I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring.
It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.
That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they use different letters.
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's funny to read a post complaining of the bad relation between written word and pronunciation of a language when said post is written in English :)
I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms.
Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is "digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid "digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at some point).
The Académie Française tries really hard to be prescriptive, and perhaps that works for the handful of elitist writers hanging out around Saint-Germain-des-Prés but it definitely can't keep up with the connected world, the language that is actually spoken and used by everyone, and often gives in by being descriptive with a noticeable lag and awkwardness. It is more of a self-congratulatory circle of elites trying to uphold a (400 year-old) tradition for the fun of it, and the population often decides to use vastly different words regardless of what is considered a "real word" in French.
It also happens a (400 year-old) tradition that was quite intentionally set up to be overly complex so to prevent unwashed gray masses from learning "proper" written French and to keep it reserved for the elite.
I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.
It's easy enough for a foreigner to learn it in a year (so all what's left is to expand the vocabulary and polish the pronunciation). How can it be hard enough to prevent natives from learning "proper" written French? Was it also illegal to teach them so being hard enough to be impossible to figure out intuitively was sufficient?
What you need is some guy to make a few half-assed changes to spellings that don't actually come anywhere close to fixing the problem, but are just enough to create incompatibility with other users of the language. :)
> For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English
Apparently, as recently as in the 1950s, both palatalized ("soft") and non-palatalized ("hard") /n/ in the second syllable of this word were recognized as variants of the normal pronunciation in Russian dictionaries.
This has and always will be the case with spelling vs pronunciation. Pronunciation tends to change much faster over time than does spelling.
> That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word.
This is far from being a general rule. Your example is an exception. Consider "мера", "монета", "обмен" and so on. You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases.
You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases and you should not. What I mean is using "э" where you can, phonetically. Using "е" in those cases actually is "changing" although has made it into the standard.
That's not what you said in the original post. Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts, as I believe input from a native speaker may be valuable to someone.
I obviously failed to communicate that properly yet that's exactly what I meant.
> Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts
That's not me. For a spectrum of reasons I believe it's great if whoever having a relevant idea/opinion shares it, even if it's wrong, let alone different from mine. So I don't downvote anybody ever (but in some extremely rare exceptions perhaps).
That's because 'e' also usually makes previous consonant softer(not in your example though, because it's a loan word I guess), so you'd have to put 'ь' everywhere then.
usually makes - so why not use 'e' only in the cases when it actually does? I don't say 'э' should always be used in place of 'е'. I mean why not use 'э' when it sounds 'э' (without the preceding letter softening) and 'е' when it really sounds 'е'? The Russian writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
As the sibling comment says, it doesn’t, at least not anymore. It is to a large extent traditional. The current Russian writing system is essentially the same as it was in the early 18th century, when it determinedly deviated from the Church Slavonic. There was a spelling reform right after the Bolshevik revolution in the early 20th century, but it was not particularly significant — they just abolished a couple of letters and forbade the use of a particular letter in the end of words. Since the 18th century, the Russian pronunciation has of course evolved (and anyway, there is no such thing as the Russian pronunciation; there are always dialects). Which, inevitably, has led to deviations between the spelling system and whatever was the standard pronunciation at the time.
> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?
I am a native Russian speaker and a former Korean language major. I would estimate that the modern Korean writing system has roughly the same amount of exceptions and non-phonetic spellings as the Russian one.
For example, the letter ㅎ (h) is not pronounced in a lot of cases. Some other consonants are reduced depending on their position in the syllable, etc.
The illusion that Korean is "pronounced as written" is created by the fact that Koreans are extremely happy when you learn to speak their language at all. I as a Russian speaker would also rather hear you pronounce Russian words as they are written than not try to learn Russian at all :) But as soon as you start working on sounding as close to native as possible, that illusion of simplicity quickly breaks down.
Aside, I wonder how long UK dialects will survive: my kids often come out with US Americanisms - of both word choice [garbage] and pronounciation - because of the media they consume.
I do not know much about UK dialects, but someday US will speak a Kiwi-influenced dialect. Received Pronunciation will survive due to preservation efforts.
The exact same happens with all the languages that use the latin alphabet: They may all use the same alphabet but the frequencies and patterns of letters are very different.
In fact that's how we tend to recognise a language even if we don't speak it at all.
It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.