Talk:English orthography

Dual function letters

English has a unique feature. Check out this words: do, wind, read and bass. They are important, because they actually have 2 pronouncings each one with a different meaning for each pronouncing. It is unique, because it doesn't happen in other languages with a Latin alphabet. For me, English is an second language, and this aspect makes me difficult learning it. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese language share this feature, however they don't have a Latin alphabet.

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2024 and 8 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rkcunnington (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Emmasarkan (talk) 20:39, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

'Wehrmacht', 'Dzongha', 'Nietzschean' and 'Qin' is generally considered to be not English orthography

Proper nouns in English are capitalised and non-italicised, which may have caused the confusion that these foreign proper nouns are English words. Frankly, they are not English words as they are romanisations of foreign languages, and do not follow existing English orthotactics. Thus, I'm fairly certain that they should be removed or moved into a different list under the grounds of not being English -- English speakers usually require a sound guide or be seperately taught how to pronounce these words, and the fact that they exist on the page merely clutters and complicates the list. Sidesyci (talk) 02:41, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Duplication of information on vowel letters followed by <r>

The Spelling-to-sound correspondences section "Combinations of vowel letters" contains the typical pronunciation of each vowel letter combination in all possible environments, including when followed by <r>, which is nearly always a separate category requiring a separate row. However, there is also a section "Combinations of vowel letters and ⟨r⟩" which contains the same information as was in the "when followed by <r>" rows of "Combinations of vowel letters" . This is unnecessary duplication of information, and means that any edit to the "vowel letter followed by <r>" pronunciation has to be made in two places. It runs the risk of an editor making an edit in one of the tables and neglecting to make it in the other one, resulting in the information getting out-of-sync.

We do not need to list the information twice, so we should either remove the "before <r>" rows from the "Combinations of vowel letters" table, or remove the "Combinations of vowel letters and ⟨r⟩" table altogether. Since the "Combinations of vowel letters" table is incredibly long and cluttered, not helped by nearly always requiring a separate "before <r>" row, sometimes multiple "before <r>" rows, for each vowel letter combination, I propose the former. Remove the "before <r>" rows from the "Combinations of vowel letters" table, adding a note that this excludes when followed by <r>. We can then have the "Combinations of vowel letters and ⟨r⟩" table as the sole home of this information, which will be a lot more readable and eliminate the unnecessary duplication and editing problems that I mentioned. Offa29 (talk) 12:03, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Manuscript

Letter u in unstressed closed syllables as /ju/ or /jə/, e.g. in manuscript /ˈmænju/əskrɪpt/, is still not accounted for in the table. JMGN (talk) 17:47, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

If we're trying to map out every way a letter is used in more than two words, then we're doing something silly and unencyclopedic. Remsense诉 18:48, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Maybe such info is appropriate in a different entry tho'? JMGN (talk) 20:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)