Why is English spelling so complicated? 

It can be managed through tough thorough thought, though.

i understood both of these things

I am happy too :). As a Pole I know what a regular pronunciation is. We learn ortography because spelling isn't often regular. I am always a little angry when I read about phonology of other languages (yes, English Wikipedia is a lot better than Polish) and thay always need a word to describe sound in English (whether it's a vowel or a consonant). It is so unpleasantly funny. As someone above write English is like Chinese. And it is true. They have the same pictograph but different dialects or countries pronounce them differently. I think that this is the reason why there will be no real reform of English. First English is used in many countries that belong or belonged to the "crown". I do not believe that this people will reach a compromise together, for e.g. USA is stubborn and strangely conservative (look "no" for metric system). Canada, Australia, USA or UK have their own characteristic ways of pronunciation certain words - in te same country they pronounce them differently. So how could they have the compromise? Secondly, if people do not create a universal language or there will not be another phase of civilization development (e.g. by China) English WILL BE lingua franca. USA and UK need to have the same language because of globalization. South Korea and North Korea are separated for half a century and their languages already sound a bit different. How long US does not belong to the UK and how technological progress has changed both countries? Different groups that live in the concerned countries change language too. I see it when I compare various countries using Slavic languages. I partially agree with the sentence: "I think this makes it hard for native English speakers to learn other languages". Before the age of 20 (when Internet was just developing and it was very expensive) I thought that every language has complicated grammar like Polish so I didn't liked learning languages because I though that it is too time-consuming. Why should I learn languages when I hate traveling? Why should I learn languages when I will not be useing it? Why there always is so many exceptions? etc. So what thinks average English speaker? Probably the same. USA is so big (and traveling abroad isn't cheap). Briton can travel using English. They can use only English on the Internet and no one will fault them. Because of many exceptions they probably think that other languages are the same - so language learning is for them waste of time.

yeah sadly here as a child I was always told by my teachers words arent pronounced the way they look

Hmm, maybe not so much that there is NO correlation between the written word and the spoken word, but more that there's absolutely no guarantee that you can guess the entire pronunciation on the first try. At most, we hope we can pronounce a portion of an unfamiliar word. When we're learning to read as children, we are taught the basic possible sounds that each letter can make, and we are instructed to "sound out" unfamiliar words. Even with words that don't seem to follow any known spelling rule, you can usually make a good guess based on other words you've seen before. Under a parent's or teacher's guidance--and classmates and friends and siblings correcting each other--any improper pronunciations eventually get weeded out and corrected. Exposure to the spoken and written word is enough for native speakers to be able to learn all the vocabulary they need to. Rather than having difficulty with pronunciaton of unknown words, native speakers have exponentially more trouble spelling known words correctly. We just learn to accept that sometimes we might have to look up a spelling or be wrong, lol. At this point, however, I don't think anything can reasonably be done to standardize English spelling. At all. The reason being, the number of native speakers globally that have extremely varying pronunciation, since English has had centuries to evolve and change in different countries. Even more, within each such country, there are a wide range of regional variations in pronunciation. There is no governing body that controls English. No country or region will want to give up its pronunciation and spelling in favor of a foreign one. It's sad but true. Even we native speakers get very frustrated at times. XD

Well Also Lots Of Languages Have Different Pronunciations For, 'J' Could Be Pronounced /d̠ʒ/, /ʒ/, /j/, Or /h/, Depending On The Language, So If You Don't Know What Language Something Is, Or How To Pronounce Said Language, It's Reasonable To Not Know How To Pronounce It.

And then when they do pronounce it they pronounce the vowels seemingly at random without even a baseline idea of what said of vowels they should be using for those letters. No /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ first pass through always something random like pronouncing every A in a Russian word like /æ/ and every I like /aɪ/. Just generally very poor intuition as to what the most common vowels might be to sus out the pronunciation of any unfamiliar word. Really love turning every vowel into a diphthong too.

No one ever spells Cheshire as "qaixolo" even though Xi Jinping might be colonel of the Qing Dynasty again.

Jacob Griffin That just shows Chinese spelling is a mess too. They should've stayed with Wade Giles or adopted Yale romanization, so foreigners wouldn't say "King Dynasty".

But those sounds depends on where they are placed in the word, then no, fish cannot be written ghoti. That's the dumbest example in the world.

*cough* Ugh, that's roughly enough. It takes ploughing through tough thorough thought though.

@@TAKEmeTOtheMORGUE 👏

Yes, it's true. When I read a new book or an article in Polish I can go to my friends and tell them about new fascinating things that I learned - but with English books I don't do it (in English). Checking how to pronounce each specialized word in English is very time-consuming (unnecessarily time-consuming). I don't like to feel embarrassed so I really rarely speak in English :(. And I feel that many no-natives do not feel comfortable when they have to speak in English. I think that the most comfortable are people from other Germanic languages, e.g. Sweden. In addition, talking to someone who speaks English in a bad way (because English is not his first language) and he has a strong accent too isn't easy. I remember my conversations with some Indian - it took me some time to understand him :)

Then it should be pronounced "poon". The Latin "v" and the Greek "ω" were both used as vowel or consonants, representing either "u" (as in the English "put") or "w" (as in English "swim"). BTW, "w" is called "double-u" (despite looking like a "double-v") because of the use of the written "v" as a spoken "u" in Latin.

I thought it was "pee-owned". That comes from having teenagers to teach me about the internet. I told them, darlings, I invented the internet.

I always thought it was similar to “pawn”, like the chess piece, except without the a. As in, pwn, which can be made of p as in pal, and wn as in own.

'Pwn' is a typo of 'own' which means 'to dominate or conquer a rival in a humiliating way.'

I always pronounced it like pvvvvvn

yeah, this came to mind for me too when he asked for "most hated spellings" :D

The rule is more accurate when it applies only to the "ee" sound (so forget "weigh"), but there are still plenty of "weird" exceptions to "seize" onto.

There are, in fact, MORE words that violate the "I before E except after C" rule than follow it, so truly it's not something that should be taught. ... In fact, the "I before E except after C" rule was NOT taught in my school. It never appeared in any of my spelling books or reader books. I learned it from my parents because they'd been taught it back in the past when nobody questioned these things. So, at least in the 1970s and 1980s someone had it right.

I went to a public elementary school in the sixties (in Philadelphia, PA) and I before E was definitely still being taught there. Even if it's ancient history in schools parents will probably keep passing its dubious wisdom down for a few more generations.

I before E except after C when IE or IE make the sound EE... Which still leaves a few exceptions. One of them being caffeine which happened because that originated by putting the suffix -ine on the word café giving something like kaffay-een which we quickly started to [mis]pronounce more simply. Good, isn't it? Sadly there are no such excuses for seize and weird. They're just bastards. :)

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll, Usenet:rec.arts.sf-lovers 15 May 1990.

😂😂😂😂😂😂

It's a legacy from german to make verbs look like nouns with a completely different meaning. Hence we capitalize nouns. Buchen = beech trees / buchen = to book

Yes & no-in his own time it would have been pronounced ‘Kaiser’, but medieval and Renaissance Latin went through its own sound changes in various areas of Europe, and there are conventional Anglicizations of all the major Roman names (eg Mark Antony (not Marcus Antonius) & Cicero (not Kikero) & Pompey (not Pompeius) etc.)

That's wild, I had no idea. Great video, by the way!

Thanks!

xidnaf has a good video on it, though it's more about kings vs emperor.

To this day I find it extremely strange that anyone named their child 'Cicero' pronounced 'Kikero.' It blew my mind the first time I heard about it. Just kinda sounds bad to my ear. Maybe that's just because I don't speak Latin though.

Thank you! This is really interesting, and a good demonstration of how 'simplification' doesn't always make things easier.

Polish, related to Chech, didn't merge 'y' and 'i' sounds as Czech did, so those words are pronunced differently and spelled as well: 'bić' and 'być', but on the other hand Polish pronunciation of 'morze' (sea) and 'może' (maybe) is the same in most dialects but keeping this simple trait of etymology really helps. Polish uses archaic, mostly diagraph spelling while Czech adopted more modern diacritic spelling. It's very interesting to campare Czech and Polish spelling to see sound changes and similarities of both, like Polish 'rz' and Czech 'ř', 'y-i' like mentioned above, h-g shift and many more.

Actually, there's slight difference - in common Czech, ý changes to ej but í does not. (I understand some may view common Czech as low language but it's still different the letters are differentiated even though the pronunciation merged.)

I assumed that it's not that simple. I take into account only standard language - some southern and northern Polish dialects even have distinct ''ř'' sound - spelled 'rz' (compare: řeka - rzeka), other have vowel lenght and so on, while standard doesn't (it does have other features). And to be clear: I don't speak any Czech, while I have pretty good understanding of Czech writing, like 80%. How much do Czech understand Polish writing?

The common Czech is so common (especially in bohemian parts of the country) it should be mentioned, IMHO. Slovak lacks this, its dialects are simply local dialects. Personally, apart from -i used for palatalization I don't have many problems with Polish orthography and that may be because both Czech and Slovak do not palatalize except for d, t, n and l (l in Slovak only). (Polish in general seems to have more consonants such as the ć/cz difference which is not present in Czech and Slovak.) But a couple of people told me they found it difficult, take from that whatever you will.

Thanks! My initial script was double the length (!) and most of it was on the development of the alphabet! It's such a fascinating story.

Alliterative Woah! I know your channel is mostly anglocentric but...I'd be damned if I wouldn't love a video of yours about other alphabets (expecially the chinese ideograms)!!!

That would be interesting but definitely not my expertise--I heartily recommend NativLang's channel for explorations of such things!

Have you ever heard of the Qaixolo Cat? Here's a hint: _Colonel Xi Jinping will make the Qing Dynasty great again!_

Exactly!

Kinda like how the original Pona Toki language had only 20 words, but speakers of Pona Toki today recognize 23.

Cuzican Aerospace 🤣

latin letters with exact phoneme-grapheme correspondence, forming syllable blocks, SOV order, no grammatical number or gender, totally regular inflections... That sounds great to me! :D

Cuzican Aerospace you mean toki pona?? It started with 118 words and now it numbers 125-ish

I've lived in that area my whole life, and while I could pronounce them, it took me until I was practically an adult before I could reliably spell them. Though I also couldn't spell Massachusetts until I was a teen, and I remember the first time I spelled America correctly on my first try when I was 10. I've always been awful at spelling.

The French left a bunch of place names in midland USA. Some retained their French pronunciations like Des Moines, Iowa but others became anglicized like Detroit, Michigan.

The cities in the above comment are all cities in Massachusetts, which is a different geographical region from what you're mentioning.

My British neighbor loves to correct my mispronunciation of all those places, and I love to learn them. I fondly remember my very American father pronouncing "Were-Chester-Shyer Sauce" when I was a kid. To think it's actually "Wushter Sauce". Who knew!?

I'll one-up you Gloucestershire /ɡlɒstɚʃɚ/ not /glaʊ.sestɚ.ʃaɪɚ/ Worcestershire /wʊs.tɚ.ʃɚ/ not /wor.sestɚ.ʃaɪɚ/

Thank you-as you can tell, I can’t read Arabic, and so had to rely on the labelling of images to be accurate. I appreciate your correction.

I just had to second guess myself a couple days ago, because my spell check told me "catalogue" was wrong. I yelled at it for being xenophobic. I'm American, too, but I can't really tell you why I got in the habit of spelling it that way. Almost every other word where there's a difference, I use the American spelling, just that one word for some reason stuck with me from somewhere.

I definitely always use the -logue spellings as well. Just ending on an -og looks bad!

I spell it 'catalog.' The extra '-ue' is superfluous. You get the same pronunciation.

Correct: dialog, catalog, analog, monolog Incorrect: rog, leag, tong (language)

Jacob Griffin No.

Welcome! And thanks! :)

Or even flipping Zhaif... that is sooo grating on the ears and speech processing centres.

AEon Tokusatsu Reviews I'd suggest you'd google, in a very safe environment, what yif(f) means. Trust me, you'd be grateful for zhaif. Also, I apologise for the images in advance.

Mø Nälayé you and me, buddy, you and me.

Mø Nälayé go for it

Just don't Google the e number for MSG

Coloure

As a french speaker that had to learn German, i can attest you that German has a quite easy spelling. It is easier for me than my native language. Of course it's a bit harder than Slovak, Spanish or Finish but it's quite ok. In my opinion English and French are on par but maybe the later is a bit better cause it's more easy to learn to read it.

The reason why English is such a hard language to learn for some people because of the variety of languages around the world. For example and Australia is speak with a heavy Australian accent and in England they have a variety of different types of accents around a 10 mile radius of each other. Case in point a person from Central London can speak a different variety of English then one from Lisbon Grove in the same area. This way people don't understand each other. And you're in South America English has a Spanish accent attached to it.

@@peterhiggins1872Of course, the same can be said for other languages. Spanish natives speak in a variety of regional dialects and accents, some of which might even be associated with a particular part of the city or economic status or education. And then you have to take into account the varieties of Spanish spoken by South American speakers. In Holland, a significantly smaller country, a city boy will have tremendous difficulty understanding a farmer who is just a twenty minute drive away.

Grammar N Word you just made my point clear; even the Japanese language has it's own dialects. Another example is in Okinawa they say Nangin for carrots, and in Tokyo they pronounce it Noingin. You can hear the difference.

Very true -- another whole level of complication.

You might not have noticed that many people pronounce "with" with a /ð/, even utterance-finally.

I don't understand. You have "-A- single letter" - [a] :) There is many languages where one letter means a word, eg. Korean 이 /i/ - a tooth; 아 /a/ - oneself. In Polish we have: a ("disjoint" and), i (and), k (to - in archaic; but in Czech too), o (about), u (at), w (in; or Czech "v"), z (with/from). Czech use "z" (from) and "s" (with). In Russian they have this "two letters in one letter" letters :) я /ya/ (I) ё /yo/ (argh - expression of annoyance) Here is a list of some languages that have one letter words: jalu.ch/languages/one_letter_words.php www.wordnik.com/lists/single-letter-words Look how others Germanic languages uses their vowels as single letter words. :) I, island, ice, Ireland etc. - do you want to change all this "i" to "aye" or "ai"? English language needs standardization of spelling, not the next emotions of the scribe o_O (21:30 "ghost" was a good example in this video).

Did you misspell 'plao' ? Also, what's that 'w' character?

Pretty certain through is actually pronounced 'froo'. Pronouncing it with the 'th' sound is quite difficult and sounds weird.

Definitely a regional difference; that initial 'f' for "th" is widespread in a number of places, but completely unknown in others. A clear example of the problems with phonetic spelling!

I've tried pronouncing through with the 'th' instead of the 'f' sound and I have to say it sounded unlike any word I've ever heard. Just transferring smoothly from a 'th' to a 'r' was extremely difficult. May be the rest of my dialect influencing it though.

There is a Gough Street in San Francisco. If you mispronounce it, people will instantly know you are not from around here.

We use the word cwtch in English all the time when talking to babies. We just never realized because no one bothered to write it

Welcome! Pirates are an interesting case, since the 'pirate accent' we all know is and love is actually mostly a product of mid-20th-century media, specifically Disney's Treasure Island. But it's true that the West Country accent that it's based on does indeed maintain some pre-vowel-shift elements, as many local dialects do. slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/pirate-speech-origins-in-west-country-english-via-robert-newton-aka-long-john-silver.html

Thank you -- it's definitely instructive to look at how other languages have handled these same challenges. I definitely agree that the current situation is such that no widespread reform of English spelling is possible, for reasons connected much more to history and geography and politics than to phonology or linguistics!

@@Alliterative - I agree with you. The variety of English pronunciations (Australian, New Zealand, South African, Glaswegian, etc) make it impossible for there to be one accepted form of phonetic spelling. It's much easier to have one spelling, however odd, and just let people pronounce it as they wish. So girl can be pronounced gerl , gurl, goyl, gal, gel and so on; but each person still spells it girl. Doesn't help the non-native English speaker but keeps academics in employment.

@@hobmoor2042 I don't think many proponents of English spelling reform are calling for phonetic spelling. Phonemic (with an 'm') spelling can be designed in such a way that phonemic distinctions still made in any subgroup of speakers remain in the orthography. That way "girl" can still be spelled , since some (probably only Scots, I believe?) distinguish "fir", "fur" and "fer(n)". But AFAIK absolutely no one has a phonemic distinction between and , it's pure homage to Greek. If you read what @Alliterative writes, he says that the reason that reform is hard is not really linguistic.

still irish spelling is better than the english one.

David Pusnik 😱😮

Haha 😁

Have you seen Welch?

@@krcmaine - I speak Welsh (Cymraeg) and it is easier to read than English.

poertjt2 Danish speakers sound like they are swallowing their vowels. Or it sounds like speaking Norwegian while you're trying to gargle a teaspoon of water at the same time.

Yes, Danish and English are the only two languages that I know of, where you can never be sure about the pronunciation by looking at the spelling or vice versa. In some other languages there ara a few spoken sounds that have more than one potential spelling, but very rarely the other way around. If you know how to spell, you can pronounce. But not so in Danish or English.

And aswell, in Danish, the already much used s, k and v makes q, w, z, x and c almost entirely redundant. But on the other hand, there should be letters for a whole host of other sounds that currently don't have their own letters, aswell as symbols for vowel length, extra syllable (a schwa letter), glottal stop and syllable stress. All of these have huge impact on the meaning of spoken words, and yet they have no written counterpart. Among the vowels, and besides from vowel length, there are 3 kinds of a, 3 kinds of ø and 3 kinds of å, and two of each don't have their own letter. Together with the schwa sound this is 7 vowels missing their own letter. Among the consonants, the "soft" versions of d, v, and r miss having their own letters, as does the sound currently denoted by "ng". So that is a further 4 letters missing. These 11 missing letters would represent sounds which are not automatic variations of other sounds, only dependent on the surrounding sounds. Rather they are true independent sounds in Danish, with no current letter of their own. There is of course 20 or 30 other sounds which are merely automatic variations of the primary sounds, and they shouldn't count as independent letters. But then there is vowel length, glottal stop and syllable stress, all 3 of which should have their own marker. So this gives a total of 11 letters and 3 markers that should be added to written Danish. Subtracting the 5 before mentioned redundant letters from the current 29 letter of the Danish alphabet gives 24 letters, and adding 11 new ones and 3 markers, gives an alphabet of 35 letters and 3 markers.

Thanks! Sadly I very much doubt (doute?) there's *any* aspect of spelling that *everyone* will agree on these days, but it's true there's little logic to those spellings -- though they're explicable by history!

Thank you!

That's one of those (many) English place names that's *completely* opaque... I'll put it on the list! :)

In Italy, when we talk about the Greenwich Meridian, we pronounce that as "Green Witch" too

Lol in Brazil people say Greh-noo-itch

So are the British just messing with the tourists then? o_O

Interesting... seems like the Brits really want to seperate themselves from everyone else even more, trying to get their own identity, since everyone speaks English nowadays. o_O

The problem I see with "one letter one sound" is that you would have to increase the number of letters in the Alphabet to accommodate the new letters that would be needed. I think what would work better is to have consistent letter combinations for sounds using simple rules. As an example, consistently use the "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking" It doesn't matter what the second vowel is for it is always silent and the first vowel is always long. Likewise, other letter combinations could take care of other sounds (like "ar") when applied consistently.

@@Solitaire001 I don't like that either I'd much rather just make up new symbols and repurpose ones that don't have sounds that are unique to them like c, x, and q. I''m totally fine with having an alphebet that has potentially 300 letters.

@@Motherfucker_Man Kevin Stroud released an audiobook called "The History Of The Alphabet" which covers how the Alphabet developed (it is available on RU-vid). In the audiobook, he mentions the cuniform system of writing which has a separate symbol for each syllable. A problem with cuniform was that it was very difficult to learn to read and write because of the number of symbols (he mentions that it had over 600 characters), and the simplicity of the Alphabet is the reason it superseded cuniform.

@@Solitaire001 I think an alphebet of a quarter to half the size would be easier to learn. I guess what I want to do is make a different version of the phonetic alphabet that can be used for al languages.

Corey Cook it used to be pronounced like "own", think about it you say only not "wonly", stone, alone, or atone. It actually brings it a lot closer to other Indo-European languages as in Spanish un or una One of the many peculiarities of Abraham Lincoln was that he was so backwoods that he pronounced it as "own" and most high-minded easterners thought he was parochial for it, but he was actually right, lol

I Believe I Heard That When English Spelling Was Standardised, The Spelling Of One Came From One Dialect, While The Pronounciation From An Other.

Thanks!

Thank you! I wish I had the budget for ads! 😆

It's not pronounced -el either really. Just an L and a silent E either way. I prefer -le and -re

batl, lytl, ejndzhl, ejngl

*friends, not frends *colleagues, not colleauges *are, not ar

I think they where trying to spell it “right” as they mentioned they are trying to spell things more correctly when they leave internet comments .^.

*+Deadpyro1130* So "friend", "league", "again" and "are" weren't correct spelling all along?

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

_Dehr wuld be resistins tu dat kind of spelling do', espesili in Amerika and Ostralia and Nu-Sealend and Kanada tu and mabi efen Grate-Briten aswel beakus Brexit._

thank you! I couldnt figure out that it meant 'excursion' for the life of me.

But what is _ms money_ ?

It all has to do with the different word-stress patterns of the influences on English. Romance languages tend to have word stress towards the middle or end of their words, whilst English-native words are almost always stressed on the first syllable. If there is an exception, such as 'behest' or 'among', that exception is due to the fact that the first syllable is a prefix; the first syllable of the root is still stressed. Another thing to note is that Greek has a nearly unpredictable stress, which is why they always mark the stressed vowel on their words. I don't know the history of the stress for 'photograph' and 'photography', but it is possible that those are the stresses left over from Greek. Then again, of course, those words have gone through several languages to get to English, so I could definitely be wrong and they are from Latin or French. Point being, different patterns of where stress lies on a word create the confusion in modern English, where so many words are derived from different sources.

that is because San Francisco is a spanish name, it means "Saint Francis" and in spanish there is a simple rule, if a "c" comes before a "i" or "e" is pronunced similar to an "s" but if it comes before an "a" "o" or "u" it will be pronounced like a "k". so San Francisco sounds perfectly normal...... in spanish.

Are we in Spain or speak spanish????? NO so your entire comment is irrelevant. But thanks for playing.

soooo... you dont know the history of the region. my response is not irrelevant but i can't say the same of yours.

@@nicolasinvernizzi6140 Go back to whatever cave you crawled out from. We are talking about ENGLISH. Not Spanish. Maybe learn how to read and comprehend a little bit first. LMFAO

im not the one who lives in a cave apparently. its not my fault you are an ignorant idiot who insults people traying to help you undestand why something is the way it is. and no, you were not talking about english, you were talking about San Francisco and that name has nothing to do with the english language.

I would love to hear more about how other languages have handled / are handling these issues, since all languages have sound changes (though not all of them have had as many drastic changes as English since writing was introduced). Thanks for these tidbits!

The thing that I liked the most of Turkish spelling is how they write words borrowed from other languages, especially French. For example: hairdresser in Turkish is kuaför (coiffeur) and museum is müze (musée).

Well, for norwegian, since we were writing danish, and speaking various dialects of early modern norwegian, we ended up splitting our written languages into two separate ones. One that norwegianified the existing danish language used by those of higher social status, and one that was based on a collection of regional dialects, turned into a writing system by Ivar Aasen. Today they enjoy equal legal status, and you have a right to receive and fill in any official documents in either form, and each primary school will choose one as the main one, and secondary schools might end up with a mix of students of both. Personally, in secondary school, any class not strictly about spelling was taught in Bokmål (norwegianified danish), while i was required to write in the one my primary school taught, Nynorsk (which is based on a selection of regional dialects) For administration, each county chooses one as the main one for use internally, so you have to make a specific request to get documents and forms in your language of choice. Spelling reforms have tried to move them closer to eachother, hoping to unify them into a common norwegian set of spellings, but it never was successful, and the notion is now mostly abandoned. Nynorsk (the one based on rural dialects) however, is generally adding some spellings that are absorbed from Bokmål-like speech. It's important to distinguish that they don't have separate languages connected to them, nor are they simply spelling systems for different dialects. They are simply two different attempts at spelling reform after we gained independence from denmark, and both of them stuck. I've been told that it's a fairly unique set-up.

Wow. And people say English spelling is complicated! That's fascinating, thank you!

But when you put a caret on a Turkish "g" it goes silent, that doesn't sound very phonetic!

I think the dominance of English is actually a perfect example of the overwhelming importance of politics, society, geography etc in the development of a language. English isn’t widespread because of anything inherent to it as a language, but because of historical circumstances that resulted in English-speaking people having military/political/social/economic power in many areas of the world. For better or (often) for worse. And thanks, glad you enjoyed the video! Some of the Spelling Bee Endnotes have more specific info on some sounds, & I’ll be doing more of them over time.

Interesting!

Shud bee spelt az rithum

What? I think pumpkin is spelled phonetically.

Another regional difference... "punkin" is a common pronunciation.

@@kidsea13 but it should be noted that it's 'punkin' rhyming with sunken, not like pun-kin. Pretty common in the US I think. Here in Australia I hear people drop the p all the time, and just say pumkin.

Dravidian languages like Malayalam also a letter based (alphabetic-?) language not a phonemic (sound based) like English.