Why is english pronunciation so inconsistent

English spellings and pronunciation are so strange because the language is really a mix of lots of different languages. In fact, English is made up of words taken from Latin, Greek, French and German, as well as little bits and pieces of other local languages like Celtic and Gaelic.

Why is English so unphonetic?

If we consider sounds made simply by the letter 'a' for instance, in the word 'apple' – it's /ae/, in 'car' – it's /a:/, in amount – it's /a/, and so on. This, consequently, makes English a non-phonetic language, which means that the pronunciation of a word is not dependent on its spelling.

Is English phonetically inconsistent?

It is important to understand that English is not a phonetic language. So we often do not say a word the same way it is spelled. Some words can have the same spelling but different pronunciation, for example: I like to read [ri:d].

Why is English grammar so inconsistent?

One reason is that pronunciations have changed drastically, and spelling doesn't always keep up. So we've lost the gh sound in night, but we still use those two letters. Another reason is that English has borrowed so many words from other languages and - again - kept some of the original spellings.

What is the most common reason for wrong pronunciation in English?

An experienced teacher of non-native speakers of English can easily recognize the causes of mispronunciation, which in most cases are lack of vocabulary, lack of practice, bad teaching experiences, lack of direct contact with the language, and lack of self- confidence.

Is Russian fully phonetic?

Russian is a phonetic language, which means you can accurately tell from the spelling of a word how it should be pronounced, and you can accurately tell from the pronunciation how to spell it. This is a sensible system that English completely abandons.

Is Russian phonemic?

Russian has 34 consonant phonemes,some of which have multiple allophones resulting from softness and/or voicing assimilation. There are five vowel phonemes in Russian, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. Unlike English, these phonemes are pure vowel sounds, rather than diphthongs.

What is the hardest English accent to imitate?

The British Accent

The Great British accent proved to be the most difficult of all the accents to imitate – along with the regional Yorkshire and Cockney pronunciations, in particular.

How did English spelling become Unphonetic?

The Great Vowel shift and the change in the English sound system brings us directly to our next topic of study i.e. English spelling. Spelling had become fixed in a general way before the shift and did not change when the long vowels changed. Hence, English spelling became largely unphonetic.

Is the English language declining?

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now.

What is the hardest grammar to learn in the world?

Hungarian

The grammar of Hungarian is significantly different from that of Indo-European languages such as English. The language has no grammatical gender and it uses suffixes instead of prepositions which makes Hungarian one of the most difficult languages in the world.

What percentage of English is irregular?

Surprisingly, approximately only four percent of all English words in print defy explanation and are truly irregular. More commonly, speech sounds in English words are spelled with one of several possible spellings, which are determined by various kinds of patterns.

Is English The Hardest language in the world to learn?

English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, especially compared to many of the Romance languages like Spanish and French.

Why English is so awkward?

English has more phonemes than many languages, with around 44, depending on which variety of English you speak. It has an unusually large set of vowel sounds—there are around 11. According to WALS, most spoken languages only have between five to six vowel sounds.

Why T is silent in English language?

A: The short answer is that the “t” in many words is silent because it's too difficult or awkward to pronounce and has become assimilated into the surrounding consonants.

What is the problem with English pronunciation?

English is not a phonetic language, so it is often hard to know how to pronounce a word by its spelling. Pronunciation in English is based on sounds, not spelling. Some sounds in English (th for example) don't exist in other languages.

What is the most non phonetic language?

All spoken languages are phonetic, including English. Non-phonetic languages would be languages like American Sign Language, which consists of gestures, or mathematics, which consists of numbers and symbols, or PYTHON, which consists of computer code.

What kind of language is Russian?

Together with Ukrainian and Belarusian, the Russian language makes up the eastern branch of the Slavic family of languages. Russian is the primary language of the overwhelming majority of people in Russia and is also used as a second language in other former republics of the Soviet Union.

What is the closest language to English?

The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.

Is the English language getting worse?

People tend to think that older forms of language are more elegant, logical, or correct than modern forms, but it's just not true. The fact that language is always changing doesn't mean it's getting worse; it's just becoming different. In Old English, a small winged creature with feathers was known as a brid.

Why is the B in dumb silent?

The rule is simple: if a word ends in the letters mb, the b is silent. Lets look at some examples. I already told you the word climb. Some others are thumb, comb, crumb, lamb, limb, bomb, and dumb.

Why is K silent?

The letter ⟨k⟩ is normally silent (i.e. it does not reflect any sound) when it precedes an ⟨n⟩ at the beginning of a word, as in “knife”, and sometimes by extension in other positions.

Is there a silent V in English?

But as Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, one unusual letter is never silent: the letter V. While it makes an appearance in words like quiver and vivid, you can rest assured it always behaves the exact same way.