Open source dmd on Reddit!

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:gpbpib$2eek$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>
>> What do you mean with pseudo-phonetic?
>>
>> How do you pronounce the first letter of "I"? And the first letter of 
>> "Incredible"? That doesn't seem to have any logic! :-P

Yea, that's exactly what I mean. English pretends to be phonetic but really 
isn't (at least not anymore). But I never truly saw just how non-phonetic it 
was until I learned the Japanese -kana alphabets. Those alphabets really 
make English's claim of being phonetic look ridiculous.

>
> If you work with kids teaching them to read phonetically (rather than 
> look-say), you'll discover that by and large, the phonetic rules work very 
> well. They'll pronounce about 80% of the unfamiliar words reasonably 
> correctly.

It "works" because they hear the phonetic pronunciation that they come up 
with and realize that it sounds similar to (but not the same as!) some 
particular word that they know. That clues them in that the word it *sounds 
like* is probably the word that they're trying to read. You can even hear 
them going through the process of starting with a phonetic pronunciation and 
then morphing it into the real word. (Besides, that remaining 20% is still 
quite a lot.)

The same exact thing happens when English speakers learn to read Japanese 
Katakana and come across an English word written in Katakana (or a romanized 
version of the Katakana). Most of the time, the Japanese pronunciation is 
noticeably different from the actual English pronunciation, but when you 
"hear" the Japanese pronunciation it gives you a good idea of what English 
word it's trying to approximate. ("terebi", "bideo gaimu", "beisubaaru", 
etc. Note: I may have the exact spellings of these wrong because I'm unsure 
of the exact pronunciation. Maybe our resident Japanese-speakers can correct 
me?)

>
> The words that don't work so well phonetically are often borrow-words from 
> foreign languages or words that have had their pronounciation shift over 
> the years since their spelling was sed. For example, the silent 'e' at the 
> end used to be pronounced.

That's one thing that's kind of nice about Japanese. Native words and 
loanwords are written in different alphabets (sort of like uppercase vs 
lowercase), so unlike English, you generally know if a word is a 
properly-pronounced native word or a potentially-differently-pronounced 
loanword. (Not that this is necessarily the original reason for the separate 
native/foreign alphabets, but it's at least a nice benefit.)