English, Furigana, and the Problems of Spelling Reform

Thank you World of Warships for sponsoring this video.
During registration use the code FIRE to get for free: 200 doubloons, 1 million credits, the Premium Battleship Tier 5 - USS Texas, and 7 Days Premium Account. Applicable to new users only.

Let's ignore the fact that I used narrow transcription for schwa (should have been broad, I know, but I'm not redoing this video AGAIN).

A sequel to the videos:

Videos about Japanese I referenced:

0:00 Intro
2:18 Japanese
3:56 The Reform

Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music by Me

Thanks to my patrons!!

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Merc - Japanese

#linguistics #spelling #japanese

[kklein]

Thank you World of Warships for sponsoring this video.
During registration use the code FIRE to get for free: 200 doubloons, 1 million credits, the Premium Battleship Tier 5 - USS Texas, and 7 Days Premium Account. Applicable to new users only.

Let's ignore the misuse of narrow transcription for schwa (should have been broad) :(

[daviddavis]

I like this idea; I’ve heard a lot of people say that “we should just add diacritics to English because loads of other languages do it!”
Meanwhile in my other language, Spanish, lots of people drop their diacritics *constantly* because they’re really irritating to type, and that’s in a language with only two.

Having them for learners seems like a good middle ground.

[OmegaTaishu]

I think having optional diacritics is a neat idea.
Russian does this also. When people are learning to write, they accentuate the stressed syllables of many words, but slowly drop that accent as they progress.

[nomadicmonkey]

When you broached the example of Japanese, my hackles were raised (I'm born and raised Japanese) anticipating for usual nonsense pet theories and cringeworthy font choices but instead of all that, I believe that analogy actually makes some sense! I guess some of the UK place names would benefit greatly from this reform should it be implemented, although I've heard that those place names sometimes function as a shibboleth to reinforce us vs them difference lol
This is a tangent but I remember reading some Japanese linguist argue something along the lines of like kanjis in Japanese have much in common with the homophones in English only distinguished by spelling. And as a native Japanese speaker that sounds about right; words themselves are what really matter and learners focusing neurotically on individual kanjis and its many potential readings is kinda ridiculous because that feels like you're learning it upside down, just like a hypothetical non-native English speaker trying to memorise all the pronunciations 'gh' can have in English apart from context and then proceeding to learn actual words only after that pointless rote memorisation.

[itmedana]

this is interesting! it reminds me a lot of how the nekudot/vowels in hebrew are typically used as training wheels when you’re first learning and then disappear altogether later on

[ЖекаИванов-шб]

The use of the breve ăbove evĕry letter that represents schwa is actuălly an impressive ideă. I really like it buuut there is a diălect variatiŏn in distrĭbutiŏn of schwas as well (weak vowĕl merger between unstressed /ɪ/ and /ə/)
Upd: I dón't prŏnounce secŏnd e in the wurd 'every' niether but if I'm not mistáken it was mentiŏnd in the vidéo that sílent letters ålsó might be written with breve
5:27 point three
You see, I'm a fan of spelling reforms too

[evfnyemisx]

Spelling reforms work best when applied slowly, the first thing we should do is standardize the spelling of "through" and "though" as "thru" and "tho"

[georgios_]

5:05 YES! This is exactly like Greek, people learning Greek find it weird that words always have to take a stress marking unless they're monosyllabic. Then you point this example out, they're shocked!

[Sky-pgjm]

Speaking as a Bilingual Anglophone who learned French, this would actually be a lot easier to implement in places like my home country of Canada. It'd make Canadian English more intuitive to Francophones and French (both Metropol and Quebecois) more intuitive to Anglophones like me. I mean we already need to learn the accents to learn French.

[sierrrrrrrra]

Kanji is not trivial to learn. But, after studying for a year for fun, I can confidently say that Kanji is useful, if not necesary for Japanese writing. And yes, there's lots of them but you start with the most common ones. And multiple readings can seem tricky, but it's really not because you generally learn multiple words that use the same Kanji concurrently. So
the 人 character is pronounced differently in the words 人間 and 外人; but in both words the character 人 carries the meaning of "person" so you know both words have to do with people, even if you forget the reading of the character (which you won't, because 人 is one of the first ones you learn). And if you see a new word with this character, you can guess that it is another person type word, much like if you know the different roots/prefixes/suffixes of different English words

[jasonbraun]

English is my second language and honestly once you know a certain amount of words you get a feel for how English spelling works.
You probably won't be able to write every word just by hearing it but you will rarely come across a written word that you can't pronounce.
The worst word I've ever come across is "victual" which is actually pronounced "vittle" but that's at least kind of similar to the actual letters.
Kanji pronunciations on the other hand cannot be guessed at all and similar characters can produce completely different sounds.

[stan_albatross]

Grave for stress is not what I would use - an acute accent is much better - it's used to indicate stress in many more languages (Spanish and Portugese spring to mind). It's also way easier to input on English keyboards and most people already somewhat understand it to mean a stressed or fully pronounced letter - like the é in Pokémon.
Now that the grave is free, I would use it instead of the breve for vowel reduction. No need for it to specifically indicate a schwa either, just a generally reduced vowel - so it doesn't matter what it's reduced to in each dialect. This is also nice because reduction and stress never intersect.

As for other ideas, hacek > overdot in all cases for consonant letters. Way more familiar, easier to input, and easier to write than an overdot. As for the distinction between /θ/ and /ð/, I would probably use lowercase th for θ and either bold/capitals for ð. This distinction is hard for ESLs to get around but native speakers handle it fairly easily, so it might not be that neccessary.

If we want to go into more detail then a macron can be used for "long" vowels (/a/ -> /ei/ for example) but this is probably not needed. Silent E is not too hard to wrap your head around.

Sample text : ínsight vs incíte

[arachnidsLor]

since im learning japanese, i thought i could add my 2 cents to the kanji debate. while they are really difficult to learn, once you get used to them, it makes a lot of sense (to me at least). kanji is full of meaning basically. the words "kaki" 描きdrawing and "kaki" 書きwriting are just a small example. i think a fluent jp speaker will instantly know what you mean when you use the kanji, and it clarifies meaning. and then theres the fruit, kaki. which is a persimmon. theres more kaki words too . when hearing, you have to rely on the context sure, but i think when reading it kind of works. i think kanji are especially cool in their use in names, because you can really customize a name for a child and put a lot of meaning into a small amount of characters. theres a lot of words where i dont even really "read" them anymore, i see the kanji and recognize what it is right away. i think the language would lose a lot of detail, nuance and meaning without kanji. but who knows if people in the future disagree with me, or if japan wants to make it easier for its own kids to learn the language. even japanese people struggle with kanji in some ways. sorry long comment !

[Lord-Of-Bread]

The main problem with marking schwa like that is that some words can be stressed or unstressed depending on what the speaker is emphasizing which changes their vowel.
For example "A" can be both /ə/ and /eɪ/ depending on weather or not its stressed. Similarly "An" and be /ən/ or /æn/ and "The" can be /ðə/ or /ði/

[ToastbackWhale]

I’ve been a fan of accents/diacritics ever since I started learning Czech. IMO Czech has a *beautifully* transparent writing system.

[justfrankjustdank]

i feel this is closer to hebrew niqqud than japanese furigana, for those who dont know (also i havent touched hebrew in a good year correct me if im wrong pls) they dont write a lot of vowels in their words, and those they do pronounce have different pronunciations, so they added "accent marks" (niqqud) to show which vowels to actually say in the words. its mostly used in government or super formal documents or places non native speakers of hebrew would be reading usually, including children. i love this system and im so glad you brought up bringing it into english :)

[robertbennett]

I distinctly remember using a system like this for "long" and "short" vowels basically distinguishing the difference of "A" in the words face and cat respectively

[Kyle-zttt]

Accents are actually already used in English (to some extent) like in blessed ("blest") vs. blessèd ("blessid") and naïve - it's just that not many people use them.

One problem I see for putting a breve over letters that represent schwas is that the breve is already used in classroom teaching for "short vowel" sounds (in contrast with the macron for "long vowel" sounds), none of which are the schwa.

[kikivoorburg]

This feels similar to how latin can be written with accents to clarify pronunciation, especially for new learners! Latin only uses an overbar* like in "ē" iirc, but I don't see why the same system couldn't work for english as long as we try to keep the number of new accents to a minimum

* is it called an overbar for letters? I'm used to calling it that in a maths context but I'm not sure it has the same name here.

[OLITION]

I regularly differentiate "read" and its past tense "read" by spelling the latter as "rēad" or "réad"
not in any official capacity (yet) but when i'm messaging in chats etc. moreso for my own sake than anyone elses lol