this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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General Memes & Private Chuckle

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[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

i'm confused. aren't the standardized spellings based phonetically off of a specific dialect? in which case, it does both?

[–] aliceblossom@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Since English spelling isn't phonetic, what you're saying isn't even possible, so no. Just to be clear, the word phonetic is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it very specifically means the spelling produces perfectly unambiguous pronunciation which, as far as I know, has never been the case for English with the Latin alphabet. And if you think about it, that makes sense. You are using symbols from a completely different language to describe the sounds - there is zero guarantee there are enough symbols to describe all of the sounds unambiguously. You might be able to get there in combination (see "ch", one of our most stable letter combinations), but as soon as you do that, readers can no longer intuit what the sound should be. For example, for "ch" the sound for "c" (which is itself already ambiguous) plus the sound for "h" does not "make" the "ch" sound. Instead you'd get either "kuh" like in cousin or "sh" as in shush.