I’ve been trying to learn a new language (Vietnamese) and a thing that has been driving me crazy are all these instances of letters being randomly pronounced differently in different words sometimes. If you don’t think about it too much, it’s easy to go “this language is dumb, why do they do this?” But then I think about English and we have so many examples of this or other linguistic oddities that make no sense but which I’ve just accepted since I learned them so long ago.
So I wanted to generalize my question: For all the languages where this applies, why are there these cases where letters have inconsistent pronunciations? For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one? For cases where the letter or combination of letters creates a new sound not already covered by existing letters, why not make a new one? How did this happen? What is the history? Is there linguistic logic to it beyond these being quirks of how the languages historically developed?
If you want a great rundown on the history and craziness of English, may I recommend this video? It does a pretty good breakdown of how our language got to be such a mess.
Writing is just a proxy for speaking. And entirely its own thing. Think about Greek. There are ancient texts from thousands of years ago that would be kinda weird but basically legible for modern readers. However, same text read in ancient pronunciation would be unintelligible. Search for Shakespeare in historical accent. Then suddenly a ton of things that seem weird in modern English actually start to rhyme and even make funny homophones jokes.
Essentially, written word is a living system. Learning this system is not just about its internal logic, but learning about its history and the myriad of quirks it picked up along the way.
Complementary to that, think that poetry is 90% having fun with these quirks.
Below is just one possible aspect of this, the other answers you’ve received are also valid. Writing systems are complicated!
Your making the mistake that writing systems are supposed to represent speech sounds. They do not (or at least they don’t have to). As an example, in my accent (midwestern American English) there are at least three different sounds I make for “t”:
- “touch”: (aspirated) voiceless alveolar plosive
- “matter”: voiced alveolar tap
- “mat”: glottal stop
These are the technical names linguists use for these sounds; you can find them on Wikipedia if you want to know more. English speakers can agree though that they are all “the same thing”; the technical terminology is that they are all allophones of the same phoneme. Different accents will have different allophones, for example some English accents may pronounce this “t” phoneme in “matter” and “mat” the same way as my “touch”. If you think this is splitting hairs, that’s just false; the way languages divide sounds into phonemes varies greatly. For example, Japanese speakers consider my “touch” “t” and my “matter” “t” to be two completely different sounds, i.e. two different phonemes which are not interchangeable.
(Very) roughly speaking, writing systems tend to map better onto phonemes than onto actual sounds. Part of your frustration with Vietnamese writing could partly be from this: Vietnamese possibly has some sounds as allophones which in English are not allophones and belong to different phonemes. In other words, to a Vietnamese speaker they are the same sound. On the flipside, it could be that Vietnamese uses different letters for different phonemes, but those sounds are part of the same phoneme in English and you perceive them as “the same sound” when they are in fact distinct.
One more example is the Cot-Caught merger present in some varieties of English. In my accent, the vowels in these words are two separate sounds for two separate phonemes. In English accents which have the merger, they have become the same phoneme and in fact are pronounced identically, with the exact sound depending on the particular variety of English.
This shows one way you can end up with different spellings for identically-pronounced words.
Languags don’t get designed in a lab by a creator who comes up a consistent set of rules. Languages constantly shift and change as the people who speak them do. Languages borrow loanwords from each other, then proceed to mangle them. Slang arises, becomes part of the lexicon, becomes passe. Regional dialects drift apart but then mingle again.
And at no point does logic ever enter into the equation. Change just happens haphazardly.
There’s a pair of concepts in Linguistics referred to as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism refers to trying to declare a set of rules for how language should be. If your teacher ever told you that ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word, that’s prescriptivism, and it’s bunk. Descriptivism is just a best effort to describe how speakers of a language actually use it. If English speakers regularly say ‘ain’t’, then it’s an English word. The fun thing about descriptivism is that there will always be holes and inconsistencies, because not all English speakers are necessarily speaking the same way.
Compare the English we speak today from Ye Olde Englishe. Many words are now spelled or pronounced differently from how they used to be. Many old words have been replaced by completely different ones. Syntax has changed quite a bit. And if you go far back enough, English used to be written with a different set of characters from the Latin alphabet we use now. But this all happened so gradually you can’t establish any clear dividing line to separate these languages, there’s no date on which you could say everything prior was Old English and everything after is Modern English. And if you look towards the future, 100, 1000, 10000 years from now, English won’t be the same as it is now either.
This. So much this.
evolution happens for all things that self-replicate, not just life. languages self-replicate through those who use them and as such change over time with leftovers like we often see in life.
As a case study, I think Vietnamese is especially apt to show how the written language develops in parallel and sometimes at odds with the spoken language. The current alphabetical script of Vietnamese was only adopted for general use in the late 19th Century, in order to improve literacy. Before that, the grand majority of Vietnamese written works were in a logographic system based on Chinese characters, but with extra Vietnamese-specific characters that conveyed how the Vietnamese would pronounce those words.
The result was that Vietnamese scholars pre-20th Century basically had to learn most of the Chinese characters and their Cantonese pronunciations (not Mandarin, since that’s the dialect that’s geographically father away), and then memorize how they are supposed to be read in Vietnamese, then compounded by characters that sort-of convey hints about the pronunciation. This is akin to writing a whole English essay using Japanese katakana; try writing “ornithology” like that.
Also, the modern Vietnamese script is a work of Portuguese Jesuit scholars, who were interested in rendering the Vietnamese language into a more familiar script that could be read phonetically, so that words are pronounced letter-by-letter. That process, however faithful they could manage it, necessarily obliterates some nuance that a logographic language can convey. For example, the word bầu can mean either a gourd or to be pregnant. But in the old script, no one would confuse 匏 (gourd) with 保 (to protect; pregnant) in the written form, even though the spoken form requires context to distinguish the two.
Some Vietnamese words were also imported into the language from elsewhere, having not previously existed in spoken Vietnamese. So the pronunciation would hew closer to the origin pronunciation, and then to preserve the lineage of where the pronunciation came from, the written word might also be written slightly different. For example, nhôm (meaning aluminum) draws from the last syllable of how the French pronounce aluminum. Loanwords – and there are many in Vietnamese, going back centuries – will mess up the writing system too.
Oh I didn’t know the current alphabet came from the Portuguese. I assumed it was from the French when they colonized Vietnam.
The point about the logographic characters being distinct is interesting. I guess if you don’t have to phonetically spell it out you have some more freedom in picking what written characters will represent the meanings of the two words. It is still a shame we ended up with those homophones, but I guess that’s just a path dependency thing since the spoken words came first. I guess they just had to work with what they had when they converted them into characters.
The French certainly benefitted from the earlier Jesuit work, although the French did do their own attempts at “westernizing” parts of the language. I understand that today in Vietnam, the main train station in Hanoi is called “Ga Hà Nội”, where “ga” comes from the French “gare”, meaning train station (eg Gare du Nord in Paris). This kinda makes sense since the French would have been around when railways were introduced in the 19th Century.
Another example is what is referred to in English as the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, referring to the waters off the coast of north Vietnam. Here, Tonkin comes from the French transliteration of Đông Kinh (東京), which literally means “eastern capital”.
So far as I’m aware, English nor French don’t use the name Tonkin anymore (it’s very colonialism-coded), and modern Vietnamese calls those waters by a different name anyway. There’s also another problem: that name is already in-use by something else, being the Tokyo metropolis in Japan.
In Japanese, Tokyo is written as 東京 (eastern capital) in reference to it being east of the cultural and historical seat of the Japanese Emperor in Kyoto (京都, meaning “capital metropolis”). Although most Vietnamese speakers would just say “Tokyo” to refer to the city in Japan, if someone did say “Đông Kinh”, people are more likely to think of Tokyo (or have no clue) than to think of an old bit of French colonial history. These sorts of homophones exist between the CJKV languages all the time.
And as a fun fact, if Tokyo is the most well-known “eastern capital” when considering the characters in the CJKV language s, we also have the northern capital (北京, Beijing, or formerly “Peking”) and the southern capital (南京, Nanjing). There is no real consensus on where the “western capital” is.
Vietnamese speakers will in-fact say Bắc Kinh when referring to the Chinese capital city rather than “Beijing”, and I’m not totally sure why it’s an exception like that. Then again, some newspapers will also print the capital city of the USA as Hoa Thịnh Đốn (華盛頓) rather than “Washington, DC”, because that’s how the Chinese wrote it down first, and then brought to Vietnamese, and then changed to the modern script. To be abundantly clear, it shouldn’t be surprising to have a progression from something like “Wa-shing-ton” to "hua-shen-dun’ to “hoa-thinh-don”.
In almost every language the writing was developed ventures or even millenia after spoken.
Writing is also more set, especially with the printing press it made changes very slow. So while spoken language keeps changing written lags further and further behind.
Huh. I hadn’t even considered how technology might affect this. Interesting.
Yeah, English is the go-to example because the first people to run printing presses in English were Dutch and couldn’t really spell or speak English.
There was likely similar situations in Asia as well, I’m just not familiar with their history.
But go back far enough and even writing by hand is technology
English was written long before the printing press. However it always (at least to my knowledge) used the latin alphabet which predates any written English I can find by more than 1000 years. Note that I’m not an expert on English linguistics, so if is someone claims something before 1200 I’m not aware of it but that doesn’t mean they are wrong.
There are 26 letters in the latin alphabet. There are between 38 and 49 sounds in English depending on dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology (I’ve seen reports as high at 56 but I can’t find sources so I’ll stick to Wikipedia which is often accurate) There is no way to have nice spelling in English. Some languages using the latin alphabet have various accent marks which help. At this point the dialects of English are different enough that reformed spelling would need to start with reforming how we pronounce words. (there are other alphabets in the world, I have no comment on if any would be better)
I guess at the heart of my question is: Why people didn’t create new letters to fit those sounds? Sure initially people would have to learn what the new letters are so they could pronounce them, but they already have to learn all these rules and exceptions so they can pronounce the reused letters correctly in the right circumstances. Why can’t we have 38-56 letters?
For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one?
In Spanish, words that use
kinstead ofctend to come from “other” languages, like Greek, Arabic, Japanese, or Russian.Aparece en palabras procedentes de otras lenguas en las que se ha buscado respetar la ortografía originaria, o en voces transcritas de lenguas que emplean alfabetos o sistemas de escritura distintos del nuestro, como el griego, el árabe, el japonés o el ruso
Yep. The letter K is basically a concession of the Latin alphabet to make some more sense of Greek loanwords, where the letter K is originally from, following a series of pronunciation shifts. But C is the Latin K, so words of Latin origin (the majority of vocabulary in Romance languages like Spanish) will normally only use C for that sound.
K is more useful in languages where the soft C has entered use (like French, Spanish, English, and others) just because K is always hard and makes it easier to define the pronunciation of (loan)words that may otherwise encourage the wrong pronunciation when paired with certain vowels (kite, cite, and site all being different words in English, for example).
