Is English a logographic writing system?

[GrandPiano]

Morphemic, my mistake. In any case different "dialects" (don't you mean accents?

Accents are just differences in pronunciation. Different dialects usually have not only different accents, but also different vocabulary and grammar. I'm pretty sure Salmoneus meant dialects, but specifically the differences in pronunciation between dialects.

[clawgrip]

Morphemic, my mistake. In any case different "dialects" (don't you mean accents?

In this case, the specific nomenclature is an irrelevant tangent. We all understand what is meant: that due to regional variation, not all English speakers employ the same set of phonemes in their speech, meaning that any universal English writing will require redundant letters for all speakers.

Sometimes, however, using proper terminology is important. Your constant flopping around ("English orthography is entirely logographic." ➡ "Sorry, I accidentally confused phonograms and logograms. " "phonemic orthography, not phonetic" ➡ "Morphemic, my mistake.") makes it hard to understand your point and makes it seem either like you don't know what you're talking about or you purposely keep changing it.

Also, if people around you constantly correct your pronunciation, it suggests the problem is not inherent to English (since all the people around you don't seem to have the same problem).

[Sumelic]

And if you think you 'mispronounce' your own language, then you don't understand how language works.

People can certainly mispronounce words in their own language. It's artificial to define "language" as only being the stuff people learn as children. That's the part of language that is most interesting to linguists, but people continue to learn parts of their own language into their adulthood. If they acquire a pronunciation that nobody else uses, we generally call it a mispronunciation. Obviously there are many cases where the "mispronunciation" actually becomes established in a group of people, causing it to become more or less a part of the language. So there is no binary distinction between "valid pronunciations" and "mispronunciations." But that doesn't mean you can't "mispronounce your own language." If I say /fəˈveɪ/ for "fovea," that's definitely a mispronunciation.

I usually learn new words through reading. Everyone around me constantly corrects my pronunciation. Since English pronunciation is usually unrelated to spelling, I default to pronouncing every new word phonetically and thus usually wrong.

How are you wrong, though? I'd bet it's along the lines of getting the stress wrong, or vowel quality wrong, or pronouncing "s" between vowels as /s/ when it's supposed to be /z/ or vice versa. This shows that English pronunciation leaves out some phonemic information. So do most writing systems. English spelling is still largely phonemic. If it were logographic, you'd be more likely to be prone to mispronunciations along the lines of "hydrophobic" /wɔːtɚfɪɚɪk/, or "foreword" /priwɝd/.

[Xing]

Morphemic, my mistake.

Sal's point is still valid. The fact that English dialects/accents have different phonemes have – in many cases – nothing to do with morpho(phonetic) processes. Even if we look at purely monosyllabic words, English dialects/accents have different phonemes.

Now look at the following words, and tell me which ones share the same vowel phonemes:

bad
cat
vast
plaque
dance
palm
mosque
lost
hot
dog
core
law



I think you started this thread with a valid and interesting question – roughly, where do we draw the line between on the one hand an alphabetic writing system with a deep orthography, and on the other hand a purely logographic writing system? However, you have been derailing the thread by making a series of drastic claims, with little or no evidence.

As for spelling reform proposals, these have been discussed extensively, both here and on other places. You may join the thread on spelling reform here on the board if you want to contribute to that discussion. But please, cut down on some of your arrogance if you expect constructive feedback.

[Sumelic]

I think you started this thread with a valid and interesting question – roughly, where do we draw the line between on the one hand an alphabetic writing system with a deep orthography, and on the other hand a purely logographic writing system?

Phrased that way, the question is also easy to answer. No natural language has a purely logographic writing system. There are always phonemic and morphemic elements. Egyptian hieroglyphs included consonant signs that often supplemented the logograms in a redundant fashion. Chinese hanzi are almost always syllabic and often contain phonetic indicators. Japanese kanji are used with the phonemic syllabary systems and Romaji.

[clawgrip]

No natural language has a purely logographic writing system. There are always phonemic and morphemic elements.

Tangut sure comes close, though. The vast majority of characters are entirely devoid of phonetic indicators.

[cntrational]

globalization and the internet is accelerating language change, by increasing the amount of interactions

[MoonRightRomantic]

I think you started this thread with a valid and interesting question – roughly, where do we draw the line between on the one hand an alphabetic writing system with a deep orthography, and on the other hand a purely logographic writing system? However, you have been derailing the thread by making a series of drastic claims, with little or no evidence.

As for spelling reform proposals, these have been discussed extensively, both here and on other places. You may join the thread on spelling reform here on the board if you want to contribute to that discussion. But please, cut down on some of your arrogance if you expect constructive feedback.

You are right. I have a hateboner for English spelling. I am sorry for that and I will stop derailing.

Back on topic, I had two proposals for English conscript, not spelling reform. The first is simply writing English with logograms, a la Yingzi or Neoglyphi. The second is compressing all English multigraphs without changing their (often variable) pronunciation in order to disambiguate without resorting to diaresis or similar. For example, replacing every instance of digraph "gh" with yogh.

[clawgrip]

Probably the most ideal universal English spelling reform would be to create a script with a letter for every single phonemic vowel, like a letter TRAP, letter BATH, letter PALM, letter LOT, letter CLOTH, letter THOUGHT and so on. This would still have a lot of unnecessary letters for speakers of all varieties of English (for example, those six letters would only represent two distinct phonemes for me: /æ æ ɑː ɑː ɑː ɑː/). But it would perhaps be less complex than contemporary English spelling, since each letter is always pronounced the same way.

[Sumelic]

Probably the most ideal universal English spelling reform would be to create a script with a letter for every single phonemic vowel, like a letter TRAP, letter BATH, letter PALM, letter LOT, letter CLOTH, letter THOUGHT and so on. This would still have a lot of unnecessary letters for speakers of all varieties of English (for example, those six letters would only represent two distinct phonemes for me: /æ æ ɑː ɑː ɑː ɑː/). But it would perhaps be less complex than contemporary English spelling, since each letter is always pronounced the same way.

That doesn't work, because there are a bunch of words that vary between TRAP/BATH/PALM and LOT/CLOTH/THOUGHT. I'm not just talking about mergers, I'm talking about different diaphonemes being used by different speakers. You can see some of the uncertain words for TRAP/BATH listed here: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sound ... ath-split/

The membership of CLOTH is also notoriously variable among different North American accents--I don't have a reference right now, but for example, words like "cog" and "frog" may be in LOT or THOUGHT.

The current system for representing these sounds seems pretty close to optimal to me. Yeah, standard British English speakers have to choose between "a" and "ar" in BATH words, and American English speakers have to choose between "a" and "o" in FATHER words, but I don't think this is a huge burden.

[clawgrip]

Neat. I didn't know that. Also, focusing on actual sounds can cause more trouble. Due to intervocalic t-d merger and Canadian raising in my speech, writer and rider are differentiated only by the vowel sound. How would a phonemic writing system deal with this! It would force all speakers of English everywhere to learn two different letters for /ai/. Same for pouter/powder.

I would never want a spelling reform. I don't even like American spellings, but I think they make it clear that the current spelling system is not exactly optimal, since plenty of other reforms could be made. I think this topic has been done to death though.

[MoonRightRomantic]

Spelling reform is impossible. Let us speak of real world issues no more.

I read a couple featural abugida for English (e.g. Enganagari, Notae). It is probably the best way to write it, since accent-specific information (voicing, vowels) is easily dropped or added. I think a hybrid logographic and featural abugida script would be a fun exercise.

[socio4016]

During research on English spelling reform (in short: main barrier is vowels, rhotics and voicing in different dialects) I have come to the conclusion that English is at least partially logographic and will only become more so as time passes.

Am I right to conclude this? Is English really logographic rather than alphabetic?

I think it is alphabetical in form but logographic in substance.

[Torco]

English is not, functionally, logographic. It is closer to being so than other languages, but not even that much. While there are supposed to be rules for spelling and reasons for why cough dough sow whatever, I don't think those rules are real in the sense that speakers probably just know the sequences and the pronunciation. In this sense, sure, letters sort of sometimes function like logographic radicals, in that they might as well be arbitrary little pictures that combine in conventional ways to encode words. And sure, a lot of words might as well be like that, but a much bigger lot actually don't. I laugh at Loic Suberville's memes well enough, but most words are *not*, in fact, spelled wacky enough that it might as well just be a any random sequence of letters.

I remember learning the language, as a kid... it was mostly through the internet and old SNES roms. I learned spoken english rather later, and even though the orthography is wack as fuck, for the most part when I heard a spoken word I could kind of figure out which written word it corresponded to and vice versa. Not everytime, and a lot of times I would just fall back to rote, but it's not, in fact, easier for most words to just learn them rote: many words are spelled quite unfunkily... long, dog, god, pen, lick, cock, all pretty low on funk.

An alphabetically written language *could* end up in this state of "might as well be a logogram", though. Just take english's wacky spelling and make it even more wacky, perhaps by the passage of time, perhaps by some process by which things are written in an acrolect but pronounced in a basilect, perhaps through taboo avoidance, who knows. For example, if all words are spelled so wacky that the spelling gives you no information about pronunciation, then one can say that this language has wacked itself into being a logography with extra steps. Even in such a language, you could have language teachers assuring you it's all very logical, and being wrong, just like they are about Enlgish... but we're not there yet. I think as divoced as English spelling is, actual logos are even moreso.

[conlangdolphinfly]

No, English is alphabetic. It uses a combination of letters and symbols to represent the sounds of spoken language.

[clawgrip]

If you want to see what it takes to turn a phonetic script into something like a logography, take a look at Book Pahlavi. Numerous letters visually converged and became indistinguishable from each other, it employs numerous complicated ligatures, uses archaic spellings, and many Aramaic words were borrowed into the writing but not into speech, so these words are spelled as Aramaic but pronounced as Iranian. Tellingly, Aramaic spellings were sometimes supplemented with Iranian phonetic complements, creating the semanto-phonetic combination that characterizes all natural logographies. English is tame compared to this partially illegible script.

[MoonRightRomantic]

I only recently read my notifications after several years away, so sorry for the late reply.

English is not alphabetic. It has a series of “phonograms”, as explained at this phonics website: https://phonograms.logicofenglish.com/chart

It’s easy to confuse it for alphabetic since each phonogram consists of one or more characters used by the Latin alphabet, but the unit of sound and meaning is the phonogram and not the individual characters.

Each phonogram has one or more values, which have to be memorized for every word.

As a native North American Anglophone, I hate it. I often find myself consulting wiktionary to find which spelling is correct for a word I want to use. I don’t know how to pronounce the overwhelming majority of words I know (I read a lot of books as a kid and still read now, but on my devices) and most of the time wiktionary doesn’t even note the North American pronunciation.

But it’s never gonna change because humans stupid.

[Dormouse559]

I only recently read my notifications after several years away, so sorry for the late reply.

English is not alphabetic. It has a series of “phonograms”, as explained at this phonics website: https://phonograms.logicofenglish.com/chart

It’s easy to confuse it for alphabetic since each phonogram consists of one or more characters used by the Latin alphabet, but the unit of sound and meaning is the phonogram and not the individual characters.

That’s usually called a multigraph, using more than one letter to represent a single sound. The fact that English spelling has a somewhat higher number of multigraphs doesn’t prove it has a logography, just a defective alphabet.

As a native North American Anglophone, I hate it. I often find myself consulting wiktionary to find which spelling is correct for a word I want to use. I don’t know how to pronounce the overwhelming majority of words I know (I read a lot of books as a kid and still read now, but on my devices) and most of the time wiktionary doesn’t even note the North American pronunciation.

Counterpoint: As a native North American Anglophone, I do know how to pronounce and spell the overwhelming majority of the words I know. I only have to look up rather obscure terms. (I read a lot of books as a kid and write for a living as an adult.) Our individual experiences don’t say much about the underlying nature of English writing.

[lsd]

when you can't read alphabetical scripts, they look logographic...

as proof, a few decades ago, National Education's sorcerer's apprentices tried to teach children the writing of French (which is as easy as English...) as a logographic system, where words were not broken down into letters but as autonomous entities...

Obviously, this was an abject failure, much to the delight of orthophonists...
I learned to read just before, but maybe that's the source of my conlinguistic logographic attraction...

[Knox Adjacent]

as proof, a few decades ago, National Education's sorcerer's apprentices tried to teach children the writing of French (which is as easy as English...)
as a logographic system, where words were not broken down into letters but as autonomous entities..

Excuse me, what