounds were organized in an attempt to give you a mental image of the word being discussed. Also, many words are marked so you know their exact purpose in a sentence without adding extra words or maintaining a very specific word order. It's great!
The problem with hangul is that there are a lot of homophones in the korean language (mostly cuz of Chinese loanwords). Chinese also has a lot of homophones but they are differentiated through writing, whereas in korean, they are written the same. That's koreans use Chinese characters in parentheses to distinguish whenever the meaning is ambiguous, especially in academic journals or legal manuscripts. This is also why their constitution is written in mostly Chinese characters and only use hangul as supplementary.
First, the Latin alphabet is great because we can build words and derive sounds, which Hangul also does, but with our writing system the focus is on words rather than syllables. Now, how hard English is or not to write and read has nothing to do with the late alphabet and everything to do with its own history... About korean, pardon me because I don't speak it, but is it really all that phonetic? Doesn't the standard writing follow a standard dialect, maybe, or has some letters or words that cannot be easily guessed because their sound has changed but their writing kept, or maybe a weird syllable division that one simply has to memorize? Like in Portuguese you hear "fala" and you know how to write it... You won't wonder if it should be "fal-a', or 'fal-la' or" fal-la" or anything else.
...Do you realize that most of the characteristics you described also apply to many other languages, not just English? Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, etc. all have many different dialects, and derivative forms are their bread and butter... 5:07... Of course you don't do that. Native speakers don't approach their own language by logic, it's all about custom/core memory. You just memorized the spelling as a kid, like the rest of people in Europe (and elsewhere) did with all sorts of words in their respective languages... Again, there's nothing unique here, and, btw, if you think English spelling is super weird, try French, ^^ 5:54 ...Yes...that's how most languages work. Every word has one or several semantic roots, which can be appreciated in its spelling. Again, English is no different than many other languages in this regard. 6:55 Again, this is true of many languages, not just English. Words have meaning and can be combined to form new words with different and yet related meaning. Germans do this a lot, but you can also find examples in other languages. For instance: -English> Umbrella (from the Latin "umbra", which means "shadow",it was probably taken from the Italian "ombrello") -German> Regenschirm > Regen (Rain) + Schirm (Screen/Shield) -French> Parapluie > Para (to stop/stopper) + pluie (rain) -Spanish> Paraguas> Para (to stop/stopper) + aguas (waters) 7:04 ^^, again, you can do the exact same thing with many other languages... Seriously, how can you even suggest that English is the only language with Latin and Greek roots? Bottom line, English spelling system is as fucked up as the French one (I'd argue that this is party due to the strong French influence that English has)... It doesn't make things clearer or easier, quite the opposite. In order to get the spelling right, people just need to memorize and practice, until they eventually become familiar with the obscure ways of English spelling...
Weak arguments - First argument Argument: having English spelling the way it is makes it easier to distinguish words that are pronounced the same (such as two, too, to..etc), thus there won't be any ambiguity on the page - Counter argument: then add extra letters ONLY in the cases were there are words that are pronounced similarly, such as two and too. But most words don't have similarly pronounced words. Why would you pronounce Haos as House (I.e: produced Hoese) what other similar word to it exists in english? - Counter argument #2: There are languages that invented better ways to distinguish between similarly pronounced words. For example in Arabic when you have two similarly pronounced word you just add the letter (A) at the and of one of them. And in case that there are 3 similar words you add an (O). For example Too, To and Two. In the Arabic system you can wright To for To (i.e: leave it as is). Then write Toa for (Too) and wright (Too) for (Two). This is a more predictable and systimatic pattern in adding letters to distinguish between similar words. You don't have to go to the extreme of making THE WHOLE spelling of the language arbitrary to resolve the problem of a few similarly pronounced words. - Second argument: having english spelling the way that it is makes it possible to know the root of the word: - Counter argument: Hmmm. nobody gives a fuck about that. The function of a thing is supposed to follow its purpose, which is in the case of writing system to communicate, and having arbitrary spelling is not a good way to communicate. - Last argument: Not even worth mentioning, because its retarded
I wil rayd mai kar in mae (I wil ride my car in may) Haw ar yo? (How are you?) Wat is yor neem? haw old ar yo? weer do yo lev? do yo laik video geemz? wat geem do yo plae? do yo watch yoteob a lot? wat is yor fevoret kaind of videoz? its intuitive
All good points! I would only add that there is no reason to distinguish in spelling between English words that sound alike because they don't mean the same thing. It is the context that tells people the differences among 'pair, pare, pear' or 'rite, write, right'.
EXACTLY! But as for the similar sounding words, context and grammar would suffice in making sure what the person is trying to convey, as for differenciation in writing, the arabic system you mentioned is kind of confusing, but still WAY BETTER than what we use now.
What he's praising is the dual phono-graphic and logo-graphic nature of english language. I have to say I don't disagree. I was very impressed with the spanish spelling in that if you knew how to say it, you knew how to write it, and the lack of exceptions, but he's got a point that it's interesting to be able to group the words by roots even when the pronounciation varried over the centuries.
+iyke ewnaho Other languages with "foreign influenced words" exist and some of them have still been able to make uniform both graphically and phonologically the words from another language.
Russian spelling is a mess though, because of all the vowel softening. If stress HAD to be marked, you could truly not really mispronounce it if you knew the script.
Russian spelling is shit. Almost all other (except Caucasian) spelling are great. I can read Belarussian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Srbian and etc just fine (not including complex sounds like Q and Ğ) without speaking it, but not Russian.
I used to have an Australian friend, and we talked a lot. One day I asked her if my English was good (I'm not a native English speaker) and told me that I sounded almost native, but my English was too "clear". At first I couldn't understand but now I did thanks to your video.
So i will write down a sentence how i would speak it with german pronounced letter: I am watching this video right now. Ei em wotsching sis video reit nau.
+Lindybeige Chinese dictionaries don't work that way at all. Here's how: 1) The vast majority of complex characters are actually a combination of simple characters like big 大, tree 木, or sun 日, and sometimes additional material that does not occur by itself. 2) The more complex characters usually have one part that is more prominent than the rest of the parts, this is called a radical. There are 214 simple characters and graphic elements which can be radicals. The radical usually gives a hint as to the meaning, whereas the rest of the character usually contains some hint as to the pronounciation. 3) Now if we have the character 櫧 we take the radical which is the tree 木 at left edge of the character and count the rest of the strokes which in this case are 16 strokes. 4) In the dictionary there will now be one or two dozen characters which also have the radical tree 木 plus 16 strokes - there you go much easier. 5) You can also look up the reading of a charachter. As stated above, the rest of the character is usually a hint as to the pronounciation. In our example 櫧 the right part 諸 is pronounced zhū and in this case it's a perfect hint, because our example 櫧 is also pronounced zhū. 6) If you can't find out either the radical or the reading, you can usually also look up the character by stroke-count only. For our example we said that the right part had 16 strokes and tree has 4 strokes which makes a total of 20 strokes. This method is the least efficient, however, as there are plenty characters with 20 strokes. 7) No matter which of the three ways (radical, reading, stroke-count) you chose to look up the character, you should have found out that 櫧 means oak. If you are using a Chinese dictionary regularly it will not take that much longer to look up a word than in an English dictionary. I chose a character with the radical tree 木. That doesn't mean that all characters with this radical are indeed trees (as you might think from your reasoning). You also have things that were made from wood, eg. pillar 柱, contraption/machine 機, pole/lever 杠 etc.
1. you dont need thousands of CHinese characters to know the language, a couple of hundred is enough. 2, Chinese dictionaries has 2 search system, 1 is phonetically. and 2 is using the number of strokes, which is put into categories by their radicals(Chinese characters are often symbols joining 2 simpler characters together one of them is the radical) 3, for Chinese you can also guess the pronunciation by looking at the character, as I said most characters are compound characters made up of more simple characters, and if you know how to pronounce those simpler characters then you'll have a pretty good idea on the pronunciation of the compound character. 4 English has massive amount of borrowed words, that will make no sense to a speaker of non-romantic language, while Chinese has minimal outside influence thus ALL of it's words makes sense. take the word Volcano for example, in english it is derived from Latin, and by looking at it, it does not even hint the idea of a fiery mountain, guess what,s volcano in CHinese? 火山， 火 means fire 山means mountain, so fire mountain.
7 лет назад
obsidianstatue Agree on the first 3 points, but the fourth is not very strong. Even a Romance language speaker like me would not get much hints about "vulcano". It's a Roman god, and the word root is not related to mountains. English have a lot of derived words, and the origin of the roots is not that relevant. Examples: "snowpeak", "smoker", "derail", "antagonist". Once you're familiar with those roots and affixes you will get many other words that have them. They're just a different set of roots than those of Chinese. Of course, Romance/Germanic/Indo-European language speakers have some advantage with those roots, because they're shared. Even the grammar is not that different. Just as Chinese speakers have some advantages for learning Japanese, and they are in very different language families! In the end, you cannot expect that all words have such a transparent etymology like 火山, and I'm sure Chinese must have some obscure ones too. Examples of obscure etymologies in English: what does a company have to do with bread? Or a dress with something straight?
two simple examples of weird things with Chinese characters, and no I am not talking about weird awkward characters that most people will never encounter or meet in their life. 末 and 未 You can probably tell the difference of one having the upper line shorter and one having the under line shorter. First one means End, and second one means... well, Future. They look god awfully similar to each other. 日 and 曰 This one isn't so common now days, since people stopped using the second one as often as they did. The two is literally the same but one is thinner and a bi taller than the other one. The second one makes sense because the mouth sign is 口 but that makes the first one (Which originally is a picture slowly becoming the symbol.) kinda feels absurd. It isn't that big of a deal, but they are kind of a pain in the ass to tell from each other when you don't know chinese that well. Every language has their positives and negatives, you simply don't say a language or a system is superior.
You should try Italian. Like Latin, that is a really good spelling system, 1 letter, 1 sound, no mistakes. With few exceptions and rules, you can learn and speak any word just by reading it.
A i takođe se vidi ovo izvođenje o kojem je on pričao. Jedini problem je što imamo mnogo sinonima, pa značenje nekih riječi u rečenici jedino može da se razumije iz konteksta i iz izgovora te riječi. And the derivation he spoke of can also be seen in our language. The only problem is that we have too many synonyms, so the meaning of particular words in a sentence can only be understood from the context or the pronunciation of the word (some of the words have same written form, but they sound different).
Toga ima pun kurac i u drugim jezicima uključujući i engleski. There's plenty of that in other languages as well, including english. An example of this: I bow to my liege before I shoot the frenchman in front of me using my bow.
Oh and when talking about efficiency in writing, I think you would be amiss not to mention Hangul, the Korean writing script. Although Korea used Chinese characters to write once they received them from the Chinese, they reformed their writing system and came up with an entirely phonetic system that is thought to be one of the most efficient writing systems in the world.
Hangul is a bit overrated, without Chinese characters it became somewhat difficult to differentiate the words with the same sounds. Thus in some fields of studies like Law, medical, and sciences you do need to use certain amount of Chinese characters to avoid ambiguity.
The beauty of English is even if poorly spoken in bad order is still fully understood, and you're right about being able to discern etymology. And don't forget the oldest extant variety of English is Zummerzet- me acker. Drink up yon zider, grab yer comboin 'arvester and come down to elp ee ere with yon blackbird.
Every thing you said about seeing meaning and the history of the word applies to German as well with the difference that is has a much more consistent way of reading. We might have some of the most complicated Grammar (Mark Twain can tell a story there), but when it comes to spelling it's much more straight forward. Very few exceptions there, and basically you read everything single letter that's there, nothing's left out. So English has no advantage over any European language in that regard, it only adds complexity, because the reading rules are a hodgepodge of Anglo Saxon / French / Latin / Gaelic, you name it all mashed up with no consistency whatsoever.
+Kilian Muster As a native English speaker I entirely agree; we can keep the derivation; the meaning; and the structure, all whilst making our language phonetic. Unfortunately wide-scale reorganisation would require one thing that we - as a people - can never do. You see; to reorganise English spelling we would need to set up a board of experts to decide how the new rules would work - you might not see the immediate problem here, but - this would mean agreeing with the French and if Moses had been English there would have been an 11th commandment.
Nithingr I don't say you reorganise your language I just think the argument the English system is the best is total crap because most European languages have all the same pro arguments and almost none of the convoluted spelling of English, so amongst European languages the English spelling system is arguably the worst we have, because it's such an inconsistent mess.
Ah, I forget that sarcasm cannot be easily communicated by the written word (by which I mean to say that it is my error, as the effect can be achieved but requires careful consideration), it often amazes me how an ill thought attempt at humour can turn absolute agreement into disdain and disagreement. To reorganise my statement, I do not believe that English spelling is the most effective at conveying meaning and I do not believe that this is as a result of it's nature (as it shares the vast majority of it's history with it's neighbouring languages.). I would also add that the recent discovery that most people only read the beginning and the end of words is an advantage that applies to all experienced users of any given alphabetic language, the ability to read a word phonetically is a benefit that mainly applies to memorising spellings and to new users of the language. Also you missed Welsh (another example of a well organised and phonetic language before anyone makes any "random combination of letters" comment).
Is this satire? Because of the inconsistent spelling, an English dictionary needs a whole separate phonetic alphabet if you want to learn the pronounciation or the word without listening to a recording or a person speaking. You don't need that when learning, say, German - because the regular alphabet is already phonetic.
@@nopenope3228 Not really. Spanish writing is not even phonemic: we have always pronounced B as V, and LL as Y for the last century or three. C can sound either as K or as theta (or S for most native Spanish speakers everywhere), which can be also written Z (and also pronounced S). A K sound may be written C, K or QU. H doesn't sound at all, in standard Spanish.
About "cupboard" - I actually learned big fancy words and proper spelling back in my younger days by purposefully mispronouncing words. I actually DID pronounce it "cup-board" for a bit, partially to be silly but mostly to remind myself that it has a 'p' in it, and it's not just "cubberd" (as an American would pronounce it)... Another example is "omniscience" - It is quite literally "omni" and "science" welded together to produce another word, so I pronounced it "omni-science", or ALL THE SCIENCE, which is nifty when you realize it actually means "all of the knowledge", or the state of knowing everything (as the dictionaries like to put it)... :D It's a nifty trick for remembering the spelling of big, funny, awkwardly-spelled words... Basically, you take the two (or more) pronunciations of the letters or word-chunks and remember it two or more ways (because your brain remembers silly useless crap a lot easier than it remembers useful stuff), and then you've got it... "Oh dear, was it an "an" or an "on" in the word that means a general malaise? Ah, I've got it! MulANchully! Melancholy!" :D Also on "defense" - Why would you "de-fence" ("de" suggesting to remove the fence) your defenses? Why would you want to engage in "de-fence" with someone with a sword? Wouldn't you want to fence them? Wouldn't you want to pro-fence, instead of de-fence? I dunno about you, but I like my military bases fenced, possibly even double-fenced, as opposed to de-fenced... ;) Though, that's not exactly the right word; you want to de-FEND your bases.. But then, if you de-FEND (de, again suggesting to remove), doesn't that mean that you're no longer FENDing? If you're not FENDing off the enemy, then you're either not being attacked, or you're already overrun! D: I mean, you deionize particles to remove the ions... You delaminate linoleum flooring in order to remove and replace it... You dethrone a King or depose a dictator when you want a new government... You detoxify something when you want to make it no longer toxic... etc. etc. etc... So why would you want "de-fence" anywhere near fortified positions!? In fact, I think if I'm gonna put up a hasty military camp, I'm gonna fence the area, maybe even re-fence it, should the makeshift barrier fail or not be as strong as my liking.... I think the distance between the actual thing keeping the enemy Army out and the act of keeping the enemy Army out is a bit more sensible... But, it's just one American's opinion... :D
Finnish is best. The writing system's only 300 years old so the spoken language hasn't had time to diverge from it. It's literally pronounced letter by letter, even the dipthongs are mostly just the 2 letter slurred together.
spankeyfish Yeah, and there are not too many exceptions, like how "sekunti" is pronounced sekuntti". Though because of dialects, it may seem like there are a lot of words that are pronounced differently from how they are written.
Except when you realize the spoken language is completely different from the written one. Words lose sometimes over half of their letters in everyday speech.
The spoken language is exactly the same as the written one when you are speaking standard Finnish. Of course a dialect won't match written standard, but thankfully you can also write in a dialect.
My thoughts exactly. I couldn't stop thinking how everything he praises english for is actually pretty terrible when compared to most other european languages.
+Janeator It's terrible compared to Chinese and even Japanese. The English writing system is completely ridiculous, and gets even worse once you take into account learners whose language embodies a different rhythm.
If anybody wants an abridged explanation why english writing is so messed up, it’s a literally half baked system. English started out as a germanic language written with runes. Later with christianization, they switched imperfectly to a latin based alphabet with some holdover letter from the old runic alphabet; this constituted Old English. In 1066, the Duchy of Normandy, a region of France, conquered England and thus introduced both new words and grammatical rules into the English language; this constituted Middle English. Lastly, around the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the English language started to change as the french words and grammar rules were integrated into general speech and vowels began to speciate to accommodate the changes in a process called The Great Vowel Shift; this process wouldn’t be complete in any recognizable and consistent modern form until the mid 17th century. Unfortunately for the language, the printing press was invented and introduced before the completion of the Great Vowel Shift which locked official English spelling and typography in the 15th century while the language was still shifting. Afterwards with the onset of colonization, any hope for restandardization was lost as the new colonies started developing their own versions of english.
Actually as a man from Israel(a gamer) I don't find English hard at all, but what I do find weird is the amount of misspellings on American and English writing(especially on the internet). You can imagine my cringe when I see that: "someone needs too go too some place and a friend tells him that he wanna come to... and than their going there." ps: I didn't even know defense with an "s" existed!
Those are usually touch typists that aren't paying attention. I can type entire wrong words because I'm distracted by something completely unrelated to the matter at hand. That or people typing via cellphone.
HAWXLEADER yea us americans like to just do things quick. most of the time I see, "I would like to come to." because they don't want to do that extra o
fire - burn - smoke - torch - bake - stove - candle those words in english are not even related. 火 - 烧 - 烟 - 炬 - 烤 - 炉 - 烛 how chinese works : all those words in chinese are related with fire all have a fire on the left side. petty much all the chinese words work in this system. and we're not like english everytime create something new just create a new word like "phone" and "computer" in chinese we just use two old words put together stands for new thing phone we call it "hand machine" and computer is "electric brain" one of my english friend didn't know raisin is made of grapes...which is crazy to me because in chinese we just call it “grapes-dry” also like jerky is “meat-dry”
+CapnTates That in and of itself is a fairly stupid rule, though, isn't it? What's the point of having a letter that can never exist without another letter after it? Why not just include that second sound as part of the first letter?
I learn German and it's quite cool to see how often they just shove different words together to create a new one - the longest I can think of is: "Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl" aka. feeling of belonging together (zusammen=together, gehören (verb)=to belong to, Gefühl=feeling)... in fact, when unsure of how to phrase something, I've put nouns together as a guess and my teacher has said it was quite Germanic to do so
Slavic spelling. Said enough. What you see is what you read. There is like 3 cases in thich it is not so, and that is if "n/t/d" is followed by "i". Czech spelling is like that, russian is even simpler, but they have a different alphabet and other slavic languages are similar to either czech (polish, slovakian, croatian) or to russian.
+CZProtton The stuff about the meaning in derrived words, same in slavic languages... besically, it is better. But whole sentences are harder to understand since slavic languages do not have word order strictly in a sentence.
+CZProtton Harder for adult students of the language maybe, but otherwise I wouldn't say so. In Polish you can rearrange words in a short sentence _almost_ (but not really) randomly, and the meaning should stay the same (there will be exceptions obviously :P) - but style will change, and there will be shift in what the sentence stresses. Some arrangements will sound naturally, some will sound like Yoda-speak, others -ancient- anachronistic, and some may not make much sense at all.
***** Hey bud! Who rattled your cage? No one really cares about that right now, I think you've hit the wrong thread :-) I am from one of your old foes, the Serbs, and frankly, especially in this topic, I wouldn't care if you're Albanian or not. Also, I didn't know you guys have phonetic writing I'll sure check that out :-) Also, regarding "shqip" thing, you guys have to understand we call you that way because we've heard you guys call yourselves that way. The same way everyone calls Hungarians , well, "Hungarian", except for couple of peoples, including Serbs, who call them "Magyar", because they call themselves Magyar, even the name of their country in Hungarian is "Magyarország". We've simply heard them calling it that way, and we started calling Hungary that way. Does it make sense? :-) "Shqiptar" has no actual insult weight,even among the Serbian Nationalists, at least not any greater when something is called "Albanian". I think folks started using it more when they realized you guys get pissed about it, but you use it yourselves all the time, so what the actual fuck? :-)
Lloyd your description of the Chinese language is incomplete at best. The majority of Chinese logograms are composed of sub-grams. Frequently, this includes a sub-gram that is placed entirely for similar sound, not meaning. Therefore in a compound logogram you can device both the pronunciation and the meaning from the components.
+Victor Yowland Yes, it is CERTAINLY incomplete! And yes, a sun behind a tree=east, two women=argument. I din't go into that - I was talking about English, and I just wanted to make the main point which is that Chinese is meaning-based not sound-based, and that this has a big advantage that some people might not have considered.
all i can say is that serbian is perfect when it comes to this. 30 letters and 30 sounds. If you can read, you can pronounce and vice versa. And we use standard letters with few exceptions do its easy to learn. Defence - defense - difens (in serbian way)
I think the Korean spelling needs credit. Each character makes a certain sound, with near no exceptions. Very straightforward. Its also very phoenetic with exception of a few chinese words in the language
Then it is a derivative of Indian, in the same way Koreans worship a derivative of an Indian religion. Sanskrit represents a syllable- a consonant and a vowel. With a superscript or subscript addition the vowel can change or be removed.
I think Spanish and Japanese are well spelled languages. You speak the word almost exactly as it is read, with a few exceptions here and there. Also looking up words in the Chinese dictionary is not as hard as you think it is, there are around (in Japanese anyway) 2000 that you learn in school, all characters have part of those symbols, it makes it easier to find words. Just as we would look up S, they would look up く which would enable them to find くち (this is Japanese)
+Athanaric Got's Helm I feel that the Japanese writing system combines the best of what the video explains about Chinese and English writing. The Hiragana is typically used to mark the grammatical function of words in their sentences. Katakana generally represent words borrowed from or otherwise derived from European words, especially from English. Kanji typically represent the meaning of a word. For uncommon/unknown kanji, hiragana can be written over the Kanji to show pronunciation.
+Cloud Strife well... it's a bit more complicated than that... how'd you look for the word 自転車? probably you don't know how it is spelled... you don't know if it's ON-yomi or kun-yomi... so the Japanese do exactly the same as the Chinese do... they have 214 so called "Radicals" (I don't know if it's the same number in Chinese... but I suppose...) and they are ordered in a specific way... and they use the number of strokes the first kanji is written with... of course you have words that are written in hiragana or katakana... but compared to the word WITH kanji (some words are written with kana although they have kanji) it's almost nothing...
+Nifuruc The advantage to the kana system is that, if you hear a word like 自転車, you don't have to know the kanji and can use kana (じてんしゃ) to search for it like you heard it, as in english where you just search for the letters of the word. The kanji will be there, with it's pronunciation in hiragana.
Ｍｒ Msan yes, sure :) but there's a difference between Kanji Lexika and dictionaries... we're talking about Chinese dictionaries... the japanese kanji lexikon is the only comparable source... and when you read a word you don't know you usually don't know the reading as well...
All your points also apply to German spelling, BUT most of the words are actually written as they are spoken and vice versa (well, some are strange, but not nearly as many as in English), although I'm still sorry for German learners because they have to memorize the Genders of words and get used to our Cases. English is just to inconsistent sadly. Take a look at this : Tough Though Through Thorough
If you learn german, and your native language has gender for words, it's even harder, because... most of the words have different gender in german, than in your language!
That's really strange indeed! In polish at least "dziewczyna" (girl) is femine ;) "Chłopak" (boy) is masculine, but "dziecko" (child) is neuter ;) But it gets tricky when you say eg cat. In polish "kot" it's male, while "katze" in german, as I understand, female. When learning german, it's really hard to say "die katze". It's natural for me to say "der katze" ;)
jarlfenrir The reason why 'Mädchen' is neuter in german is to be found in a form that the English language doesn't have. I don't know how it's called in English, but in German it's 'Verniedlichungsform" or "Verkleinerungsform" (~form which makes subject cuter/smaller). Those forms /always/ are neuter. So you have 'die Katze' for cat, but 'das Kätzchen' for small cat. 'Mädchen' now comes from 'Maid' which is an old way of saying 'young woman' or 'virgin'. The "Verkleinerungsform" then makes 'die Maid' into 'das Mädchen'. And, well, that's why the german word for girl is neuter!
7:33 In every language there are orthographic rules, very few languages are written down with the regional dialects, it's not only a characteristic of English, for example, a sentence in Spanish: - Me gusta mucho ir a la playa por las mañanas - Me guta musho i a la playa po la mañana The last example is the dialect of Andalusia, in southern Spain (probably not very accurate). The first one is the one that is use in all the Spanish speakers countries, and the same happens with french, German, Russian... Then, you said that English has a very useful way of reading because the ambiguity of the words doesn't exist, for example two, to or too. Well, sorry but that's a very stupid argument, if, for example 2 is written as "to" if you read "I will go to a house" your are not going to think that "to" is refering to 2, because the sentence will have no sense, most of the words that sound the same refers to totally different things, and anyone can know that. A writing system needs to be easy and practical, we don't need to know the history of the language by reading it, because the only thing I want to know is what the book, web, message, letter... Is telling me, I don't care about the story of the language at this moment, and If I were interested in the story of English I would to Wikipedia or I would study linguistics. The written language needs to be easy and precise, and English is not. English is not the best writing system in Europe, in fact I think that is one of the worst of Europe as far as I know.
I'm Uruguayan and think Spanish behaves similar to English in this regard. I make no distinction between S and Z, V and B, and LL and Y. I don't pronounce the S before consonants, or when it's at the end of the word. The H is mute for all Spanish speakers but there are many reasons why it's kept there (old iberian "f" as opposed to greek style "ph" now shown as "f", and latin roots). These differences appears in writing only, and adds to the etymological context and you have words that pronounce the same but are written differently (ola, hola). We also use contractions like "pal'" all the time, but write "para el". Finally, our regional dialect is written down differently: Rioplatense voseo is not only spoken but also written differently from Spanish voseo (vos sos, vos sois). So there's cases where we pronounce things differently from how we write them, and cases where we extended the writing system to reflect how some pronounce things.
Well english has one of the worst systems on the planet. You cannot compare it to something like greek. When i see something written i expect to read the letters that i see and not remembering every single case of every letter how it can be spelled. Heck even german is way cleaner and easier to read than english...
Well, still it's the most used language in the world, so this drawback becoems a positive. Yes if an alien civilization comes they will have a hard time but pretty much for everybody (with the exception of your native language) will have an easy time with enbglish if it's used in your everyday life. Also, greek.... why can't you guys just use the normal alphabet? c'mon.
I agree, I studied some greek in college, and it's not hard to pronounce, plus the stress marks and spirits. My first language is spanish, and we have a strict phonetic system that is quite comfortable if you don't know the language. We only miss a couple of transliterations from mother languages, latin and greek (we don't have the Theta sound in words that should have it, like Theos).
As an analytic language English is very efficient, but less flexible than Slavic and Latin languages. I love English, but the phonetics keeps driving me crazy from time to time.
+Igor “Ahoy” Arutiunian less flexible? You can do almost anything in English. also you can drop 60 per cent of the words and retain basic sentence meaning. You can order words any way almost, you have huge poetic licence and you can mash words together and reuse them for different meanings.
+NoFaithNoPain In languages like Russian the endings of words change based on their use in the sentence. That is the reason why you can put words in any way possible without changing the meaning and usually even without making the sentence sound weird. In English, however, the meaning of a sentence depends a lot on the order in which the words are put. I'm not saying that it's impossible to change the order of words in English, but I'm saying that it's just harder to do than in some other languages.
Igor Arutiunian All this is true. I would not have described "Flexibility" as being able to order the words in any fashion though. It is not particularly flexible to me the amount of words needed in Russian, or the fact you have to listen to a huge sentence until you hear the last word then all of a sudden you understand it. Likewise, look at MAT and the simplistic way it is put together. With English swearing the way you can mutate words into each other, verbs into nouns into verby gerunds, then this would be the kind of flexibility I would have meant.
+NoFaithNoPain You have a point. It would be unfair to define flexibility in such a narrow way I did. I see what you're saying about the long sentances, but I think you confused it with Latin. In Latin verbs usually placed in the end of the sentence, so you have to read the whole thing to get any idea of what it's about. In Russian it's not the case. You can just pile a ton of stuff into one sentence without having to stop and start a new one. It's kinda weird even for me actually. :) It's funny for me when some Russian speakers claim that Russian is somehow better because it has more words than English.The way a single word can be changed creates an illusion of Russian having more words. It's like saying that "duck" and "ducks" are different words. :)
+Igor „Ahoy” Arutiunian Similarly in Polish you can use one swear-word and use it to mean almost anything you want by mutating it and use almost only that word to convey stuff. Pretty entertaining at times. :P
Chinese-based written characters are composed of various combinations of a relatively (to English) large but finite number of "radicals" with different meanings, similar to English, and in postindustrial times they have developed, or maybe more accurately, been forced to adopt the common Mandarin and a standard and almost completely concrete-much more so than English-phonetic alphabet to use to write characters-zhu yin fuhao, and later pinyin (Romanized Chinese). The Japanese use a combination of phonetic alphabet (hiragana and katakana, which is used for loanword pronunciations) and pictographic characters, kanji-the same characters used by the Chinese. In my experience, dictionaries are usually categorized by stroke order, phonetic spelling, or radical usage, rather than the example you listed. Also, you fucked up the stroke order for "big", but let's ignore that.
Hm, with this kind of logic German, Russian or Czech languages (I have listed all languages that I am able to speak on a decent level, so maybe there are others, which are way better and more intuitive,but certainly not French - really guys, why you want to multiply 4*20 just to be able to say eighty. Seriously, why to not use belgic alternative? Anyway...) are way better than English, cause you can do all mentioned in video things and also pronounce a word correctly even if you see it first time in your life. :D
Elliot Ecstasy | he also speaks French and Latin, plus he has some extra experience with a handful of other languages, he mentions this when he talks of Lithuanian. Please pay more attention and comment AFTER you're sure what you are saying is true
Elliot Ecstasy | Oh and he constantly is explaining the pros and cons of the different languages throughout the video, so anyone with a nine and a half minute attention span can infer what he means
There were quite a few assumptions of how Chinese works which indicate the standard of research that went into this video is quite a bit lower than normal. Typing - I sucked at it, but I learned chinese typing in primary school. You need about 3 keystrokes per common character, or on very rare occasions, up to 5. This works by taking the first few strokes of a character, the last few, and then choosing from a finite dropdown list of characters, enumerated 1-8, and choosing one of them. Sometimes, you'll need a rarer character that's buried a few pages back, and can go forwards and backwards with 9 and 0. I know a guy who can just belt out paragraphs and paragraphs, with the same number of keystrokes per minute as someone typing in a latin alphabet language. Not every character requires an entirely new word. I like to describe it as an interaction of semantic fields - you have words that mean something rather vague, and you juxtapose it with other words until it makes sense. There's no word for "public transport" on its own, but there's "common use exchange travel/through tool tool." You do still need to memorise an enormously large number of words to come across as educated, granted, but there's similar interactions within the words themselves - radicals. Radicals are components of a word, which you can roughly (and incompletely, for convenience) separate into up, left, right, core, and maybe bottom. Not all words need all of these, and most just use up to two. Radicals allow you to stitch together vague concepts into slightly-less-vague concepts - a left-fire radical and a right-radical that roughly means hole can form together to mean a wok; things with the hand radical would typically indicate some sort of a manual action, and those with a foot radical indicate something done with a foot, and so on. Things with common right/core radicals also tend to have at least vaguely similar pronunciations - it's surprising, how much I could get away with faking by guessing off these keys. That hole-ish radical? Put it with a motion one to mean pass/through, and pronounce it as guo (forgive me, I'm going to romanise cantonese in a very unsystematic way here). Add it to fire for wo. Add it to insect, meaning snail, for another wo (with a different tone). This is ironically a lot like Lloyd's point on looking at the shape of a word to learn its history. Dictionaries are also sorted by these radicals and keystrokes. For a wok, I'd look under fire radicals, then count up the keystrokes needed to write it in a standard way (12 to 14, if I remember correctly - i was notoriously lazy in memorising the proper, orthodox way of writing). Okay, enough about chinese. His point on reading words as a whole doesn't really address more recently-established written languages having more useful phonetic systems. I would even argue that they're at least equally good at indicating their meaning and etymology as english. Yes, we often read words in english as a whole, but that's not something exclusive to it. Germans and Spaniards don't comb through each individual letter or letter grouping, either, but they get to know exactly how something's pronounced based on the spelling, as their systems are very strict on how certain letters and combinations are spoken aloud, sometimes even down to the stress syllable. At least in the case of French and German, I'm also certain that a lot of them are also rather more uniform in indicating what a word is supposed to mean based on its spelling. English has the rather unfortunate problem of coming from several different languages. Hell, it's a germanic language where the academic lexicon and fancier words in general are made latin by french influence. Outside of obvious loan words, english's parent languages don't really have this issue. That said, as useful as conjugation and declination and whatnot are in indicating the who, to whom, by whom, and what gender everything supposedly is can be, it's absolutely liberating to have english as a language free from the need to memorise all of that. I'm quite surprised that this wasn't brought up.
To get this straight, I really do like English. Especially the British one. But I never understood this... I am Hungarian and our language has a really straight forward spelling with only few exceptions (the language itself is somewhat related to Finnish but it's a really distant and controversial relation) and I've never quite get why the English spelling has to be the way it is. Even after watching some linguistics talking about the English language. Until I found this video! Now I really get it. I always thought it's a silly thing and have no reason at all. You enlightened me. Thank you kind sir! I found your channel only yesterday and I can't stop watching your videos. Really clever, very informative. Congrats!
Defense *wasn't* an example of spelling simplification. In fact, you've got it almost completely backwards; the American "defense" is more ancient (dating back to the 1300s) and is closer to its French roots than the Anglicized "defence". About the only spelling simplifications that really caught on were the dropping of the extraneous "u" in words like color or honor, and the switching of -re to -er for most words (like saber, center, theater, etc) to match the pronunciation better.
I'm native Finnish speaker I strongly disagree. - Two, Too. If you don't get confused by speech, why would you from writing? Also English has words like read that can be pronounced in two different ways. - Sign, Signal. In Finnish all derivatives are pronounced the same way. Also how is this such a big pro that it makes it better than all the advantages of one sound, one letter system. - Cupboard. Finnish writes compounds in this way too even if some people dropped letters because of dialect etc. - Colour, French and Latin roots are interesting to very small part of the population. The advantage is very small. - Geordie, Oxford etc. dialects. Finnish has many dialects too and it works well. Most English speakers also know the standard "newscaster english" spelling. And also for someone that speaks very strong accent it isn't any different from them to learn how to write. What does it matter if English is wrote like this: "I speak English" or like this "Ai spiik Inglish". It involves exactly the same amount of learning. - Defence, Defense. No problem if you actually changed all the words and not half ass it. ---- Coming to Pros of one sound, one letter system: - Children learn to read earlier making school more efficient from younger age. This has even been studied a lot. Finland has two official languages. Finnish and Swedish. Finnish students do a lot better than Swedish students and the only factor studies have found is that it's harder to write and read Swedish. Swedish is still a much easier language to read and write compared to English because it doesn't have those French and Greek loan words that are spelled weirdly. - People do less annoying mistakes on spelling - Foreigners don't accidentally pronounce words wrong - If you hear a new word you can search it from a dictionary without wondering why "numonia" isn't there. Google actually fixes this problem a bit as it knows I'm meaning "pneumonia" but it won't do this for all words.
English spelling was a general free-for-all, with people spelling as they heard the words, but with the advent of printing, the spelling began to standardize. Printing came in just as the shift from Middle to Modern English was taking place, so some of the letters now silent were still being pronounced. The Monty Python French Taunter's "kay-nigget" was close to how people once said "knight".
I am so sorry, but Chinese dictionary did not work like that EVEN A LITTLE BIT, and I am so astonished that you have that kind of total bull about Chinese dictionaries considering you are always concerned about historical accuracies. I assume you were talking about ancient Chinese dictionaries, because modern ones use a Roman letter spelling system for education purposes. However, even the old ones are NOT HARDER TO USE THAN WESTERN DICTIONARIES !!! We had a prononciation referring system called Fanqie（反切） and we also had number of strokes for you to look up characters.
alextyy You didn’t fully think through what you wrote. When you mention Chinese speakers using Roman alphabet Pinyin for learning and typing you are actually proving his point because you point out something that was a necessity and a method and alphabet that had to be borrowed from Europe plus Pinyin system that had to be created just to get around the language’s imperfection.
In fact the "authentic" chinese word dictionary is to use radical to categorize words then find the word you want then you lookup use cases to that word.
Actually, that's exactly the way the Chinese dictionary works. You guys have obviously never seen one yourselves and are just saying that he's wrong to satisfy your own desire to be the most politically correct person in the world. P.S. - Feed me :)
@@servantofaeie1569 "Nope, IPA is the best." For the range of phonetics, sure. The Korean character's syllabification system is very elegant though. Much better than all the dots in IPA imo.
English is better because we let you drop your godawful Korean romanizations right in, and the canon is enriched. Try writing English or French words in Hangeul, and you're in for a world of hurt.
If you only ever had to write about your immediate family, rice, cabbage, soil, and a tiny handful of other things, then sure, Hangeul will do just fine. You need loan words as soon as you start talking about much else, and those loan words are positively butchered by Hangeul. Even in Korea, hanja are still all over the place.
You can recognize words in one go in finnish language also, so it makes finnish easier and more efficient for the speaker to write than english. Thats why Finnish school system does so well. We learn to write basically as we learn to speak and the literal skills and understanding of written content is really high level at early age.
Your main point of "the beauty of the english language" is that words are derived from what they describe. Yet, that's the main thing english speakers ALWAYS criticise of german. "We have developed an incredibly complicated dialect, that is omnipresent in the entire language and that makes it easy to use." Erm, no. That's not even remotely close to what that is.
@@Zonalyre A bow is a kind of neck clothing. Some men prefer to use a tie, which is long, and hangs down about to their bellybutton. But other men, and some women, prefer to use a bow (also known as a bow tie), which is tied in front of your throat with two loops and two ends hanging slightly down. And if someone want you to help them tie this bow (since it may be hard to do without seeing, or in a mirror), they may ask you to tie the bow on them.
and about ur point that Chinese is hard to write small or read small... 5:21, its the same, we just look at the shape of it plus the context... and there u go.
As a little bit of an Orientalist...the assessment of Chinese is rather oversimplified, these characters or Pictogramms are made of minute elements termed as Radicals: smaller Fragmentary pictures e.g. Mouth is usually a tiny or larger square>>divide the larger Square into four = (Rice) Field Tien , you can see clearly the one for rain Yuu. Four droplets. You do actually know the Chinese for Big/larger without knowing it= Typhoon which is from the Chinese Taa feng =Large/great Wind! Your assessment of learning this language is correct>>you should be able to get by with approx 5,000 Characters>>roughly the same with Japanese.
Chinese/Japanese characters have a specific way of pronunciation so in dictionaries they can be ordered to sound, for example Big is Dai or oo in Japanese, also they can be ordered in count stroke. I would not say that English is the best system, it is illogical at best, German has very strict grammar rules and Dutch/English has a lot of exceptions. Japanese grammar is very easy to learn, the difficulty lies in that you have to learn a lot of ways of saying things not to the point.
I think the best description of the English language I ever heard was: "The English language has a proud tradition of luring other languages into dark allies, beating them into a pulp with a big stick and then rummaging through their pockets for some spare vocabulary and grammar." It illustrates pretty well why it's spelling is so messed up.
Relations between words... no, that argument doesn't work. There are probably as many examples of related words being spelled differently as there are for them being spelled the same. And the usual rule is, that if it's pronounced differently, it's probably written the same and vice versa.
Good morning, Lloyd. I absolutely adore your channel and I apologize for responding to such an old video, but I personally feel Spanish is the best spelling system. Nobody is ever confused as to how to spell a word. Nobody ever asks "how do you spell that". Everything sounds exactly as it is spelled. Almost never does a letter change its sound, and when it does, the rules are so obvious and so constant that everyone will understand intrinsically how to spell the word. Just my opinion.
Look up Russian. All the advantages of English you've listed, but also virtually no inconsistencies between written and spoken forms. English is far from "best system around".
+27182818284590452354e-19 Russian is also a very difficult language to learn.
+27182818284590452354e-19 Same with polish, lol. 99.99% of words in polish are written exactly like they are spelled/spoken
+27182818284590452354e-19
-"o" is pronounced as "o" or "a" depending on punctuation
- writing e/E instead of ë/Ë is more and more common (even though they sound different and are used different)
- the punctuation is only understandable if you've heard a native say it correctly
- dialect is a thing
+27182818284590452354e-19 Most Slavic languages have better consistency between written and spoken because "сви знају шта је најбољи језик на свету царе."
+MyGdoggy Not at all. Subject first, (usually); just 3 tenses, careful of suffixes, words sound like the spelling. Its the alphabet that intimidates - a few hours work. English (and its subtleties) is far more complex. You have to read and read to really "get it". Far more complex.
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
+SrgGoofy Yup, it's official: I'm blind.
+SrgGoofy While you're at it, don't forget to drop "x"! It's not like you need a special character to spell "ks".
+SrgGoofy I'm so glad this is a joke, but I actually had to double check, because the EU is just that absurd.
+IshayuG yeah, it's like making a satire about feminists or creationists, you can't make a proper satire out of them without looking like you're talking like an actual creationist ;-)
+SrgGoofy O my GOD, I lov it! Zis perfektly underlins burokrasy in al its horibl short-sitednes! And at forst I totaly belivd zat zos ver ze aktual plans for som reform in ze vorks :D
I can write Chinese.
However, the Chinese dictionary is actually way thinner than the English dictionary.
There are prominent character "bits", where characters that bring similar background are grouped under there. Then, the characters are grouped by stroke counts. It's somewhat rare to see any character with a lot of strokes. It's a lot simpler than you put it, but it is pretty complicated.
There's no way to learn "phonics" in spoken dialects of Chinese, however. So that's just tough.
+2Dtube1 Yeah, I used to regularly use a Chinese-Korean-English dictionary where all the entries were sorted in Chinese, and it was way simpler than whatever he's going on about. Count the strokes and pick a radical (I'm not great at picking the radical sometimes, but there are only so many to choose from).
+2Dtube1 i think you have a beginner's chinese dictionary........
+Epileptic Bunny Maybe.
+2Dtube1 nope i have the same one. actual chinese reading, you actually dont need to know too many words, only a couple... thousand (unless your a scholar). easier than it sounds, because the writing is pretty structured. its hard to explain without pictures, but it is surprisingly easy when you understand the concept. the starting 'bit,' the number of strokes, a couple of flips, and your done.
+2Dtube1 Actually, Chinese dictionaries are the worst to use when you use the prominent character bits version. Even as a native Chinese I can never tell which is the prominent bit. Also, stroke count is not easy, because there are some types of strokes slightly more complicated than 1 slash pointing whichever direction.
The incorrect stroke order for 大 at 0:55 hurt my feelings
@Beau Hayden bot
マジでムカつくな
🙃
Yeah, we don't usually start a stroke from the middle with two pens.
Mine too. And my Chinese is elementary.
Someone just told me to watch this and so I watched it and I enjoyed it. Thank you Lindybeige.
+Dan Bull Collaboration coming maybe :D? Dan in the Beige outfit talking about proper bow string making, and Lindy rapping about D&D?
+Dan Bull People told you to see one of his worst videos then. The gigantic egocentrism and the absurd fact that he compares two of the worlds HUNDREDS of languages instead of the language families is just a tiny scratch at the surface. I'm surprised and frustrated to see this kind of video in this otherwise fine channel.
Sagramorbald chill dude. Having an apprecation of one's own language is fine. Not wholly disagreeing with you, but I think you're being disproportionately passionate here.
McJaews I'm deeply disappointed. His videos are usually so good exactly at debunking the type of thing he just did here - "My language is just so good it's the best in the world" is not better AT ALL than calling Katanas the best swords in the world, something he always makes fun of.
He clearly has very little knowledge about languages. Maybe he should call an expert to talk about it if he intends to touch the subject without sounding like a 10 yo brittain-centric brat.
+Sagramorbald Well, Lindybeige has been an expert in "talking like he knows everything" for years. He's probably got a master's degree in "knowing everything". He sure know a lot of stuff, but he is often oblivious of how much he doesn't know, and so he makes bold statements like this in the video.
I enjoy his videos a lot, and I love his historically-related stuff, but sometimes he misses the point. It happens, we all do it.
The languages that have 1-to-1 pronunciation have all the same advantages that you mention English language having. Words can be identified instantly, no one thinks about individual letters when they're spelling. Also while people living in different parts of a country all have their dialects, the proper written language is universally the same, it works just exactly like you describe English working. Using the proper language is always acceptable, but usually people like to pronounce their words as the like, always being something very close tho.
But when you speak, you can make the difference. I know that if I say I have /tu:/ cows, it means the number, there is no ambiguity. Why would there be an ambiguity when you write?
Eric Kinley I speak Finnish and have never been sure about what a word means. The words are not used in a vacuum there is always context.
It's bizarre to me how so many commenters make this observation and yet... it's not even remotely true? Did none of you watch the video? Spelling purely by phonetics obscures etymology and blurs morpheme boundaries and word relationships. It's also a pipe dream since dialects are a thing.
Granted I'd already come to a similar conclusion myself before watching this video (that English spelling is morphemic rather than phonetic, similar to Chinese but with more pronunication clues) so maybe I picked up on things not stated clearly.
@@Wlerin7 Written English is said to be morphophonemic rather than consistently phonemic. However, highly phonemic writing systems can be mastered in 3 weeks or less. One never completely masters the English writing system but 50% of the students can read children's books after 3 years.
@@erickinley5557 Why should the writing system add heterographic homophones. The spoken word doesn't remove such ambiguity. People who are interested can read read up on the etymology of a word. The clues found in historical spelling are generally not understood and ignored. Written words with historical baggage usually obscure the pronunciation of the word.
Some say that English is a combination of many languages, but I think English just follows other languages into dark alleys, then beats them up looking for spare syllables.
You got the last part wrong. "...Alleys, beats them up, and rolls them for loose vocabulary.
English is three languages in a trench coat mugging other languages in dark alleys for spare vocabulary and extra "u"s.
English is a psychopath
@@tanmaygusain1316 English is a pragmatist.
I have a dictionary for chinese characters used in japan. The way they categorize it is by main component first and then sorted by amount of strokes. (like 日>早>時>木>床>校>言>話>議)
That sounds absolutely ridiculous
@@wikipediaintellectual7088 it's not. Kanji aren't made up of random parts. They are made up of radicles. Even if you don't know the Kanji itself, you can find it easily by knowing which radicals it is made up from.
@@fullyverified7491
That sounds incredibly convoluted and it makes no sense.
@@wikipediaintellectual7088 Given probably close to 1.5 billion people can use this system fine, I think your the idiot here.
I'm sure that sensible if you know the language, but that order to me seems completely arbitrary.
Ah, but in my part of the English speaking world, cupboard isn't kubbud, it's kubberd, because we actually know what an R is.
You mock leaving out the R, when you yourself leave out the P. What?
***** EVERYBODY leaves out the P in cupboard. The word (at least it's spelling) has two bilablial plosives right next to each other, one voiceless and the other voiced. They naturally run together, and the voiceless one gets left out, because they're impossible to say together unless you make the deliberate effort to say as if it were actually two separate words, with slight pause between the P and the B.
I don't leave out the P. So not everybody leaves out the P. Case closed.
*****
Well then you don't pronounce the word cupboard like anybody else I have ever heard of. It's one of those words like Worcestershire which has an entirely correct pronunciation where not every letter is pronounced.
kabbd /kabbrd
Your argument is that English preserves meaning in the word that is not preserved in pronunciation. Guess what... Romance languages (and probably a lot of the latin/cyrillic based languages) are pretty good at preserving the roots at the same time it preserves pronunciation to a similar level of complexity and consistency.
The problem with English was inventing its current written form before big pronunciation shifts, having so many imported words from so many places, trying to preserve the original spelling and snobness (made more complex for class status, including "restoring" original spellings that ended up being wrong).
Modern China uses Pinyin to dictionary search, to write, to learn to read, etc, which is basically using latin characters.
let alone romance languages can infer meaning more efficiently than chinese by appending prefixes / suffixes to the words
Yeap.
Latin languages could and should just be written as spelled while maintaining derivations, but I think the opportunity has passed now.
Yep. English is pronounced modern and spelled Middle English. It’s ridiculous.
@@Bettiebokchoy English may be ridiculous but you can master it through thorough thought, though. A tough doe taught me.
:p
Hum, do you speak any other European language Lindy ? Because all the points you listed will apply to most of them I think.
English pronounciation is actually quite messy with like you said words coming from Latin, French, Saxon and others barbaric tongues, I particularly can't stand how the i is sometimes a normal latin i, like in "infinite" and sometimes a completely unrelated aï sound, like in "like".
Plus you probably have the worst accent differences of all languages, and I'm not talking about GB vs US I'm talking within the British Isles, it's hard for foreigners to believe Scotland and Wales utter the same words. But to be fair it has more to do with history (and how the UK failed to be a nation but succeeded as an empire ;)) than with the actual language itself.
A friend across the Channel
+iopklmification Accents don't mean the language is bad, though, and actually prove lindy's point about it being a very good written language. Also, he does give credit to European languages in General.
+iopklmification The different accents in English are not worse than those in Dutch/Flemish. We just managed to compress all these differences in a plot of land about a fifth of the size of Great Britain.
+iopklmification Wow... Failed at being a nation? Probably one of the most successful unions of nations. And I think you'll find English people find European dialects vary far more than English ones. Just look at German!
+VintageLJ No, he really didn't. He claimed that english words are uniquely self explanatory and that english is unique in its borrowing of words. Which isn't just a tad wrong, it's wrong evolved to the new stage of super-wrong, the wrongest of wrongs.
+iopklmification Please go tell that to someone with a strong accent. Report back here... if you're still able to.
I have been learning English for 20 years and reached a solid C1 level and I'm still finding out words I were pronouncing wrongly or would pronounce wrongly if I only knew the spelling and not the sound on a regular basis.
It took me a couple of weeks, months at max of learning Dutch and Romanian, barely reaching A1 level, to pronounce these languages more reliably than English.
Don't worry, us first language English speakers do that as well.
Wait until you start getting into the accents and dialects (don't.)
Well I learned English since I was a child but I still make plenty mistakes too. For example once I said “I’m gonna ‘titty’ my room up” instead of “I’m going to ‘tidy’ my room up” because i didn’t know when to use the I sound or Ee sound
@@ha-ru8907 btw, most Natives would say, tidy up my room, not tidy my room up. 'Tidy up' is like a verb
I would normally say tidy my room, not tidy up my room because it's one less word
English pronunciation is an absolute mess.
Don't get me wrong, I love the English language, but all of the advantages you described here aren't unique to it at all. This video is a breakdown of some of the advantages of alphabet writing- systems, most of which have spelling systems that aren't crap.
Mike D I think he meant Latin languages
Yep, you are right - This video is mildly entertaining, but it is crap - fails to demonstrate the claims it makes at all - and I'm English!
Your comment is like seeing the comment I wanted to write, except you've already done it for me. Thank u for that. I'm guessing Lloyd doesn't know many languages, this is one of his less truthfull videos.
I think you missed the second part of the video.
As someone who is from Sweden, and tries to study English, it really pains me to sound OK.
You Englishmen have no idea how hard it is to differentiate from Though and Thought first time you see it.
yeah though through thought and tough all seem like they'd be the same at first.
These words can be understood through tough throughout thought, though.
I had to
It gets worse when you're reading in Reading.
Or if you're leading the leading of your acid based batteries
As someone who is from Norway, and learned English when I was young. It's not that hard to differentiate "though" and "thought".
Hmm, it's clear he doesn't know Chinese very well...
He never said he did
Perhaps not, but pontificating on the relative merits of something you're clueless about is rarely a good idea...
+Potato Dragon By trying to inform the audience on a topic of which they are most likely ignorant, the informant is claiming a position of authority on the topic. Whether this is his or her intent is irrelevant. As the audience doesn't know any better, they'll trust that this supposed authority who's actually going off of half baked knowledge and assumptions knows what he or she is talking about and take his or her word as the truth. This is where the spreading of wrong information often starts.
If it's clear, why don't you point out some specific things he got wrong? It would be nice to know. I'm not trying to flame, I'm just curious.
His example is rather awkward. After all, he is giving the example of a dictionary in which you know the meaning of a word and are looking for the character for it. Admittedly, that is difficult to find in Chinese, but it is difficult to find in _any_ language. I can't very well open up an English dictionary to find the word for "a large burrowing African insectivore." Dictionaries are only useful when I'm looking up the meaning of a word I've already seen on a page, not the other way around.
So in that case, I assume Chinese dictionaries must be arranged in some way related to how they are written like how alphabetical dictionaries are arranged according to how they are spelled.
It's still clearly much harder to alphabetize a Chinese dictionary than an English one, but not as bad as he makes it out to be.
lloyd just described how reading works for literally every writing system
In Spanish writing is 100% phonetic, and even the stressed part of the word is accented (if it deviates from where you would normally expect the stress to be). For this reason, in Spanish, we do not really make spelling errors when we write, whereas in English, even an educated person might misspell here and there, or mispronounce a word they have read for the first time and never heard pronounced (for example, epitome).
But yeah, I agree with your point, languages like French and German have a highly irregular spelling system too (from what I understand), and those ones are only in Europe, I do not even know how Korean, Hindi, Persian, etc. function and doubt Lindybeige does either.
@@santaanna700 la hache no se pronuncia, la "c" se pronuncia "k" y "θ", la "q" sola no existe, no se distingue entre "b" y "v"...
@@santaanna700 German system is not irregular, if you see a word written you know how it's pronounced.
@@santaanna700 hindi is one of the most phonetic languages.. u write what u say..
@@santaanna700 same with Korean.. the there's expectation..
I am going to venture to say that almost no one uses a character dictionary in the manner described. You don't go scrolling down a list of animals until you hit upon the one you want. If you see a character you don't recognize you search for it based on stroke order. If you hear a word you don't recognize you look it up based on pinyin. Though there are picture dictionaries for children that group like objects for easy study.
Lindybeige doesn't care. To him everything english is superior to the rest of the world. A very small world he lives in even though he seems to be interested in many things.
You don't understand! it is impossible to look up a symbol it is the symbol you are trying to remember!
Carbon 12 *"You don't understand! it is impossible to look up a symbol it is the symbol you are trying to remember!"*
I don't quite follow what you're trying to say here but I'll repeat the relevant bits of my previous post concerning character dictionaries:
1.) If you hear a word you're unfamiliar with you look it up by its pinyin (or kana or romaji or hangul - I never got the hang of the Taiwanese look up method, so no clue there)
2.) If you see a character you're unfamiliar with you look it up by its stroke order (no need to thumb endlessly through a list of animals until you find the one you're looking for)
3.) If you want to look up a word but can only remember the meaning (and not the sound or the character) then you're in the same situation you'd be in with a language with an alphabet. There are lots of ways around this particular problem when dealing with characters, however.
This is all I really wanted to say; sorry for any confusion my first post may have caused. Cheers!
They are also ordered in groups of radicals, such as all the characters related under the "grass" radical or the "area" raadical etc...
Taiwanese have their own system of characters for different pronounciations, and it in fact looks similar to katakana in a slightly forced way...
I like gravy, but not when I visit Egypt. I find it makes me wobble.
The word on the video is gray you American!
it's gravy no?
I looked away for a split second and only caught a milisecond of the word popping up, so I went back and paused it. It's gravy.
English spelling is fine, it's amazing, it's all dandy. I love it.
It's just the pronunciation that's messed up.
All of our spelling existed first (for the most part), then we just started saying everything differently (thanks to the Great Vowel Shift). If you go back to Old English and Middle English, things were pretty much said exactly how they were spelled. It's only after the Great Vowel Shift that we starting saying most of our vowels differently (which lead therefore to some other changes in pronunciation) that our spoken English and written English didn't add up. Fun Fact time: if you ever wonder why English doesn't have that characteristic Germanic sound for the most part, it's because of the Great Vowel Shift. Had that not happened, English would sound *a lot* more Germanic even given its French influences. (Don't believe me? Listen to someone speak Middle English)
+thinkpol knight would be spelt different from night, right?
+thinkpol Today completly different pronounciation: knight, blood...
Here some comparisons
blood blut (EN, GE)
cake kuken kuchen (EN, NL, GE)
thou du
two twei zwo zwei (EN, middle high German, GE dialect, high German)
laugh lachen
circus zirkus (note the different pronounciation of ci and cu)
PS: Germans introduced ä ö ü to prevent confusion when words became too similar
also the stupid norman-french scribes didnt bother to learn to write english properly so they just used inconsistent, unfitting french spelling conventions and ruined everything.
edi Yes, I know, I speak German XD
Juan Cruz Spinosa -ight words are really fun. The "-ight" spelling is left over from a phonetic sound that English used to have but we lost (it's the throaty "ch" that German has now, both kinds). But originally, we did say the "k" in "knight."
But those come from the Old English words "niht" and "cniht"
Pyjamas are always plural, unless you're at a party!
never even noticed that lmao true, but if you say pajamas party it sounds like "a" PJ is having a party
"Pajama bottom" and "pajama top" are singular.
@@masonmonnie I mean he's not wrong
'pet shop', 'comic club', 'art school' - it's not special, It's a rule.
Chinese dictionaries are sorted alphabetically by the pingyin of the sound each character makes. It's pretty straight forward. Also, i would argue that the whole recognize a word like a face idea applies to any writing system, once you read a word in say, (insert language), you learn to recognize that word at a glance without having to say each syllable every time. With phonetically based writing systems you're not stuck if you don't know the pronunciation of a word as you can read it flawlessly just by saying each syllable. I'd say they're the best of both words.
I've never seen a dictionary like that. I learned Chinese for a few years and to look up characters, I was taught to jump to the category ("radical") and then under that radical, to look for characters of that number of (additional) strokes. If you think about it, the components of Chinese characters are just their letters, and they have roughly 200 of them. Not brain breakingly many. 🤷🏻♂️
@@paddor Radical also works, but the newer generations mainly use pinyin now.
@@Syuvinya That only works if you know the pronunciation of the character.
@@paddor radical only works if you know the strokes of the character
That sounds like a silly system. We can spell everything in Japanese and Chinese using an expanded version of Greco-Latin script- the international Phonetic Alphabet
Spelling in english is so hard, that you even have freaking spelling contests - and you are telling me that this is the best system around !?
I renember when i first heard about spelling contests. Pronunciation and spelling are so integral thing in my native language, that concept of spelling contest was really hard to grasp.
Well, I guess when you think about it, it is a bit strange, but it's just something we do.
Wars aren't really in fashion anymore. So not sure what that has to do with anything.
Yeah, while studying, I remember having something of a revelation when I realized that word that means "to spell" in Japanese is relatively unused. It wasn't until that point that I really thought about the fact that 'spelling competitions' are a totally foreign concept in some other languages lol
They oh I'd say every country that has a history pre-napoleon gets to complain. For future reference its not how many wars we've won its our win rate. 14/16 is pretty all right. 88% a solid B+
Yes it is hard to spell english words but you can still spell phonetically and english speakers will be able to understand
Using the same points you described in the video, Spanish is better than English. Because the pronunciation of the words do not change so drastically like in English.
Except for the times when you get the odd Arabic word thrown in.
+crzymn246 Arabic is the best language Arabic Master race
crzymn246 They're not odd to native language speakers
Polska Man I think we're using different connotations of the word "odd" here. I meant mine as in "irregular", not odd as in "strange".
crzymn246 Again even in that context they're not odd.
Even though I have learned English since I was 4, it is really hard for me to guess how a new word which I have come across is pronounced. Being an avid reader, it is a problem for me because I prefer reading in English. Especially because in my native language, words are said exactly the way they are written.
you look up on Chinese characters by radicals not categories. There are many inaccuracies but this is the one that bothered me the most so far.
one thing is that American spellings are sometimes more consistent than British spellings. the immediate example I have is tiger not being spelt with -re despite it having the same ending as "centre" in French. I don't remember the others but this is just something that's crossed my mind.
+Nitori ShogiPlayer
He was referring to reverse lookup when you know spelling and you don't know how to write that word.
Japanese language has phonetic system as well while Chinese seem to lack any way to write word phonetically
Actually many Chinese characters are written phonemically. It's a lot more so in Old Chinese but since pronunciation has changed since then the correspondence between the sounds and words are less apparent.
Nitori ShogiPlayer
I think phonetical characters are not really possible because china has several different languages and all use same symbols, so phonetic spelling will be quite different.
the fact that characters do have significant phonetically component is really dark side of Chinese script, because very often you have no clue what is the meaning of that character.
They are phonemic characters already. I am not saying there needs to be. For instance the character 蚊 has a bug on the left (signifying meaning) and the character 文 on the right, telling you its pronunciation. How you pronounce the latter depends on your Chinese variety and ultimately affects the pronunciation of 蚊.
actually, chinese dictionaries work with radicals, that is the first section of the character you can find. They're also categorized under number of strokes. It's still rather inefficient, so they use pinyin, Latin alphabet, to spell out the characters, which makes it somewhat easier to look up words, but Chinese has so many homonyms that that solution doesn't help much either.
+Alexander Salt There's an alternative system I prefer that goes by the first two strokes, then stroke number. Basically, there's a definition of five types of strokes. Straight vertical, straight horizontal, going left, going right or squiggly. You look at what the first two are, then just count strokes and check the list of characters fulfilling both criteria. Sounds complicated, but it's actually really fast when you get used to it.
+irrlicht321 Stroke counting can be difficult as well, but i agree it's far better than the example in the video. Though i think he was trying to provide the description of the radicals type without getting too far into how simplified Chinese is written.
+Alexander Salt Yes, obviously they would look for more ways to order the characters, but always you have to have some knowledge of the character to start you off. True, one can get the initial letter of a word in English wrong. What does sykolojee mean? Look under P...
That sounds like a silly system. We can spell everything in Japanese and Chinese using an expanded version of Greco-Latin script- the international Phonetic Alphabet
I'm really liking the new aside-camera.
I'm a 3rd year Japanese learner and I know about 1,000 characters, and everything you say that's an advantage in English also applies to the character system. Memorizing characters and memorizing spelling really aren't that different.
The strokes aren't random, there are simple characters, and those simple characters (called radicals) just combine to make the more complicated characters. Sometimes it makes sense, like how 娘 (daughter) 姉 (older sister) and 妹 (younger sister) all have the character for woman 女 on their left side, or how characters that have 反 in them are usually pronounced "han." Sometimes it doesn't make sense and you just have to memorize them, but it's the same for spelling, and spelling gives away the meaning like you describe just about as often as the consisting characters give away the meaning of a character.
You develop immediate recognition over time, like in English. You learn the associated readings, and you learn to sound out words you don't know out. If you want to look something up in a dictionary, you go by the phonetic pronounciation, and if you want to look up a character you don't know, you go by radical. The characters make reading go much faster and like spelling, different characters can indicate different meanings for the same pronounciation like in "to" "two" "too."
It's hard at first, but like for English, you learn the patterns and develop an intuition. I love how characters have so much meaning and history in them - much more than the "sign" in "signal" - so I don't think you can say English is just better. They're not as different as you think.
I find your position...
B)
Indefencible.
YEEEEAAAAAAAH
+The Examined Life (of Gaming) Is that reply entirely sensible or sencible? Its "sible" as the second syllable and the extra "c" sound is no longer required so dropped.
***** USA USA USA
+The Examined Life (of Gaming) Don't get so defensive.
english in a nutshell:
Bite
Fight
Height
White
Bite and White use the same technique and so do Fight and Height. They just happen to be spoken exactly the same XD
@@MegaMementoMori height and weight
English is still horrible. And most in most languages, after you know the word, you recognize it as a whole, but if you don't know the word the letters give you a pretty certain way to say it. In fact most latin derived languages (italian, portuguese, french, spanish) have derivative spelling.
yeah he makes all these points like they don't apply to other languages.
fact is: english pretty much only has disadvantages compared to romance languages, with very few actual advantages (like gender neutrality of objects)
English is still the most important language in the world and if you go to a non English speaking country,you'll be fine with English.
@Lindybeige
When I came to live in Germany in 1970, I was 16 years old and couldn't speak or read a word of German. Within 6 months I was quite proficient, not fluent, but I could read and understand, say 90% of the language. What helped me to become so good in such a relatively short period was of course my young age, but more than that it was the phonetically written language - German is practically always written the exact way it is spoken, or vice-versa.
Unlike English - just take the word "bow"; it could mean an archer's bow - or, to bow to somebody - or, the bow of a ship !
Furthermore, " bow" as in the last two examples, can be pronounced exactly as the word "bough", which is of course a part of a tree ! So here you have one word with three entirely different meanings and a similar word, pronounced exactly the same way as two of those words, but meaning something completely different again ! I am not even going to start with words like " enough" ! How the hell can "GH" be pronounced as an "F", but it is - " e-nuff"!!! So, enough is enough and enough of that then ! (Poor foreigners).
So comparing written English with German, I must say the German language wins hands down. German only gets really, really complicated when words are combined to make another term. Example; " Schiff" means ship ; "Schiffahrt" means shipping ; "Schiffahrtskaufmann" means Shipping Clerk ; as you see, by combining words, completely different terms are constructed. It gets even better with words such as ;
"Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft" which literally combines four different words to mean "Danube Steamship Company". Ha! 😜😜😜
P.S.
We might all understand each other written on the page, as you said, but when I was in Newcastle in 1974, I asked a railway platform attendant this question " Could you please tell me which platform the train to Hexham leaves on?" - 45 years later I am still trying to work out what his answer was, because I couldn't understand a single bloody word he said as he replied !!! 💥💥💥
Like my grandpa told an Englishman when he was stationed in europe when he was told he had an accent, there's more Americans that there are you, so you're the one with the accent.
That's a bit of a dumb thing to say....
Technically we all have an accent. Im from America & i doubt the two of us speak the same. Not unless your from the same part of the south i am anyway. Even here in the south there are around 16 different dialects. They even have their own words that none of the rest of us use.
You might find it interesting to research a bit about the korean written language, it is very intelligent and well designed
+Charles Geringer Yes, letters that look like mouth shapes, and they are not too complicated either.
+Charles Geringer because it was literally, designed.
+yamatoneko1 Apparently by a famous ruler or theirs right?
+Ryan Jackson By King Sejong the Great(well, and his staff). If I remember correctly Hangul didn't become widely used until centuries later since it was seen as a bit vulgar and "peasantlike" at first.
+Charles Geringer I find Hangul (Korean writing) very fascinating. Both the practical implementation and the history behind it.
And anyway, 'defense' comes from the late Latin 'defensum', so spelling it with an S makes more sense.
I guess the French just got to it before it caught onto English
Yes, but fence in American English isn't fense, so it doesn't make sense to only have defence and offence be spelt with an s.
@@vector9511 You mean it doesnt make sence?
@@StofStuiver Actually, sense came directly from Latin, so the French didn't change it to a variation of sence.
There are a lot of English words that are spelt with a c in the noun form and an s in the verb or adjective forms.
Like there is defence and offence, but defensive and offensive; you have a licence, but you are licensed and the process is called licensing. Someone may have a practice, which is where they practise. It's very consistent, and the way I was taught to remember which is which is that c comes before s alphabetically, and noun comes before verb alphabetically.
US English changed offence to offense, defence to defense, licence to license, and practise to practice. That is, they made some of the words always use an s, and some of them always use a c, and there's no rhyme or reason as to which is which; you just have to remember.
The languages that have 1-to-1 pronunciation have all the same advantages that you mention English language having. Words can be identified instantly, no one thinks about individual letters when they're spelling. Also while people living in different parts of a country all have their dialects, the proper written language is universally the same, it works just exactly like you describe English working. Using the proper language is always acceptable, but usually people like to pronounce their words as the like, always being something very close tho.
- stolen comment from a guy named Mixa
Way back in college, I knew a couple of Japanese guys. This was a few years before the internet became accessible to the general public. I got to look at a letter that one of them was writing to someone back in Japan. He used mostly Japanese characters, interspersed with English words. He indicated this was a common practice because some things are just easier to write in English. Apparently learning the English alphabet is pretty easy to someone who knows how to use kanji characters. If I remember correctly he even wrote a few Japanese words using the English alphabet.
I'd be interested to know if this is really a common thing or if the guy was just being odd by Japanese standards. Are there any Japanese readers out there that would care to comment?
normally, untranslatable English words are written in katakana. anything else is written in hirigana or kanji (based off old Chinese characters)
+Propellor Mous They actually do use roman lettering often, though. Look at how many of their songs with English titles are written with them. Katakana is more reserved for loanwords that they've adapted into their own language.
I believe that the use of Latin alphabet to form Japanese words was known as Romaji. It came in three forms. 1 Hebon-shiki, which is the most widely used. 2 Kunrei-shiki, which is pretty much obsolete. 3 Nihon-shiki. The three are alike in structure but Hebon-shiki is considered the easiest.
FFXIK Yeah, it's Romaji. I thought the most commonly used one was the Hepburn system?
Kami Nana Known as Hebon-shiki. :)
You have no idea how Chinese dictionaries work. What you've said was not true, as that what you have described is a thematic dictionary; we have them in European languages, too.
I don't know, but I suppose every dictionary with Chinese characters is a dictionary of a certain language using it. And then words could be put in order of pronunciation.
The Chinese dictionaries can use something called "拼音" (pin yin), which is a sort of government standardized romanization system. If you know the pronunciation, you can just flip to the letter the pinyin starts with. We also use 拼音 to type in Chinese on a qwerty keyboard. Alternatively, Chinese dictionaries have an index at the front sorted by number of brush-strokes that lets you choose a part of a character. Once you choose the first part, it points you to a spot in a second index to find the actual character, which then points you to the actual entry itself.
@@Halera- But if you do not know the pronunciation, then you will not be able to find it. Many charters have more than one pronunciation, especially in Japanese, but in Chinese it is also the case to a lesser extent.
@@partialintegral The most typical dictionary by far is usually one that integrates characters by their 部首 (lit. Head Section/ Head Part). Essentially, since Chinese is a language revolving around drawings, there are main parts in a character that provide a meaning. Most characters involve this meaning, plus an additional character for the sound it makes (for example 艸 which symbolizes grass/nature, applied into the top part of 花 - the top part. The character means flower and the pronunciation is akin to 化, where it takes its sound from). However, the reason why it's less popular nowadays is because of simplified Chinese completely ditching this concept.
@@ylissotato No, you're wrong. Simplified characters dictionaries still use radicals, and most characters fall into the sound-meaning category.
Lindy, I love you, but you have no earthly idea what you're talking about anytime you go on about language.
1. Chinese characters do not represent ideas, they represent morphemes, individual units of meaning. There are two differences. First, 'Un' would be a morpheme, but so would 'in' as in 'intractable'. These two morphemes mean the same thing, but would be different symbols. Second, and more importantly, you still need to understand the language in order to understand what is being said. In English, you need to understand how the word 'not' works in order to differentiate, "I'm not thinking of what to do," and, "I'm thinking of what not to do". The Chinese language is not magic, it probably works because having that symbolic language for so long has meant that, while pronunciations have moved apart a lot, the morphology, how those units of meaning get put together, has not so much. It wouldn't work between English and German.
Also, I don't know what Chinese dictionaries you've been looking at, but from my experience with Japanese, I would expect them to be leveled: words sorted by initial character, characters sorted by radicals (a certain piece of the character), and radicals by number of strokes. If I were looking for big, I would start browsing the radicals (which there really aren't that many, no more than fifty, compare to English's 26 letters), look for one that meant something like big, and move up from there. It's not that involved.
2. I had no trouble figuring out what your phonetic writing was saying simply looking at it. It really isn't that hard. Then again, maybe that's because I'm so used to looking at phonetic writing (IPA, to be exact), but still, you're going too far with exaggerating the difficulties.
3. Fences haven't been associated with defense for well over a century, and who do you know defends themselves with a SWORD!?
+helios5868 It would probably be "defence themselves" or "defences himself/herself" anyway. :P And "defense" is from French _defense_ and Old French _defens_, and Latin _defensus/defensum/defendere_.
As the Online Etymology Dictionary says:
" _Defens_ was assimilated into _defense_, but not before it inspired the alternative spelling _defence_, via the same tendency that produced _hence_ (hennis), _pence_ (penies), _dunce_ (Duns)".
So, it's "defence" that is actually a bastardized form and Americans returned the word to its roots. Imagine that! :D
+helios5868 yeah chinese dictionaries work similar to japanese ones, they're first differentiated by stroke then by level, like *drumroll* english first stroke similar to first letter. though modern mainland china have butchered chinese with "simplified chinese" which, like the american english have ripped words out of their meaning and context and because in chinese meaning is in each character and can be seen, they've basically destroyed the meaning of words.
Wise Lum Read my comment above, as it happens the whole "defense/defence" is completely missed example, since it's "defence" that is taken out of the original context from French by English and bastardized without regard to its Latin roots. :P
Americans - willingly or not - did not "simplify" anything in this instance. They returned the word to its "proper" form, actually.
Tomasz Wota its a bit of a tricky situation that one, how long does something have to have changed before it's considered an original spelling, french is bastardised latin, english is bastardised germanic and neo-latin languages so it really depends on how many step you want to go back by
Tomasz Wota lol well most of the world still uses defence so i think you're outnumbered haha
3:54 "It begins with [...]" a radical and stroke count. I suggest you learn fundamentally Chinese characters work before using them as an example. Also Chinese doesn't usually create a new word for each new concept (if not necessary). There is no single character for telephone. It's just the character for electricity and speaking (machine implied) so the lists aren't actually that long.
5:30 Well since we don't look at each word and break down the individual letters, isn't reading in English an awful more like Chinese than you think? Radicals and components are akin the Latin letters.
How do you understand the difference between speaker, radio, telephone, or other electrically sounds making devices?
@@ciarangrey7576 what are you on about?
you have to remember that a writing system is secondary to a language, the spoken system always comes foremost and the writing system is just a way to transcribe what was spoken. native chinese people already know the spoken words for all of those things, and since each chinese character represents a specific sound AND specific concept, it is very easy for them to read a word, and quickly recognise it from their real life experience. you can think of it almost as if people have a library of spoken words in their mind, and with chinese characters they are able to filter that list by both sound and meaning, quickly figuring out the intended word. all that is provided that they actually know the characters used, however. in some particularly uncommon or old words, that might not be the case, making the entire word unrecognisable if they fail to recognise a single character.
@@mattgolka6266 Interesting question! It's because 電話 is always known to be "phone". To use Lindy's example, why do you know a cupboard as a cupboard, and not literally a board with cups on it? Well, it's because cupboard is just a word which means, well, cupboard. It is exactly the same in Chinese.
@@ciarangrey7576 you language is bullshit accept it.
English spelling merely reflects how many facets of culture and tone and history it has. That 'color' is probably the greatest thing about english, the sheer variation that I have yet to see exist in any other language. When you write english, you can play around so much, and there is always something else to learn and do with it
+Entraya Korsbakke That is indeed an interesting perspective on it.
i think you can say it about alot of languages, if you only analyse them.
+Sral Neman Like "alot" and "a lot".
Sral Neman I concur.
+Entraya Korsbakke
I always prefer writing English over other languages for exactly that reason. There are countless ways to write even simple phrases, which gives you so much room to play around and make it read well. English feels good to read in general, Danish just seems clunky in comparison.
But then why is English the best system? You basicly discribed every language that uses the latin alphabet, so why not say finnish or serbian or german are better? I mean, it's not like the only language that you see derivation is English. And those languages have the addition of pronouncing the words like they are actually written and vice versa, whilest still being able to tell where they came from. Heck, even Polish is way simpler than english. It's just that nobody is used to it's seemingly odd writing system with all the ł ó ć ż sz cz etc, but they actually make way more sense then having pronounciation all over the place.
can't you tell he knows nothing about other languages?
Because he is english and to english people everything English is the best in the world. Even their disgusting food, miserable weather or stupid units. Every single thing British- the best in the world 🙄
Because it uses a simple alphabet of 26 Latin letters, which are capable to represent all the sound of English, and many non-English sounds, while keeping consistent spelling of morphemes, and reliably preserving international vocabulary.
@@pg8220 it's the world's most widely, useful languages. thanks to our empire (the biggest in history) and for all it's good and bad points, we have given the world the world's easiest Lingua franca .
good luck changing that any time soon.
(I especially throw this point to those who have answered in English and not Cornish, or Cambrian or Welsh etc)
@@pg8220 He says, speaking English. We don't chose to learn your language because we don't need to, we trust you'll do the hard work for us like the good lil boys you are :)
*Anyone can learn to read and write Korean*. It's just learning how to speak it or understanding it that is the challenge (which is something you learn anyway by using it). Hangul is the most modern form of writing, and the most innovative. It is geared around making it easy to learn to read. I was expecting you to say Korean over Chinese, seeing how Hangul shares a lot of characteristic with the English writing.
I would even argue that Hangul is much easier to learn than English. English has so many rules and exception when writing words and sentences. The rules are so vast that is is common for schools to teach english grammar all the way to 8 grade, while in Hangul is usually stops at most 5 grade (because there is not much more to teach)
XxDemonicGamer are you taking about Korean or Hangul? If you are talking about Hangul, then yes, it is very easy to learn. There is one drawback though. Hangul isn't very flexible when it comes to Western languages because it can't handle clustersnof consonants without using more syllables.
Korean is a whole other matter. I don't speak it myself but I know a lot of people who tried to learn it. They all say it's very hard.
I find Hangul to be interesting because it's actually capable of representing SOME English words better than the English spelling system. For example, the word "cook" is a mess. The c in cook sounds way different than the c in many other words, such as ice, where the c sounds more like an s than anything. You can't even say the c in cook sounds like the k in cook, because the c and k actually make different sounds. But Hangul handles it like a pro: 쿡. /Obviously/ that's how you write "cook", who doesn't know that? :P
...but then there is also stuff like what you said, where Hangul was designed specifically with Korean in mind so there's a handful of consonants and vowels it can't accurately represent because those sounds don't exist in Korean. Though it's not a problem with the system, just its implementation; if someone were to make a "Hangul 2.0" to be used universally, where would the downside be?
As for the Korean language itself, I actually can't say it's very hard. Most things about it feel "natural". Whereas in many other languages, words seem completely arbitrary. Even when you get down to their origins, even their origin sounds completely made up a lot of the times. (Signal? Why do we call signals "signals"? What about a signal makes you think "signal" aside from the fact that you were told that's what it was called?) Not the case with Korean (in my opinion, anyway), where it feels like sounds were organized in an attempt to give you a mental image of the word being discussed. Also, many words are marked so you know their exact purpose in a sentence without adding extra words or maintaining a very specific word order. It's great!
true, i learned hangul just because, in one sitting
The problem with hangul is that there are a lot of homophones in the korean language (mostly cuz of Chinese loanwords). Chinese also has a lot of homophones but they are differentiated through writing, whereas in korean, they are written the same. That's koreans use Chinese characters in parentheses to distinguish whenever the meaning is ambiguous, especially in academic journals or legal manuscripts. This is also why their constitution is written in mostly Chinese characters and only use hangul as supplementary.
First, the Latin alphabet is great because we can build words and derive sounds, which Hangul also does, but with our writing system the focus is on words rather than syllables. Now, how hard English is or not to write and read has nothing to do with the late alphabet and everything to do with its own history...
About korean, pardon me because I don't speak it, but is it really all that phonetic? Doesn't the standard writing follow a standard dialect, maybe, or has some letters or words that cannot be easily guessed because their sound has changed but their writing kept, or maybe a weird syllable division that one simply has to memorize?
Like in Portuguese you hear "fala" and you know how to write it... You won't wonder if it should be "fal-a', or 'fal-la' or" fal-la" or anything else.
...Do you realize that most of the characteristics you described also apply to many other languages, not just English?
Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, etc. all have many different dialects, and derivative forms are their bread and butter...
5:07... Of course you don't do that. Native speakers don't approach their own language by logic, it's all about custom/core memory.
You just memorized the spelling as a kid, like the rest of people in Europe (and elsewhere) did with all sorts of words in their respective languages... Again, there's nothing unique here, and, btw, if you think English spelling is super weird, try French, ^^
5:54 ...Yes...that's how most languages work. Every word has one or several semantic roots, which can be appreciated in its spelling. Again, English is no different than many other languages in this regard.
6:55 Again, this is true of many languages, not just English. Words have meaning and can be combined to form new words with different and yet related meaning. Germans do this a lot, but you can also find examples in other languages.
For instance:
-English> Umbrella (from the Latin "umbra", which means "shadow",it was probably taken from the Italian "ombrello")
-German> Regenschirm > Regen (Rain) + Schirm (Screen/Shield)
-French> Parapluie > Para (to stop/stopper) + pluie (rain)
-Spanish> Paraguas> Para (to stop/stopper) + aguas (waters)
7:04 ^^, again, you can do the exact same thing with many other languages...
Seriously, how can you even suggest that English is the only language with Latin and Greek roots?
Bottom line, English spelling system is as fucked up as the French one (I'd argue that this is party due to the strong French influence that English has)... It doesn't make things clearer or easier, quite the opposite.
In order to get the spelling right, people just need to memorize and practice, until they eventually become familiar with the obscure ways of English spelling...
This comment is on point.
An Englishman praising English as the best language, what a surprise
Thankyou for this comment ..
English praising themselves
Weak arguments
- First argument Argument: having English spelling the way it is makes it easier to distinguish words that are pronounced the same (such as two, too, to..etc), thus there won't be any ambiguity on the page
- Counter argument: then add extra letters ONLY in the cases were there are words that are pronounced similarly, such as two and too. But most words don't have similarly pronounced words. Why would you pronounce Haos as House (I.e: produced Hoese) what other similar word to it exists in english?
- Counter argument #2: There are languages that invented better ways to distinguish between similarly pronounced words. For example in Arabic when you have two similarly pronounced word you just add the letter (A) at the and of one of them. And in case that there are 3 similar words you add an (O). For example Too, To and Two. In the Arabic system you can wright To for To (i.e: leave it as is). Then write Toa for (Too) and wright (Too) for (Two).
This is a more predictable and systimatic pattern in adding letters to distinguish between similar words. You don't have to go to the extreme of making THE WHOLE spelling of the language arbitrary to resolve the problem of a few similarly pronounced words.
- Second argument: having english spelling the way that it is makes it possible to know the root of the word:
- Counter argument: Hmmm. nobody gives a fuck about that. The function of a thing is supposed to follow its purpose, which is in the case of writing system to communicate, and having arbitrary spelling is not a good way to communicate.
- Last argument: Not even worth mentioning, because its retarded
I wil rayd mai kar in mae
(I wil ride my car in may)
Haw ar yo?
(How are you?)
Wat is yor neem?
haw old ar yo?
weer do yo lev?
do yo laik video geemz?
wat geem do yo plae?
do yo watch yoteob a lot?
wat is yor fevoret kaind of videoz?
its intuitive
All good points! I would only add that there is no reason to distinguish in spelling between English words that sound alike because they don't mean the same thing. It is the context that tells people the differences among 'pair, pare, pear' or 'rite, write, right'.
EXACTLY! But as for the similar sounding words, context and grammar would suffice in making sure what the person is trying to convey, as for differenciation in writing, the arabic system you mentioned is kind of confusing, but still WAY BETTER than what we use now.
also, please dont use the r word, its abelist.
Nick, this is a bit silly. There are many languages/writing systems that are almost phonetic. English has actually really awkward spelling.
+Arc Kocsog it's between being phonetic, and being able to be understood via derivation. best of both worlds or a bit of either?
+Xeon or the worst of both?
What he's praising is the dual phono-graphic and logo-graphic nature of english language. I have to say I don't disagree. I was very impressed with the spanish spelling in that if you knew how to say it, you knew how to write it, and the lack of exceptions, but he's got a point that it's interesting to be able to group the words by roots even when the pronounciation varried over the centuries.
but english has quite a lot of foreign influenced words. so it can't be uniform.
+iyke ewnaho Other languages with "foreign influenced words" exist and some of them have still been able to make uniform both graphically and phonologically the words from another language.
Greek and Cyrilic spelling is still better than the english. You cannot misspronounce greek if you can read greek.
Russian spelling is a mess though, because of all the vowel softening. If stress HAD to be marked, you could truly not really mispronounce it if you knew the script.
Russian spelling is shit. Almost all other (except Caucasian) spelling are great. I can read Belarussian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Srbian and etc just fine (not including complex sounds like Q and Ğ) without speaking it, but not Russian.
I used to have an Australian friend, and we talked a lot. One day I asked her if my English was good (I'm not a native English speaker) and told me that I sounded almost native, but my English was too "clear". At first I couldn't understand but now I did thanks to your video.
So i will write down a sentence how i would speak it with german pronounced letter:
I am watching this video right now.
Ei em wotsching sis video reit nau.
*Weedyoh
+Terrance Van Liew Vidyeo
fideo :D
Watsching
as an Italian I'd write it the same way
+Lindybeige Chinese dictionaries don't work that way at all.
Here's how:
1) The vast majority of complex characters are actually a combination of simple characters like big 大, tree 木, or sun 日, and sometimes additional material that does not occur by itself.
2) The more complex characters usually have one part that is more prominent than the rest of the parts, this is called a radical. There are 214 simple characters and graphic elements which can be radicals. The radical usually gives a hint as to the meaning, whereas the rest of the character usually contains some hint as to the pronounciation.
3) Now if we have the character 櫧 we take the radical which is the tree 木 at left edge of the character and count the rest of the strokes which in this case are 16 strokes.
4) In the dictionary there will now be one or two dozen characters which also have the radical tree 木 plus 16 strokes - there you go much easier.
5) You can also look up the reading of a charachter. As stated above, the rest of the character is usually a hint as to the pronounciation. In our example 櫧 the right part 諸 is pronounced zhū and in this case it's a perfect hint, because our example 櫧 is also pronounced zhū.
6) If you can't find out either the radical or the reading, you can usually also look up the character by stroke-count only. For our example we said that the right part had 16 strokes and tree has 4 strokes which makes a total of 20 strokes. This method is the least efficient, however, as there are plenty characters with 20 strokes.
7) No matter which of the three ways (radical, reading, stroke-count) you chose to look up the character, you should have found out that 櫧 means oak. If you are using a Chinese dictionary regularly it will not take that much longer to look up a word than in an English dictionary.
I chose a character with the radical tree 木. That doesn't mean that all characters with this radical are indeed trees (as you might think from your reasoning). You also have things that were made from wood, eg. pillar 柱, contraption/machine 機, pole/lever 杠 etc.
1. you dont need thousands of CHinese characters to know the language, a couple of hundred is enough.
2, Chinese dictionaries has 2 search system, 1 is phonetically. and 2 is using the number of strokes, which is put into categories by their radicals(Chinese characters are often symbols joining 2 simpler characters together one of them is the radical)
3, for Chinese you can also guess the pronunciation by looking at the character, as I said most characters are compound characters made up of more simple characters, and if you know how to pronounce those simpler characters then you'll have a pretty good idea on the pronunciation of the compound character.
4 English has massive amount of borrowed words, that will make no sense to a speaker of non-romantic language, while Chinese has minimal outside influence thus ALL of it's words makes sense.
take the word Volcano for example, in english it is derived from Latin, and by looking at it, it does not even hint the idea of a fiery mountain, guess what,s volcano in CHinese? 火山， 火 means fire 山means mountain, so fire mountain.
obsidianstatue Agree on the first 3 points, but the fourth is not very strong. Even a Romance language speaker like me would not get much hints about "vulcano". It's a Roman god, and the word root is not related to mountains. English have a lot of derived words, and the origin of the roots is not that relevant. Examples: "snowpeak", "smoker", "derail", "antagonist". Once you're familiar with those roots and affixes you will get many other words that have them. They're just a different set of roots than those of Chinese. Of course, Romance/Germanic/Indo-European language speakers have some advantage with those roots, because they're shared. Even the grammar is not that different. Just as Chinese speakers have some advantages for learning Japanese, and they are in very different language families! In the end, you cannot expect that all words have such a transparent etymology like 火山, and I'm sure Chinese must have some obscure ones too. Examples of obscure etymologies in English: what does a company have to do with bread? Or a dress with something straight?
two simple examples of weird things with Chinese characters, and no I am not talking about weird awkward characters that most people will never encounter or meet in their life.
末 and 未
You can probably tell the difference of one having the upper line shorter and one having the under line shorter.
First one means End, and second one means... well, Future.
They look god awfully similar to each other.
日 and 曰
This one isn't so common now days, since people stopped using the second one as often as they did.
The two is literally the same but one is thinner and a bi taller than the other one.
The second one makes sense because the mouth sign is 口 but that makes the first one (Which originally is a picture slowly becoming the symbol.) kinda feels absurd. It isn't that big of a deal, but they are kind of a pain in the ass to tell from each other when you don't know chinese that well.
Every language has their positives and negatives, you simply don't say a language or a system is superior.
You should try Italian. Like Latin, that is a really good spelling system, 1 letter, 1 sound, no mistakes. With few exceptions and rules, you can learn and speak any word just by reading it.
Serbo-Croatian is written as spoken.
Mladen Milić манемој
Danilo pa Finski nije sigurno
A i takođe se vidi ovo izvođenje o kojem je on pričao. Jedini problem je što imamo mnogo sinonima, pa značenje nekih riječi u rečenici jedino može da se razumije iz konteksta i iz izgovora te riječi.
And the derivation he spoke of can also be seen in our language. The only problem is that we have too many synonyms, so the meaning of particular words in a sentence can only be understood from the context or the pronunciation of the word (some of the words have same written form, but they sound different).
Toga ima pun kurac i u drugim jezicima uključujući i engleski.
There's plenty of that in other languages as well, including english.
An example of this:
I bow to my liege before I shoot the frenchman in front of me using my bow.
one letter = one sound - as it sould be.....
one thing I like about German is how there are almost no (or completely no) ambiguities in pronunciation
Oh and when talking about efficiency in writing, I think you would be amiss not to mention Hangul, the Korean writing script. Although Korea used Chinese characters to write once they received them from the Chinese, they reformed their writing system and came up with an entirely phonetic system that is thought to be one of the most efficient writing systems in the world.
Anyone can learn Hangul and write their speaking language within 10 to 20 hours of practicing.
ktwomountain
I memorized them on the 1 hour plane ride over from Japan lol
Hangul is a bit overrated, without Chinese characters it became somewhat difficult to differentiate the words with the same sounds. Thus in some fields of studies like Law, medical, and sciences you do need to use certain amount of Chinese characters to avoid ambiguity.
The beauty of English is even if poorly spoken in bad order is still fully understood, and you're right about being able to discern etymology. And don't forget the oldest extant variety of English is Zummerzet- me acker. Drink up yon zider, grab yer comboin 'arvester and come down to elp ee ere with yon blackbird.
The way he wrote 大 hurt my soul
Why?
Every thing you said about seeing meaning and the history of the word applies to German as well with the difference that is has a much more consistent way of reading. We might have some of the most complicated Grammar (Mark Twain can tell a story there), but when it comes to spelling it's much more straight forward. Very few exceptions there, and basically you read everything single letter that's there, nothing's left out. So English has no advantage over any European language in that regard, it only adds complexity, because the reading rules are a hodgepodge of Anglo Saxon / French / Latin / Gaelic, you name it all mashed up with no consistency whatsoever.
+Kilian Muster As a native English speaker I entirely agree; we can keep the derivation; the meaning; and the structure, all whilst making our language phonetic. Unfortunately wide-scale reorganisation would require one thing that we - as a people - can never do. You see; to reorganise English spelling we would need to set up a board of experts to decide how the new rules would work - you might not see the immediate problem here, but - this would mean agreeing with the French and if Moses had been English there would have been an 11th commandment.
Nithingr I don't say you reorganise your language I just think the argument the English system is the best is total crap because most European languages have all the same pro arguments and almost none of the convoluted spelling of English, so amongst European languages the English spelling system is arguably the worst we have, because it's such an inconsistent mess.
Ah, I forget that sarcasm cannot be easily communicated by the written word (by which I mean to say that it is my error, as the effect can be achieved but requires careful consideration), it often amazes me how an ill thought attempt at humour can turn absolute agreement into disdain and disagreement. To reorganise my statement, I do not believe that English spelling is the most effective at conveying meaning and I do not believe that this is as a result of it's nature (as it shares the vast majority of it's history with it's neighbouring languages.). I would also add that the recent discovery that most people only read the beginning and the end of words is an advantage that applies to all experienced users of any given alphabetic language, the ability to read a word phonetically is a benefit that mainly applies to memorising spellings and to new users of the language. Also you missed Welsh (another example of a well organised and phonetic language before anyone makes any "random combination of letters" comment).
Is this satire?
Because of the inconsistent spelling, an English dictionary needs a whole separate phonetic alphabet if you want to learn the pronounciation or the word without listening to a recording or a person speaking.
You don't need that when learning, say, German - because the regular alphabet is already phonetic.
Thank you for restating the video. I missed the part where he said that from 4:30 to 5:04.
Go to the comment mocking the German system of spelling for English. It's not JUST about how it's spoken but how it's written.
Spanish is already phonetic as well.
@@nopenope3228 Not really. Spanish writing is not even phonemic: we have always pronounced B as V, and LL as Y for the last century or three. C can sound either as K or as theta (or S for most native Spanish speakers everywhere), which can be also written Z (and also pronounced S). A K sound may be written C, K or QU. H doesn't sound at all, in standard Spanish.
I understand Italian writing is phonemic, though.
About "cupboard" - I actually learned big fancy words and proper spelling back in my younger days by purposefully mispronouncing words. I actually DID pronounce it "cup-board" for a bit, partially to be silly but mostly to remind myself that it has a 'p' in it, and it's not just "cubberd" (as an American would pronounce it)... Another example is "omniscience" - It is quite literally "omni" and "science" welded together to produce another word, so I pronounced it "omni-science", or ALL THE SCIENCE, which is nifty when you realize it actually means "all of the knowledge", or the state of knowing everything (as the dictionaries like to put it)... :D
It's a nifty trick for remembering the spelling of big, funny, awkwardly-spelled words... Basically, you take the two (or more) pronunciations of the letters or word-chunks and remember it two or more ways (because your brain remembers silly useless crap a lot easier than it remembers useful stuff), and then you've got it...
"Oh dear, was it an "an" or an "on" in the word that means a general malaise? Ah, I've got it! MulANchully! Melancholy!" :D
Also on "defense" - Why would you "de-fence" ("de" suggesting to remove the fence) your defenses? Why would you want to engage in "de-fence" with someone with a sword? Wouldn't you want to fence them? Wouldn't you want to pro-fence, instead of de-fence? I dunno about you, but I like my military bases fenced, possibly even double-fenced, as opposed to de-fenced... ;)
Though, that's not exactly the right word; you want to de-FEND your bases.. But then, if you de-FEND (de, again suggesting to remove), doesn't that mean that you're no longer FENDing? If you're not FENDing off the enemy, then you're either not being attacked, or you're already overrun! D:
I mean, you deionize particles to remove the ions... You delaminate linoleum flooring in order to remove and replace it... You dethrone a King or depose a dictator when you want a new government... You detoxify something when you want to make it no longer toxic... etc. etc. etc... So why would you want "de-fence" anywhere near fortified positions!? In fact, I think if I'm gonna put up a hasty military camp, I'm gonna fence the area, maybe even re-fence it, should the makeshift barrier fail or not be as strong as my liking....
I think the distance between the actual thing keeping the enemy Army out and the act of keeping the enemy Army out is a bit more sensible... But, it's just one American's opinion... :D
Finnish is best. The writing system's only 300 years old so the spoken language hasn't had time to diverge from it. It's literally pronounced letter by letter, even the dipthongs are mostly just the 2 letter slurred together.
spankeyfish Yeah, and there are not too many exceptions, like how "sekunti" is pronounced sekuntti".
Though because of dialects, it may seem like there are a lot of words that are pronounced differently from how they are written.
Except when you realize the spoken language is completely different from the written one. Words lose sometimes over half of their letters in everyday speech.
id Yeah, but they're still pronounced the way they are written.
The spoken language is exactly the same as the written one when you are speaking standard Finnish. Of course a dialect won't match written standard, but thankfully you can also write in a dialect.
Rogem And therein lies the problem. One learning Finnish has to study at least two different dialects, the official and the casual.
'Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.'
I don't see how this makes English any better than other European languages.
My thoughts exactly. I couldn't stop thinking how everything he praises english for is actually pretty terrible when compared to most other european languages.
+Janeator It's terrible compared to Chinese and even Japanese. The English writing system is completely ridiculous, and gets even worse once you take into account learners whose language embodies a different rhythm.
If anybody wants an abridged explanation why english writing is so messed up, it’s a literally half baked system.
English started out as a germanic language written with runes. Later with christianization, they switched imperfectly to a latin based alphabet with some holdover letter from the old runic alphabet; this constituted Old English. In 1066, the Duchy of Normandy, a region of France, conquered England and thus introduced both new words and grammatical rules into the English language; this constituted Middle English. Lastly, around the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the English language started to change as the french words and grammar rules were integrated into general speech and vowels began to speciate to accommodate the changes in a process called The Great Vowel Shift; this process wouldn’t be complete in any recognizable and consistent modern form until the mid 17th century.
Unfortunately for the language, the printing press was invented and introduced before the completion of the Great Vowel Shift which locked official English spelling and typography in the 15th century while the language was still shifting. Afterwards with the onset of colonization, any hope for restandardization was lost as the new colonies started developing their own versions of english.
Actually as a man from Israel(a gamer) I don't find English hard at all, but what I do find weird is the amount of misspellings on American and English writing(especially on the internet). You can imagine my cringe when I see that: "someone needs too go too some place and a friend tells him that he wanna come to... and than their going there."
ps: I didn't even know defense with an "s" existed!
Those are usually touch typists that aren't paying attention. I can type entire wrong words because I'm distracted by something completely unrelated to the matter at hand.
That or people typing via cellphone.
HAWXLEADER yea us americans like to just do things quick. most of the time I see, "I would like to come to." because they don't want to do that extra o
How do you know that it's the native English speakers that are writing ? USA and UK are full of foreigners
Fankas2000 They identify as native English speakers
Do you ask them ? Because if some one has an English name that doesn't mean they are English. For example do you assume I'm English ?
fire - burn - smoke - torch - bake - stove - candle those words in english are not even related.
火 - 烧 - 烟 - 炬 - 烤 - 炉 - 烛
how chinese works :
all those words in chinese are related with fire all have a fire on the left side.
petty much all the chinese words work in this system.
and we're not like english everytime create something new just create a new word like "phone" and "computer"
in chinese we just use two old words put together stands for new thing
phone we call it "hand machine" and computer is "electric brain"
one of my english friend didn't know raisin is made of grapes...which is crazy to me
because in chinese we just call it “grapes-dry” also like jerky is “meat-dry”
I would probably spell Choir as "Qire" if I didn't know English
+Matthew Kessler A Q must be followed with a U. So it'd be Quire, which is an actual word.
+Matthew Kessler Qyre (like Lyre) or Kwaiyer
+Matthew Kessler Kveier
an italian would probably spoell it "koir"
+CapnTates That in and of itself is a fairly stupid rule, though, isn't it? What's the point of having a letter that can never exist without another letter after it? Why not just include that second sound as part of the first letter?
I learn German and it's quite cool to see how often they just shove different words together to create a new one - the longest I can think of is: "Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl" aka. feeling of belonging together (zusammen=together, gehören (verb)=to belong to, Gefühl=feeling)... in fact, when unsure of how to phrase something, I've put nouns together as a guess and my teacher has said it was quite Germanic to do so
Slavic spelling. Said enough. What you see is what you read. There is like 3 cases in thich it is not so, and that is if "n/t/d" is followed by "i". Czech spelling is like that, russian is even simpler, but they have a different alphabet and other slavic languages are similar to either czech (polish, slovakian, croatian) or to russian.
+CZProtton The stuff about the meaning in derrived words, same in slavic languages... besically, it is better. But whole sentences are harder to understand since slavic languages do not have word order strictly in a sentence.
+CZProtton Harder for adult students of the language maybe, but otherwise I wouldn't say so. In Polish you can rearrange words in a short sentence _almost_ (but not really) randomly, and the meaning should stay the same (there will be exceptions obviously :P) - but style will change, and there will be shift in what the sentence stresses. Some arrangements will sound naturally, some will sound like Yoda-speak, others -ancient- anachronistic, and some may not make much sense at all.
+CZProtton That's because we have grammatical casing, we don't need the silly Word Ordering ;-)
***** Ehm... what? :D
***** Hey bud! Who rattled your cage? No one really cares about that right now, I think you've hit the wrong thread :-)
I am from one of your old foes, the Serbs, and frankly, especially in this topic, I wouldn't care if you're Albanian or not. Also, I didn't know you guys have phonetic writing I'll sure check that out :-)
Also, regarding "shqip" thing, you guys have to understand we call you that way because we've heard you guys call yourselves that way. The same way everyone calls Hungarians , well, "Hungarian", except for couple of peoples, including Serbs, who call them "Magyar", because they call themselves Magyar, even the name of their country in Hungarian is "Magyarország".
We've simply heard them calling it that way, and we started calling Hungary that way. Does it make sense? :-)
"Shqiptar" has no actual insult weight,even among the Serbian Nationalists, at least not any greater when something is called "Albanian". I think folks started using it more when they realized you guys get pissed about it, but you use it yourselves all the time, so what the actual fuck? :-)
Lloyd your description of the Chinese language is incomplete at best.
The majority of Chinese logograms are composed of sub-grams. Frequently, this includes a sub-gram that is placed entirely for similar sound, not meaning. Therefore in a compound logogram you can device both the pronunciation and the meaning from the components.
+Victor Yowland Yes, it is CERTAINLY incomplete! And yes, a sun behind a tree=east, two women=argument. I din't go into that - I was talking about English, and I just wanted to make the main point which is that Chinese is meaning-based not sound-based, and that this has a big advantage that some people might not have considered.
+Lindybeige Brilliant video! Thank you for the upload, you have a way of making everything so interesting.
I can speak, read, and write Korean and can say that the Hangul system is the best around. Super easy and simple and perfect for their language.
all i can say is that serbian is perfect when it comes to this.
30 letters and 30 sounds. If you can read, you can pronounce and vice versa. And we use standard letters with few exceptions do its easy to learn. Defence - defense - difens (in serbian way)
I think the Korean spelling needs credit. Each character makes a certain sound, with near no exceptions. Very straightforward.
Its also very phoenetic with exception of a few chinese words in the language
Then it is a derivative of Indian, in the same way Koreans worship a derivative of an Indian religion. Sanskrit represents a syllable- a consonant and a vowel. With a superscript or subscript addition the vowel can change or be removed.
I think Spanish and Japanese are well spelled languages. You speak the word almost exactly as it is read, with a few exceptions here and there. Also looking up words in the Chinese dictionary is not as hard as you think it is, there are around (in Japanese anyway) 2000 that you learn in school, all characters have part of those symbols, it makes it easier to find words. Just as we would look up S, they would look up く which would enable them to find くち (this is Japanese)
Yeah Chinese is different. You search by radical.
+Athanaric Got's Helm I feel that the Japanese writing system combines the best of what the video explains about Chinese and English writing. The Hiragana is typically used to mark the grammatical function of words in their sentences. Katakana generally represent words borrowed from or otherwise derived from European words, especially from English. Kanji typically represent the meaning of a word. For uncommon/unknown kanji, hiragana can be written over the Kanji to show pronunciation.
+Cloud Strife
well... it's a bit more complicated than that... how'd you look for the word 自転車? probably you don't know how it is spelled... you don't know if it's ON-yomi or kun-yomi... so the Japanese do exactly the same as the Chinese do... they have 214 so called "Radicals" (I don't know if it's the same number in Chinese... but I suppose...) and they are ordered in a specific way... and they use the number of strokes the first kanji is written with...
of course you have words that are written in hiragana or katakana... but compared to the word WITH kanji (some words are written with kana although they have kanji) it's almost nothing...
+Nifuruc The advantage to the kana system is that, if you hear a word like 自転車, you don't have to know the kanji and can use kana (じてんしゃ) to search for it like you heard it, as in english where you just search for the letters of the word. The kanji will be there, with it's pronunciation in hiragana.
Ｍｒ Msan
yes, sure :) but there's a difference between Kanji Lexika and dictionaries... we're talking about Chinese dictionaries... the japanese kanji lexikon is the only comparable source... and when you read a word you don't know you usually don't know the reading as well...
All your points also apply to German spelling, BUT most of the words are actually written as they are spoken and vice versa (well, some are strange, but not nearly as many as in English), although I'm still sorry for German learners because they have to memorize the Genders of words and get used to our Cases.
English is just to inconsistent sadly. Take a look at this :
Tough
Though
Through
Thorough
If you learn german, and your native language has gender for words, it's even harder, because... most of the words have different gender in german, than in your language!
+jarlfenir
not only that. sometimes the words even have different gender than what they refer to: 'Mädchen' (girl) is neuter. :P
That's really strange indeed! In polish at least "dziewczyna" (girl) is femine ;) "Chłopak" (boy) is masculine, but "dziecko" (child) is neuter ;)
But it gets tricky when you say eg cat. In polish "kot" it's male, while "katze" in german, as I understand, female.
When learning german, it's really hard to say "die katze". It's natural for me to say "der katze" ;)
jarlfenrir The reason why 'Mädchen' is neuter in german is to be found in a form that the English language doesn't have. I don't know how it's called in English, but in German it's 'Verniedlichungsform" or "Verkleinerungsform" (~form which makes subject cuter/smaller). Those forms /always/ are neuter. So you have 'die Katze' for cat, but 'das Kätzchen' for small cat. 'Mädchen' now comes from 'Maid' which is an old way of saying 'young woman' or 'virgin'. The "Verkleinerungsform" then makes 'die Maid' into 'das Mädchen'. And, well, that's why the german word for girl is neuter!
RainbowYu
i think it's called diminutive. and yeah, you're right - never thought about that.
7:33 In every language there are orthographic rules, very few languages are written down with the regional dialects, it's not only a characteristic of English, for example, a sentence in Spanish:
- Me gusta mucho ir a la playa por las mañanas
- Me guta musho i a la playa po la mañana
The last example is the dialect of Andalusia, in southern Spain (probably not very accurate). The first one is the one that is use in all the Spanish speakers countries, and the same happens with french, German, Russian...
Then, you said that English has a very useful way of reading because the ambiguity of the words doesn't exist, for example two, to or too. Well, sorry but that's a very stupid argument, if, for example 2 is written as "to" if you read "I will go to a house" your are not going to think that "to" is refering to 2, because the sentence will have no sense, most of the words that sound the same refers to totally different things, and anyone can know that.
A writing system needs to be easy and practical, we don't need to know the history of the language by reading it, because the only thing I want to know is what the book, web, message, letter... Is telling me, I don't care about the story of the language at this moment, and If I were interested in the story of English I would to Wikipedia or I would study linguistics.
The written language needs to be easy and precise, and English is not.
English is not the best writing system in Europe, in fact I think that is one of the worst of Europe as far as I know.
I'm Uruguayan and think Spanish behaves similar to English in this regard. I make no distinction between S and Z, V and B, and LL and Y. I don't pronounce the S before consonants, or when it's at the end of the word. The H is mute for all Spanish speakers but there are many reasons why it's kept there (old iberian "f" as opposed to greek style "ph" now shown as "f", and latin roots). These differences appears in writing only, and adds to the etymological context and you have words that pronounce the same but are written differently (ola, hola). We also use contractions like "pal'" all the time, but write "para el". Finally, our regional dialect is written down differently: Rioplatense voseo is not only spoken but also written differently from Spanish voseo (vos sos, vos sois). So there's cases where we pronounce things differently from how we write them, and cases where we extended the writing system to reflect how some pronounce things.
Well english has one of the worst systems on the planet. You cannot compare it to something like greek. When i see something written i expect to read the letters that i see and not remembering every single case of every letter how it can be spelled. Heck even german is way cleaner and easier to read than english...
perhaps an example of what are you speaking about
Well, still it's the most used language in the world, so this drawback becoems a positive. Yes if an alien civilization comes they will have a hard time but pretty much for everybody (with the exception of your native language) will have an easy time with enbglish if it's used in your everyday life.
Also, greek.... why can't you guys just use the normal alphabet? c'mon.
It shares a similar grammatical structure to German.
Cleaner and easier to read sure, but German is hell to speak xD
I agree, I studied some greek in college, and it's not hard to pronounce, plus the stress marks and spirits. My first language is spanish, and we have a strict phonetic system that is quite comfortable if you don't know the language. We only miss a couple of transliterations from mother languages, latin and greek (we don't have the Theta sound in words that should have it, like Theos).
As an analytic language English is very efficient, but less flexible than Slavic and Latin languages.
I love English, but the phonetics keeps driving me crazy from time to time.
+Igor “Ahoy” Arutiunian less flexible? You can do almost anything in English. also you can drop 60 per cent of the words and retain basic sentence meaning. You can order words any way almost, you have huge poetic licence and you can mash words together and reuse them for different meanings.
+NoFaithNoPain
In languages like Russian the endings of words change based on their use in the sentence. That is the reason why you can put words in any way possible without changing the meaning and usually even without making the sentence sound weird. In English, however, the meaning of a sentence depends a lot on the order in which the words are put.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to change the order of words in English, but I'm saying that it's just harder to do than in some other languages.
Igor Arutiunian All this is true. I would not have described "Flexibility" as being able to order the words in any fashion though. It is not particularly flexible to me the amount of words needed in Russian, or the fact you have to listen to a huge sentence until you hear the last word then all of a sudden you understand it. Likewise, look at MAT and the simplistic way it is put together. With English swearing the way you can mutate words into each other, verbs into nouns into verby gerunds, then this would be the kind of flexibility I would have meant.
+NoFaithNoPain You have a point. It would be unfair to define flexibility in such a narrow way I did.
I see what you're saying about the long sentances, but I think you confused it with Latin. In Latin verbs usually placed in the end of the sentence, so you have to read the whole thing to get any idea of what it's about. In Russian it's not the case. You can just pile a ton of stuff into one sentence without having to stop and start a new one. It's kinda weird even for me actually. :)
It's funny for me when some Russian speakers claim that Russian is somehow better because it has more words than English.The way a single word can be changed creates an illusion of Russian having more words. It's like saying that "duck" and "ducks" are different words. :)
+Igor „Ahoy” Arutiunian
Similarly in Polish you can use one swear-word and use it to mean almost anything you want by mutating it and use almost only that word to convey stuff. Pretty entertaining at times. :P
Chinese-based written characters are composed of various combinations of a relatively (to English) large but finite number of "radicals" with different meanings, similar to English, and in postindustrial times they have developed, or maybe more accurately, been forced to adopt the common Mandarin and a standard and almost completely concrete-much more so than English-phonetic alphabet to use to write characters-zhu yin fuhao, and later pinyin (Romanized Chinese). The Japanese use a combination of phonetic alphabet (hiragana and katakana, which is used for loanword pronunciations) and pictographic characters, kanji-the same characters used by the Chinese. In my experience, dictionaries are usually categorized by stroke order, phonetic spelling, or radical usage, rather than the example you listed.
Also, you fucked up the stroke order for "big", but let's ignore that.
I thought it was quite easy to learn. I taught myself English in a month, and I am now fluent.
Hm, with this kind of logic German, Russian or Czech languages (I have listed all languages that I am able to speak on a decent level, so maybe there are others, which are way better and more intuitive,but certainly not French - really guys, why you want to multiply 4*20 just to be able to say eighty. Seriously, why to not use belgic alternative? Anyway...) are way better than English, cause you can do all mentioned in video things and also pronounce a word correctly even if you see it first time in your life. :D
A couple of problems here
1. What do you mean by "the best language"?
2. You only look at two languages when in the world there are thousands.
Elliot Ecstasy | he also speaks French and Latin, plus he has some extra experience with a handful of other languages, he mentions this when he talks of Lithuanian. Please pay more attention and comment AFTER you're sure what you are saying is true
Elliot Ecstasy | Oh and he constantly is explaining the pros and cons of the different languages throughout the video, so anyone with a nine and a half minute attention span can infer what he means
@@rextheroyalist6389 I'm not sure you understand what the word "best" means
Homura Akemi | I never used the word 'best' if you want to understand what the bearded fellow meant by 'best', infer it from the video
Dave David | in that case, why are you commenting anything if a small amount of content from one perspective isn't enough to make a point?
There were quite a few assumptions of how Chinese works which indicate the standard of research that went into this video is quite a bit lower than normal.
Typing - I sucked at it, but I learned chinese typing in primary school. You need about 3 keystrokes per common character, or on very rare occasions, up to 5. This works by taking the first few strokes of a character, the last few, and then choosing from a finite dropdown list of characters, enumerated 1-8, and choosing one of them. Sometimes, you'll need a rarer character that's buried a few pages back, and can go forwards and backwards with 9 and 0. I know a guy who can just belt out paragraphs and paragraphs, with the same number of keystrokes per minute as someone typing in a latin alphabet language.
Not every character requires an entirely new word. I like to describe it as an interaction of semantic fields - you have words that mean something rather vague, and you juxtapose it with other words until it makes sense. There's no word for "public transport" on its own, but there's "common use exchange travel/through tool tool." You do still need to memorise an enormously large number of words to come across as educated, granted, but there's similar interactions within the words themselves - radicals.
Radicals are components of a word, which you can roughly (and incompletely, for convenience) separate into up, left, right, core, and maybe bottom. Not all words need all of these, and most just use up to two. Radicals allow you to stitch together vague concepts into slightly-less-vague concepts - a left-fire radical and a right-radical that roughly means hole can form together to mean a wok; things with the hand radical would typically indicate some sort of a manual action, and those with a foot radical indicate something done with a foot, and so on. Things with common right/core radicals also tend to have at least vaguely similar pronunciations - it's surprising, how much I could get away with faking by guessing off these keys. That hole-ish radical? Put it with a motion one to mean pass/through, and pronounce it as guo (forgive me, I'm going to romanise cantonese in a very unsystematic way here). Add it to fire for wo. Add it to insect, meaning snail, for another wo (with a different tone). This is ironically a lot like Lloyd's point on looking at the shape of a word to learn its history.
Dictionaries are also sorted by these radicals and keystrokes. For a wok, I'd look under fire radicals, then count up the keystrokes needed to write it in a standard way (12 to 14, if I remember correctly - i was notoriously lazy in memorising the proper, orthodox way of writing).
Okay, enough about chinese. His point on reading words as a whole doesn't really address more recently-established written languages having more useful phonetic systems. I would even argue that they're at least equally good at indicating their meaning and etymology as english. Yes, we often read words in english as a whole, but that's not something exclusive to it. Germans and Spaniards don't comb through each individual letter or letter grouping, either, but they get to know exactly how something's pronounced based on the spelling, as their systems are very strict on how certain letters and combinations are spoken aloud, sometimes even down to the stress syllable. At least in the case of French and German, I'm also certain that a lot of them are also rather more uniform in indicating what a word is supposed to mean based on its spelling. English has the rather unfortunate problem of coming from several different languages. Hell, it's a germanic language where the academic lexicon and fancier words in general are made latin by french influence. Outside of obvious loan words, english's parent languages don't really have this issue.
That said, as useful as conjugation and declination and whatnot are in indicating the who, to whom, by whom, and what gender everything supposedly is can be, it's absolutely liberating to have english as a language free from the need to memorise all of that. I'm quite surprised that this wasn't brought up.
To get this straight, I really do like English. Especially the British one. But I never understood this... I am Hungarian and our language has a really straight forward spelling with only few exceptions (the language itself is somewhat related to Finnish but it's a really distant and controversial relation) and I've never quite get why the English spelling has to be the way it is. Even after watching some linguistics talking about the English language. Until I found this video! Now I really get it. I always thought it's a silly thing and have no reason at all. You enlightened me. Thank you kind sir! I found your channel only yesterday and I can't stop watching your videos. Really clever, very informative. Congrats!
Defense *wasn't* an example of spelling simplification. In fact, you've got it almost completely backwards; the American "defense" is more ancient (dating back to the 1300s) and is closer to its French roots than the Anglicized "defence".
About the only spelling simplifications that really caught on were the dropping of the extraneous "u" in words like color or honor, and the switching of -re to -er for most words (like saber, center, theater, etc) to match the pronunciation better.
The reason why the Chinese still use their language is..........well........ It just seems to have more CHARACTER than english *(ba dum psh)*
I'm native Finnish speaker I strongly disagree.
- Two, Too. If you don't get confused by speech, why would you from writing? Also English has words like read that can be pronounced in two different ways.
- Sign, Signal. In Finnish all derivatives are pronounced the same way. Also how is this such a big pro that it makes it better than all the advantages of one sound, one letter system.
- Cupboard. Finnish writes compounds in this way too even if some people dropped letters because of dialect etc.
- Colour, French and Latin roots are interesting to very small part of the population. The advantage is very small.
- Geordie, Oxford etc. dialects. Finnish has many dialects too and it works well. Most English speakers also know the standard "newscaster english" spelling. And also for someone that speaks very strong accent it isn't any different from them to learn how to write. What does it matter if English is wrote like this: "I speak English" or like this "Ai spiik Inglish". It involves exactly the same amount of learning.
- Defence, Defense. No problem if you actually changed all the words and not half ass it.
----
Coming to Pros of one sound, one letter system:
- Children learn to read earlier making school more efficient from younger age. This has even been studied a lot. Finland has two official languages. Finnish and Swedish. Finnish students do a lot better than Swedish students and the only factor studies have found is that it's harder to write and read Swedish. Swedish is still a much easier language to read and write compared to English because it doesn't have those French and Greek loan words that are spelled weirdly.
- People do less annoying mistakes on spelling
- Foreigners don't accidentally pronounce words wrong
- If you hear a new word you can search it from a dictionary without wondering why "numonia" isn't there. Google actually fixes this problem a bit as it knows I'm meaning "pneumonia" but it won't do this for all words.
English spelling was a general free-for-all, with people spelling as they heard the words, but with the advent of printing, the spelling began to standardize. Printing came in just as the shift from Middle to Modern English was taking place, so some of the letters now silent were still being pronounced. The Monty Python French Taunter's "kay-nigget" was close to how people once said "knight".
I am so sorry, but Chinese dictionary did not work like that EVEN A LITTLE BIT, and I am so astonished that you have that kind of total bull about Chinese dictionaries considering you are always concerned about historical accuracies. I assume you were talking about ancient Chinese dictionaries, because modern ones use a Roman letter spelling system for education purposes. However, even the old ones are NOT HARDER TO USE THAN WESTERN DICTIONARIES !!! We had a prononciation referring system called Fanqie（反切） and we also had number of strokes for you to look up characters.
well what did you expect from this guy?
Thank you for your post. I was going to comment also about this mistake. So glad you did.
alextyy You didn’t fully think through what you wrote. When you mention Chinese speakers using Roman alphabet Pinyin for learning and typing you are actually proving his point because you point out something that was a necessity and a method and alphabet that had to be borrowed from Europe plus Pinyin system that had to be created just to get around the language’s imperfection.
In fact the "authentic" chinese word dictionary is to use radical to categorize words then find the word you want then you lookup use cases to that word.
Actually, that's exactly the way the Chinese dictionary works. You guys have obviously never seen one yourselves and are just saying that he's wrong to satisfy your own desire to be the most politically correct person in the world. P.S. - Feed me :)
One word: Hangul.
Best writing system out there.
nəoˀp̚, ʔae pʰi ʔɛe ʔɪz ðə bɛst.
@@servantofaeie1569 "Nope, IPA is the best." For the range of phonetics, sure. The Korean character's syllabification system is very elegant though. Much better than all the dots in IPA imo.
@@stormveil you cannot write every single language with Hangul though
English is better because we let you drop your godawful Korean romanizations right in, and the canon is enriched. Try writing English or French words in Hangeul, and you're in for a world of hurt.
If you only ever had to write about your immediate family, rice, cabbage, soil, and a tiny handful of other things, then sure, Hangeul will do just fine.
You need loan words as soon as you start talking about much else, and those loan words are positively butchered by Hangeul.
Even in Korea, hanja are still all over the place.
*>I watch the first 48 seconds.*
*>I realize you're overstating.*
You can recognize words in one go in finnish language also, so it makes finnish easier and more efficient for the speaker to write than english. Thats why Finnish school system does so well. We learn to write basically as we learn to speak and the literal skills and understanding of written content is really high level at early age.
Your main point of "the beauty of the english language" is that words are derived from what they describe.
Yet, that's the main thing english speakers ALWAYS criticise of german.
"We have developed an incredibly complicated dialect, that is omnipresent in the entire language and that makes it easy to use."
Erm, no. That's not even remotely close to what that is.
+JohnTheGreat7822 I've heard otherwise
+Colin Smith Three genders doesn't help. Two in French was bad enough.
Not all words are separate.
I shot him with a bow.
I bow down to him.
Did you perhaps also tie a bow on him?
@@Karreth What is to tie a bow on someone?
@@Zonalyre A bow is a kind of neck clothing. Some men prefer to use a tie, which is long, and hangs down about to their bellybutton. But other men, and some women, prefer to use a bow (also known as a bow tie), which is tied in front of your throat with two loops and two ends hanging slightly down. And if someone want you to help them tie this bow (since it may be hard to do without seeing, or in a mirror), they may ask you to tie the bow on them.
and about ur point that Chinese is hard to write small or read small... 5:21, its the same, we just look at the shape of it plus the context... and there u go.
+100RAmen Just like everyone else in the world. He blundered in this video so much I can't even believe it's Lindy anymore. :P
yeah, that Englishness gets in the way of thinking straight sometimes
As a little bit of an Orientalist...the assessment of Chinese is rather oversimplified, these characters or Pictogramms are made of minute elements termed as Radicals: smaller Fragmentary pictures e.g. Mouth is usually a tiny or larger square>>divide the larger Square into four = (Rice) Field Tien , you can see clearly the one for rain Yuu. Four droplets. You do actually know the Chinese for Big/larger without knowing it= Typhoon which is from the Chinese Taa feng =Large/great Wind! Your assessment of learning this language is correct>>you should be able to get by with approx 5,000 Characters>>roughly the same with Japanese.
Chinese/Japanese characters have a specific way of pronunciation so in dictionaries they can be ordered to sound, for example Big is Dai or oo in Japanese, also they can be ordered in count stroke.
I would not say that English is the best system, it is illogical at best, German has very strict grammar rules and Dutch/English has a lot of exceptions. Japanese grammar is very easy to learn, the difficulty lies in that you have to learn a lot of ways of saying things not to the point.
I think the best description of the English language I ever heard was: "The English language has a proud tradition of luring other languages into dark allies, beating them into a pulp with a big stick and then rummaging through their pockets for some spare vocabulary and grammar."
It illustrates pretty well why it's spelling is so messed up.
Relations between words... no, that argument doesn't work.
There are probably as many examples of related words being spelled differently as there are for them being spelled the same.
And the usual rule is, that if it's pronounced differently, it's probably written the same and vice versa.
Good morning, Lloyd. I absolutely adore your channel and I apologize for responding to such an old video, but I personally feel Spanish is the best spelling system. Nobody is ever confused as to how to spell a word. Nobody ever asks "how do you spell that". Everything sounds exactly as it is spelled. Almost never does a letter change its sound, and when it does, the rules are so obvious and so constant that everyone will understand intrinsically how to spell the word. Just my opinion.