As an offshoot from the "How do you say" thread where I was discussing how bad English Orthography was vs. Polish with Jerzy. Thought I'd make a new thread for people to discuss orthography in their native languages. Is your language sensible and well formatted or is it written like a free-for-all of letters, seemingly designed as an affront to common sense?
You sure? The word for porridge, "owsianka" could be spelled "ofśanka" and it would make absolutely no difference in pronunciation. It the same with "żołnierz" and "rzołńeż" , or "mucha" and "móha". The are, like, thousands of rules when to write "ż" and when "rz", when to write "ą" or "on/om", when to write "ó" or "u", etc.. It's nightmare of children when they learn to write. Poor, little monsters.
I don't doubt Polish orthography is messy, but in my opinion English is just a car crash.
A humorous example first: "Fish" can theoretically be written "ghoti" in English... the
gh in lau
gh, the
o in w
omen and the
ti in mo
tion. Ok, realistically those letters don't make those sounds in those situations in syllables but y'know, those letter clusters can make those sounds at times.
We have the zr/ż sound, but nothing that signifies it, you just have to know that sometimes "s" is a hissed sound as in "silence" (incidentally, the "c" is also the same sound here
because reasons), sometimes a "z" as in "was", sometimes it's a "sh" as in "sure" and sometimes is a "zr/ż" as in "pleasure". A lot of English speakers use it without realising we actually have it in our language.
There's a brilliant poem about English and it's nonsense orthography:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html listing many words that are either written or pronounced the same way, but rarely both. Think like "beer-beard-bear" and "project and project/wind and wind"
It's not all that surprising that English is confusing though: we cobbled our language together from a Old English, Norman French and French-French. Spellings are often based on both parent language families though they used totally different spelling conventions (why some words end -er and some end -re for no clear reason). For some context it's worth noting that Old English is nothing like Modern English, it's actually much closer to Modern Icelandic than it is to Modern English.
After that we standardised our spelling in the middle of a 200 year pronunciation shift, by the time pronunciation had stabilised many of the spellings were no longer accurate. We never updated it though.
Problems stem from other issues as well, such as old fonts that made us change sensible spellings around the letters i, u, m and n because they couldn't be told apart when written together. Latin obsessed academics who tried to make English more Latin-like e.g. "isle" was originally "ile" until scholars decided it should be like the Latin "insular", it's just a mercy we were spared "insle". And last but not least, German made printing presses meant we lost the letters thorn (Þ, þ) and eth (Ð, ð) and yogh (Ȝ, ȝ) was lost to changing handwriting which meant people had to improvise.
The odds were stacked against us and also we made absolutely no effort to improve things.
