A Comparative Study Of English And Spanish Vowel Systems: Fill & Download for Free

The idea of spelling reform is certainly not new. Ben Franklin wanted to update English spelling in the newly formed United States of America and Noah Webster carried on with Franklin’s efforts with limited success when he put together USA’s first dictionary. It’s why Americans have color and the British have colour, after all. Later, Andrew Carnegie gave some of his fortune towards spelling reform, Alexander Graham Bell’s wife was a big proponent and even today organizations like the American Literacy Council and Australia’s recent, but failed, SR1 initiative and private organizations like SaypYu, the Universal Alphabet project, continue to work towards reforming the spelling of English. But through all that, we still have laugh and dough and through andnight, not to mention even simpler juxtapositions like size anddevise.An excerpt of Franklin's phonetic alphabetWhy Reform Spelling?The reasons for spelling reform are obvious, particularly if you have a second grader struggling with her weekly word list. More seriously, rates of dyslexia among learners of English and French, languages with opaque, or challenging spelling systems, are significantly higher than those of learners of Spanish and German, with relatively transparent spelling systems. Even at the age of 12, English-speaking dyslexics will misspell uncommon words like sword over half the time, compared to German-speaking dyslexics who only make errors on one out of ten uncommon words, according to one study. Further still, those German with dyslexia will still read faster than their American compatriots.International spelling reform, which has the additional goal of establishing consistency across different languages’ alphabets, would also help foreigners to learn English and English speakers learn other languages. If English and Spanish used i for the same sound (in English, ih as in lick or ay as in like; always ee in Spanish as in street), then it would be far easier for an Englishman to read Spanish and for a Spaniard to read English.ChallengesSo what’s the hold up? Well, there are several challenging obstacles to spelling reform. The question we face today is how new technologies, including omnipresent computing and augmented reality in the guise of your smart phone or Google glass, can address some of these challenges and what ones remain.The first big hurdle is that language changes. The spelling we find so confusing now was actually pretty close to how things were pronounced when English spelling was codified hundreds of years ago. What are we going to do in another hundred years, when all our new spelling is again obsolete? And what are we going to do with all the books written in previous iterations of English?This is one place where technology can help, as discussed in Anne W Zahra's answer. Translation from one language to another is now as easy as clicking a button. Translating from one script to another would be even easier. With augmented reality apps – right now you can already hold your phone up to a street full of restaurants and find out which has the best reviews – translation can happen right before your eyes.Another objection is that phonetic spelling will lead to loss of information. Spell knight as nayt, and it will lose its connection to German knecht or even that it’s a Germanic word in the first place. At an even more basic level, eelektrik, eelektrisity and eelektrishanobscures the fact that these are all the same word. This would most certainly be one of the costs weighed against the benefits discussed above. Also worth noting is the fact the some word relationships would be restored, e.g., high and height could become something like hay and hayt. Again, technology can help here, too, as language learners could uncover all these relationships through ubiquitous computers.Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, would be in figuring out just whose pronunciation to use. R-less dialects of English say far like it’s the fourth note of do-re-mi, and someone in the American South might say fire with one syllable and pit with two. Across dialects and countries there is incredible diversity to the way English is pronounced. Heck, my wife has pointed out that I myself pronounce the word orangetwo different ways, sometimes with a rounded initial vowel, sometimes unrounded.A solution here would necessarily involve one part cultural hegemony and one part experimentation and computation. In each country there is a prestige or standard dialect – American Standard English, Received Pronunciation or Metropolitan French,for example – that would be adopted. It’s rare for a person speaking a non-standard dialect to not know the prestige dialect of his or her own country. Furthermore, for languages spanning different countries, e.g., English, a combination of maximal information content, psycholinguistic experimentation and other quantifiable measures can be used to decide on the optimal spelling. The implementation details may become quite complex, but again, we can rely on the fact that Americans and the British can understand each other reasonably well to suggest that the problem is not insurmountable. Indeed, Wikipedia, among others, has had to make similar choices in deciding which pronunciation of a word to list first or mark as primary.Cross-Linguistic ChallengesOn a related note, attempts to codify a spelling system across languages would run into trouble with the cross-linguistic differences in how things are pronounced. For example, English b is pronounced more like French p. Which letter should be used for which sound? Vowel systems are even more of a mess – English long o and Spanish o are pronounced differently and the English a as in bat isn’t present in a lot of other languages and the French a isn’t present in English. These cross-linguistic differences currently exist, however, for anyone learning a new language, so this would not be a new problem. Hegemony might again have to apply wherein the pronunciation-orthography mapping of one language would have to trump others. Indeed, the push for International spelling reform is driven by an English-centric approach.Then there is the case of languages with far more sounds than a simplified orthography could handle. Mandarin, for example, has four alveolar fricatives - sounds made by forcing air through a small gap between the tongue and the front of the mouth, e.g., s, sh. That's why we see confusing spelling variants like Hsu, Xu, Zhu, Shyu and Shu. Any simplified orthography would result in a loss of information. In some cases drastic as with tonal languages or languages with vastly larger consonant inventories (e.g., Hindi). Here, progress, not perfection, may be a useful motto for reformers. Porchugez and Fraansey may be woefully mispronounced but that is surely better than a visitors attempt at pronouncingPortuguês and Français.CostsFinally, there is the practical challenge involved in an undertaking of this magnitude. People are hesitant and resistant to change and it's questionable whether they can be convinced otherwise. There is also the matter of cost -- Uzbekistan has spent $300 million so far on switching from Cyrillic to Roman letters for a population one tenth the size of the US.A Compromise?That was a complete overhaul, however. A reasonable compromise may be to introduce a second orthographic system, sort of like an Esperanto of the pen. It would facilitate cross-linguistic communication - hold up your smart phone to a French sign and it will tell you how to pronounce it in addition to what it means - and may help dyslexics so they can have a handy translation of how a word should be pronounced. All linguists know the International Phonetic Alphabet and I certainly wouldn't object to more people learning even a simplified version of it. There is precedent for people knowing two overlapping alphabets – again the example of Uzbekistan, where the population is fluent in both Cyrillic and Roman, is instructive.Perhaps the simplest analogy is the pronunciation guides used in some dictionaries and in language learning textbooks. The spelling for demure is described alternatively as dih-MYOOR, di-myu̇r or de-MYUUR in different versions of Merriam Webster’s and English learning guides, for example; parsing these pronunciation descriptions can be excruciating even with a pronunciation key. A simplified version of the IPA standardized across all languages may provide a solution to this letter jumble.Ultimately, the problem may be solved for us. Written English is already slowly changing to match pronunciation -- you'll find thru in the dictionary and ur may find its way there someday by virtue of texting. Technology may also soon place, not only a written translation of a foreign word in front of us, but a correct pronunciation in our ear. But until then, having two co-existing writing systems for English and a whole lot of technology in between may be an interesting idea to consider.

The original reasons are:Language teachingLanguage researchBefore computers, typewriters often had great difficulty working for alphabets other than Latin or Cyrillic-based alphabets. Every new symbol adds a great deal of complexity. Until the mid 20th century, Chinese typewriters were only able to type a few thousand characters and Chinese linguists developed Latinxua Sin Wenz, partly to make it cheaper and easier to type the language.For #2, there is this thing called “Phonology” and there is an entire Quora topic on it. I happen to be a phonologist.It is the study of sound systems. It is impossible to do phonology as we know it without shared descriptive alphabets such as International Phonetic Alphabet, Americanist phonetic notation, and the Slavicist Phonetic Alphabet—which exists but does not have a Wikipedia page.While scripts of languages often capture historical facts about a language and have internal logic, they are woefully inadequate in describing a language’s sounds.Lots of English speakers uneducated in linguistics are completely unable to describe how they speak in a coherent way to speakers of other dialects of English, and English uses the Latin Alphabet. I gave an example from most British varieties of English vs most American varieties here:Brian Collins's answer to Do native English people think that the study of English pronunciation has a lot to do with phonetic transcription?The example I used in that answer was the <aw> digraph. Many Brits use it to describe the vowel in CAUGHT.You can compare the American pronunciations and the British pronunciations here:caught - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notesAmericans however use <aw> to describe the diphthong in words like HOUSE.Then British people type, on the internet, “I say CAUGHT like ‘cawt,’ it does not sound at all like cot” Americans get confused and have no idea how this is pronounced. There is no shared phonetic transcription.This is just for a single language with multiple varieties written in the Latin alphabet.To complicate matters, if linguists who study phonology did not have a shared alphabet, they would instead have to learn hundreds of arcane writing systems and it would be very difficult to make cross-linguistic comparisons.Imagine if someone were talking about Voice onset time in Spanish vs Japanese, and writing about how the VOT in <Boca> is almost the same as the VOT in <弁当/べんと.>The writing systems are completely incomparable.Phonology would be a hot mess without phonetic transcription systems. Anything but an alphabet that allows consonant clusters, vowel hiatus, diphthongs, etc would be totally useless for transcribing a good 60% of the world’s languages, that basically chucks a Syllabary or Abjad out as an option.

What a fun question, thanks for asking! I’ve studied all four of these languages, and as a linguist I’ve done extensive research into their structures.First let’s consider Spanish:Spoken by 437 million people, and the official language of 21 countries, Spanish is a very useful language to learn.Pronunciation is straightforward, all Spanish vowels and almost all consonants are also found in English’s vowel repertoire, so there are not that many new sounds to learn. For English speakers, Orthography is also very efficient – it is much easier to learn to read and write Spanish than to read and write English, as there are much fewer exceptions.Spanish grammar is straightforward (nothing too mind-blowy) but burdensome (just lots and lots of verb conjugations to memorize).There are lots of resources online for learning Spanish and there are plenty of Spanish speakers that do not speak English throughout Latin America and Spain (which means it is much easier to practice your language when you travel!) Spanish speakers are generally very patient with learners and a little bit goes a long way!Now French. French gives you access to 76.8 million people and is the official language in 24 countries, although it is heavily used in many more.Pronunciation for French is much more difficult than Spanish – consonants are fine, but they have several vowels that we don’t have in English, meaning that pronunciation and comprehension will be a bit more difficult. The grammar is very similar to Spanish, so as I said above, “straightforward but burdensome”.There are lots of resources online for learning French, and plenty of French speakers that do not speak English (especially outside of Paris), however French speakers from France and French Canada are notoriously impatient with French learners (especially in Paris). French speakers from smaller French towns, the overseas departments, and from Africa tend to be much more patient.Moving on to Mandarin! Mandarin gets you a whopping 910 million people, and while it is only the official language in only 5 countries, its healthy diaspora speaks it in many, many more countries (unofficially).Pronunciation for Mandarin is mostly pretty simple, with only a few sounds that are very different from English. The trick is learning their Romanized alphabet (Pinyin) which uses our Roman alphabet but in a very different way.Don’t be afraid of tones! The Mandarin tonal system is actually very simple and easy to learn, it just takes lots of practice and exposure (watch lots of dramas, listen to lots of radio, just spend as much time listening to it as you can, and it will soon come naturally).Once you’ve mastered pronunciation, you’ll realize the rest of Mandarin is quite simple: the grammar involves no conjugations or cases or declensions whatsoever, and word order is just like English!It is up to you to decide whether you want to learn to read and write Chinese characters – if you want to become fluent in Mandarin, you really should learn to read and write. Just be aware that learning characters takes a lot longer than learning an alphabet, because each word must be memorized (and retained) on its own, not as part of a combination of sound units as with an alphabet.Mandarin speakers are VERY patient with learners (they get a huge kick out of hearing foreigners speak Chinese and have several TV shows devoted to just this purpose) and they have a very high tolerance for variation since there are so many different dialects of Chinese anyway, so you really don’t have to sound perfect to be understood. Many Chinese speakers do not speak English (it is harder for Chinese speakers to learn English than the other way around) so you’ll easily get lots of practice!Finally, German. There are 90 million German speakers in the world, and 8 countries have German as an official language.Pronunciation for German is a bit harder than Spanish and Mandarin but perhaps not quite as hard as French. Compared to the other three languages here, German’s grammar truly is a beast, however, with lots of conjugations to learn (for both verbs and nouns) and several important variations in word order. Luckily nothing is too difficult to understand, it will just take lots of practice until it is natural.Unfortunately, lots of Germans speak excellent English, so you’ll find that they often switch to English when they sense that you aren’t fluent (out of politeness, they’re usually trying to save you the hassle of speaking a foreign language) which means it can be harder to practice. However, Germans are fully aware of the difficulty of their language and if they know you want to practice it, they will almost always indulge you with a big smile.’Hope this is useful! If you’re not sold on any of the above, I also wrote a blog post on other languages you should consider learning (Afrikaans, anyone?) Check it out here!And if you’re looking for more tips or inspiration for learning foreign languages, I’m Misslinguistic. You can follow me at any of the following:InstagramFacebookTwitterBlog