Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?

Seeing as most languages are the product of a slow evolution they tend to contain letters and syllables which are no longer required...just as parts of many species (including us) count only as artifacts of lost adaptations.

English I'd say is due for a universal overhaul...being a composite of many tongues, all thrown together into the great cauldron.

that=tee...ech....ehh....tee=teeechehhtee=that

/cackle

I think the problem is that writing a language down "freezes" it in the form it was written, but the spoken language continues to change.

But all writing is conventional, anyway. All of it is just squiggles on a page. It is only by agreement that we see some combinations of squiggles as representing certain sounds. Which particular combinations represent which sounds is kind of arbitrary.

Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?

Esperanto was designed so that one letter is one sound and it closely follows the International Phonetic Alphabet, so perhaps that qualifies. I don't know if it counts as intelligently designed but German is the most like that of all "natural" European languages.

Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?To score perfectly, I demand that the exactness work in both directions: It's spelled as its pronounced and it's pronounced as it's spelled. Many languages fall short in two ways:In reading, you can't tell which syllable is accented. German requires you to know a set of prefixes that can never be stressed, and it also leaves you guessing with words of foreign origin. In writing, there is more than one way to transcribe one or more sounds. To pick on German again, which as noted further down is indeed one of the more phonetically accurate European languages despite these nits, a long A can be A, AA, or AH, and Ä is somewhat interchangeable with E.Off the top of my head, I'd nominate: Hungarian. Each vowel can be "long" or "short," and a parallel set of graphemes was invented for the long ones (with an accent ague). There are also two pairs of umlauted vowels, written with an umlaut for short or a double accent ague for long. A few digraphs were added to cover the shortfall of consonants in the Latin alphabet: SZ, ZS, CS, GY, NY, TY. I don't believe there is any ambiguity in deciding how to render an unfamiliar spoken word into speech, or vice versa. However, I don't know enough about the language to say whether the accented syllable is uniform, since there's no provision for indicating it. Bulgarian. The Cyrillic alphabet has more letters and Bulgarian, with its modest set of vowels, makes do without any diacritical marks or digraphs. It's a little weird to have a separate letter for SHT, which AFAIK is not a separate phoneme, but at least they're consistent with it. Like Hungarian, there's no indicator for accent and I don't know if that's a problem in reading. Finnish. I don't know much about this language but I believe it does a perfect job with long and short vowels including umlauts, and even doubles consonants to correspond to their pronunciation. I don't know about accented syllables. Turkish. Again I'm out of my field of expertise, but I believe there's a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, with no digraphs. I'm not sure syllabic accent is strong, important or irregular in Turkish, so the lack of an indicator may not be a problem. Korean. Its phonetic alphabet, Kan ul, was invented in the 15th century, but due to elitism on the part of the ruling class who had the time to learn Chinese, it did not become official until the end of the 19th century. Placing letters sometimes adjacent and sometimes one above the other looks strange to a foreigner but the rules governing it are invariable. Phonetic writing is required by law in North Korea, but in South Korea surnames and a few other words can be written in Chinese characters.Runner-upCzech. Long and short vowels are clearly differentiated, although not each in the same way. Palatalization is noted, although again there are several methods depending on the combination of consonant and succeeding vowel. Accent is uniform, always on the first syllable. It uses an unnecessarily large set of diacritical marks, but it uses them consistently. My only complaint is that, in writing, after a vowel that's incapable of being palatalized, you can't tell whether to write Y or I for the I sound.
Seeing as most languages are the product of a slow evolution they tend to contain letters and syllables which are no longer required...just as parts of many species (including us) count only as artifacts of lost adaptations.French is probably the worst for letters that are no longer pronounced. Almost every word seems to have at least one, and many have two or more, such as the inflection -ent for the third-person plural verb form, which is never pronounced. Worse yet, some final letters can be silent or not, depending on the next word in the sentence. This is one of the most difficult features of French for a foreigner to learn: You always have to think one word in advance when speaking. Its transcription of vowels can only be called haphazard, with only five graphemes for both long and short vowels as well as the umlauted vowels it retains from the original Germanic language of the Franks.

In addition, almost all languages that use the Latin alphabet have more phonemes than letters. English is near the top of this list and we stubbornly make do without diacritical marks. Some consonant digraphs like SH and NG work well. Others like CH and TH require knowing the source language of the word. But our vowels are utterly hopeless.
English I'd say is due for a universal overhaul...being a composite of many tongues, all thrown together into the great cauldron.The Norman invasion was a disaster for our writing system. (Although I'm sure a historian would not include that in his top ten list of its impacts on England. :)) First we borrowed thousands of French words with their original spelling. Then as the French occupiers assimilated and adopted English, the phonetics of the language changed and the pronunciation of both French and English words veered away from their spelling. Scholars kept bringing in Greek words with their Y's, PS's, PH's and CH's, and today we happily borrow words from every culture we come in contact with, each with its own spelling or "standard" romanization. Thus we now need Ê and Ñ in our fonts for "tête-a-tête" and "cabaña," We spell "glasnost" with an O even though the Russians pronounce it as an A, and we write "Peking duck" when it's really "ba-ging." Not to mention, Ba ging is the Cantonese name for the city; American newscasters seem to think the Mandarin name is French so they pronounce it as "bei zhing" when it really is "bei jing."
that=tee...ech....ehh....tee=teeechehhtee=that.Tha t's the least of our problems. TH is one of our most uniform digraphs. The only confusion is in deciding whether it should be voiced or voiceless in a given word. We have a very simple rule for that:It's voiced between two vowels: lather. Even if one of those vowels is silent: bathe. It's voiceless in words of foreign origin: mythology, maranatha. Well, in some foreign words it's just a T: Thailand But in all other cases it's voiceless: thing, three, bath. Oops, in words derived from Anglo-Saxon pronouns, it's voiced: the, thou, that, they, those, there, thus, then. :)
I think the problem is that writing a language down "freezes" it in the form it was written, but the spoken language continues to change.Every language needs to reform its writing system once in a while. The Germans and Italians did it a little over a hundred years ago. Italian can be read flawlessly and the only problem with German is the accent. Neither is quite so easy to write, but a dream compared to English and French, which haven't been overhauled in hundreds of years. I don't know which is stoopider: our seven ways of pronouncing OUGH or the French digraph OI for the sound WA. In both languages, those E's at the end of words became silent long ago. We know they were pronounced once because we can still hear them in poetry.
Esperanto was designed so that one letter is one sound and it closely follows the International Phonetic Alphabet, so perhaps that qualifies.Unfortunately it was invented by a man whose native languages were Polish and Yiddish, so his choices of phonemes seem a little strange. For most of us it's hard to remember to write the sound TS as a single letter C. It's impossible to pronounce the combination SC, pronounced STS, at the beginning of a word, including the everyday word scii, "to know," which must also be pronounced as two distinct syllables.
I don't know if it counts as intelligently designed but German is the most like that of all "natural" European languages.As I've noted, German has quite a few inconsistencies but I agree that by the standards of anglophones and francophones it looks like a perfectly phonetic alphabet. It's phonetic in one direction: You can read a page of written German out loud without making any mistakes, at least once you learn to recognize those pesky prefixes like be- and ge- which never take the accent. Otherwise the accent is always on the first syllable.

The Germans and Italians did it a little over a hundred years ago. Italian can be read flawlessly and the only problem with German is the accent. Neither is quite so easy to write, but a dream compared to English and French, which haven't been overhauled in hundreds of years.
How did the Germans and Italians manage to pull that off? Seeing as English is going to be THE international language I'd say its now time for a major re-write of dictionaries.

Eliminating the apostrophes in words like *haven't* might be a good idea. The word probably didnt even exist in dictionaries two hundred years ago.

I agree that French is possibly the worse. There are fewer words available than English, but more space on the page is required for the same sentence.

I dont like the way French words tend to have soft or silent endings...they just fade out. The word for butter is particularly annoying.

Hitler made great use of German's abrupt endings by rolling his Rs and clipping syllables for a staccato effect.

How did the Germans and Italians manage to pull that off? Seeing as English is going to be THE international language I'd say its now time for a major re-write of dictionaries.I think they came at it from totally different directions. The Germans have a reputation as lovers of authority. So when the government said to them, "You will throw out your old dictionaries and begin using these new spelling rules," they just said, "Jawohl, mein Herr," in unison and probably completed the conversion in a year or two.

The Italians were quite the opposite and didn't even really have a national language. The various cultural centers had their own dialects and wrote the way they spoke. Although for the most part they were intercomprehensible (that's what "dialect" means as opposed to "language" and that's why Cantonese and Mandarin are not "dialects" while Dutch and Flemish are, political correctness be danged), it made activities chaotic that we take for granted, like looking something up in an encyclopedia. It's been a while since I read about this but basically the Romans, Florentines, Venetians, Bolognesi, etc., who saw the future coming wanted Italy to be respected as a major nation and understood that wasn't going to happen if it didn't behave like a nation. I don't remember the details, which I'm sure are fascinating, but some amazingly brilliant and persuasive people synthesized a national standard language and got it accepted by a population that described themselves succinctly with the observation that it took a ruthless fascist dictator just to standardize their railroad schedules. They accomplished such amazing feats as dropping the H that had not been pronounced in about 1,700 years from all words like uomo (man) and oggi (today).
Eliminating the apostrophes in words like *haven't* might be a good idea. The word probably didnt even exist in dictionaries two hundred years ago.Absolutely. Spelling should be a transcription of pronunciation. I see the value in punctuation marks like periods, commas, ellipses, quotation marks, colons, question marks, etc., because they represent features of tone and cadence which are not precisely phonemic but nonetheless are elements of language. Apostrophes are okay for transcribing missing phonemes in colloquial speech or dialect, such as comin' for coming, but nobody pronounces the missing O in haven't. The apostrophe in possessives is even dumber. Horses, horse's and horses' are pronounced the same and in spoken language it's up to the listener to figure out which one we mean.

BTW, it's an interesting task to try to Google the etymology of a word like "haven't." I have no idea when it first appeared in writing, although it was surely spoken for a few generations before the conservative lexicographers of yore would have deigned to write it down.
I agree that French is possibly the worse. There are fewer words available than English, but more space on the page is required for the same sentence.I'd rank French with English for the concision of the spoken language. In either you need a lot fewer syllables to express a thought than in, say, Spanish or Japanese. As a result they tend to be spoken more slowly, making it easier for students and foreigners to parse the sentences and pick out the words they know. As I've mentioned before, Chinese is even more concise; my informal tally says it uses seven syllables for ten in English, and indeed in my experience is spoken even more slowly, making it a student's dream.
I dont like the way French words tend to have soft or silent endings...they just fade out. The word for butter is particularly annoying.That's just the northern French guttural R, one of the many things in the language that were inherited from the Germanic Franks, like the umlauted vowels and the preference for the present perfect tense over the preterit. In the south--the land of the Celtic Gauls--you're a little more likely to hear the flapped R of the other Romance languages, Gaelic, and most of the Indo-European family.

BTW, reading your post with its deliberate elimination of apostrophes illustrates why you can't get much support for spelling reform. We're used to seeing the words written the way they've always been written, and to recognize a new spelling slows us down. Kaen yuu imaejin wuet it wud bii laik tuu riid ingglish if evrii wrrd wrr speld in a nuu wee, iiven if it wuez prrfektlii foonetik? How long would it take you to regain your current reading speed? I can't enter diacritics so I'm just using the Finnish system of doubling long vowels and making up my own when necessary. But however you do it, it's going to be worse than the metric system--which we also refuse to adopt over here. It's been established that people recognize words in a partially holographic way. As long as the first and last letters are in the correct place, the rest don't matter, as long as they're all there with no extras. Changing just one letter in half the words in a sentence will send us all back to the first grade, learning to read all over again (through trifocals for some of us :)). Considering the dismal state of English orthography, my made-up example is probably closer to what would really happen, with several letters changed in almost every word!
Hitler made great use German's abrupt endings by rolling his Rs and clipping syllables for a staccato effect.Every language has its phonetic idiosyncrasies that orators exploit. Spanish people sometimes roll their Rs for effect, even though they're only a single flap except at the beginning of a word or when doubled. Great orators in English like Winston Churchill use our language's vast selection of monosyllabic words to add stress to their speech: "blood, sweat and tears." That just doesn't have the same impact in Spanish: sangre, sudor y lágrimas. :)

I think the problem is that writing a language down "freezes" it in the form it was written, but the spoken language continues to change.
But all writing is conventional, anyway. All of it is just squiggles on a page. It is only by agreement that we see some combinations of squiggles as representing certain sounds. Which particular combinations represent which sounds is kind of arbitrary.Correct, but point is it would be nice if there were a "one-to-one" correspondence between the sounds and the squiggles, at least when first associated.

The school's language teachers could then do something more useful that drilling stupid "rules" (such as English teachers telling not to end sentence with a preposition). - See GB Shaw's example of the silliness that can cause in the following:

"Ending sentence with a prepositon is something up with which I will not put."

instead of the natural:

"Ending sentence with a prepositon is something I will not put up with."

(The natural form has TWO prepositions as the last two words.)

"Not spliting your infinites" is stupid emulation of Latin, where that is impossible.)

"Ending a sentence with a prepositon is something I will not put up with." (The natural form has TWO prepositions as the last two words.)A common misconception. "Up" is an adverb in many cases and this is one such case. The sun will come up. My dog is throwing up. Your kid was acting up. A police car just drove up. Write this up. Zip your pants up. Pull the shades up.

If you put up with a lot of hecklers in a lecture, one of your supporters will tell you, "You sure did a great job of putting up!"

So it would be bookish but permissible to say, "This is something with which I shall not put up," but it would be pseudoeducated to separate the UP from the PUT. Churchill was being deliberately silly when he wrote that.

A common misconception. "Up" is an adverb in many cases and this is one such case. ...Churchill was being deliberately silly when he wrote that.As you are much better informed in language than I am (at least in its use, perhaps not in Chompski's transformation of the field) I will accept your correction and thank you for it.

I was worried about "up" being a preposition so had actually looked it up in the dictionary and found it can be one (also can be an adjective). I think, but do not know, that in genergal prepossitions require (at least implied) an object. My dictionary gave one such example in which I think "up' is a preposition. - "The cat is up the tree." "Tree" being the object as I see it.

Perhaps you can clarify what makes a preposition a preposition. Is my "can have an object" rule silly or reasonable?

I always just trust my memory. Was it really Churchill and not GB Shaw who invented that sentence poking fun at English teachers? I know (well have a stong memory) that Shaw did spend considerable effort at trying to get more rational spelling and in general was quite concerned with language, as most writters are.

I think perhaps we need a linguistic revolution of the same magnitude as the switch from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals.

Its amazing to me that in a thousand years the brilliant architects of roman civilization were still using a full page of scribbling to do long division.

There are more people learning english in China than the entire population of north america...so, now is the time!

The first rule should be that one character equals one sound. That means th and ch will have to be replaced with one letter...and also that additional letters will have to be added for the alternate forms of vowels. No more silent letters, and letters will have to be formed of one continuous line...no more i, f, or t.

A new alphabet for a spoken language yes!

Tolkein did it single handed...with the most aesthetically beautiful letters ever
conceived.

I understand he sometimes spliced bits of Finnish words together to make new names for his fantasy world, because they dont sound as familiar as most european languages. Clever!

Perhaps you can clarify what makes a preposition a preposition. Is my "can have an object" rule silly or reasonable?A preposition expresses a subordinate relationship between two nouns, so it must have an object. We allow our grammar to get pretty twisted in English, so the relationship is still there and "to" is still a preposition when the child says, "I want to be read to."

"Up" was originally a preposition in Old German, as auf still is in Modern German, meaning "on" or "atop." But somewhere along the way the Anglo-Saxons let it start serving double duty as an adverb. In Modern English I'm not sure which usage is more prevalent. It's time to get up, start the car up -- or -- up a creek, up the kazoo. Note that it's ambivalent in "climb up the stairs." We can just as easily say "climb the stairs," so "up" could be construed as an adverb clarifying the direction of the climb, rather than a preposition expression a relationship between the act of climbing and the stairs. After all we can also say "climb down the stairs."

We seem to have an engine that turns prepositions into adverbs. Now we can "eat in" or "eat out."
Was it really Churchill and not GB Shaw who invented that sentence poking fun at English teachers?I had to look it up to proof my earlier post. It was Churchill and he was poking fun at an editor who, in print, had criticized the legendary orator for violating what he assumed incorrectly was a rule.
I think perhaps we need a linguistic revolution of the same magnitude as the switch from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. Its amazing to me that in a thousand years the brilliant architects of roman civilization were still using a full page of scribbling to do long division.Hold on there. You're talking about an age of both illiteracy and innumeracy. Only a tiny fraction of a percent of the Roman population could read, and how many of them could do complicated arithmetic? Roman numerals were arguably an improvement over the Greek system of using a different letter of the alphabet for each numeral and then another set for multiples of ten, because they only require you to know seven letters: C, D, I, L, M, V, X. For all I know there may really have been people who could write numbers but not words! The Greeks did some pretty fancy math with that older system.

When Fibonacci brought the Indo-Arabic positional numbering system to Europe in the 1300's, literacy and numeracy may have been even less common than in the Roman Era, but for sure, for 99+ percent of the population it was irrelevant.

Still, your example is instructive. Merchants continued to use the older system for centuries! Only mathematicians adopted the new numerals.

So an alphabetic revolution (please not a linguistic one, unless everyone agrees with me that the language of choice is Chinese) would be of far greater magnitude than the switch to positional numbering.

Suggest the details of this revolution. The British had to post prices in both shillings and decimal currency for at least ten years IIRC. Auto speedometers still measure both mph and kph, because the consequences of guessing wrong could be to lose your life instead of a few guineas. Almost every consumer-market scale switches from pounds and ounces to kilos and grams with the flick of a switch. Everyone recognizes that it takes years to learn something this simple and that the transition is chaotic.

How are you going to do it with something as commonplace, complicated and important as writing? Is the daily newspaper going to have two parallel columns and become twice as thick? The phone directory too? Is every library going to have to stock two versions of every book for two or three generations, until children grow up knowing only the new alphabet?

Perhaps this revolution will be more practical when paper is outmoded and all writing is electronic. Then a flip of a switch will do it.
There are more people learning English in China than the entire population of north America... so, now is the time!Duh? All of those Chinese people can read and write a minimum of 2,000 han zi. Don't invent a phonetic alphabet on their account!
The first rule should be that one character equals one sound. That means th and ch will have to be replaced with one letter...and also that additional letters will have to be added for the alternate forms of vowels. No more silent letters, and letters will have to be formed of one continuous line...no more i, f, or t.How do you account for the difference between British and American standard English? Our vowels don't have a one-to-one mapping. Their R's are silent. They pronounce bedding and betting differently; we don't.

I suppose the British as always will presume that they're in charge and start writing the language the new way, using their phonetics, just as they did with the metric system. And we'll tell them where to stuff it and keep writing it the old way, just as we do with yards, quarts, acres, and Fahrenheit. :)

This is the reason there's no phonetic alphabet for Chinese. It looks like one language in writing, but in speech the words are pronounced so differently that they're unrecognizable between Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujian, etc.

If a Brit writes "call" phonetically, it looks like "coal" to us.

Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?
.
sanskrit

to Fraggle Rocker:
Thanks. You knowledge in this area is most impressive, but I had come to that conclusion long ago. Are you an Teacher in some sort of compartive language field? Or just very interested in the area?

Are you a teacher in some sort of comparative language field? Or just very interested in the area?It's just something I've been interested in for more than fifty years, since I had my first class in Spanish. I have taught writing and ESL (English as a second language) and lately I've been making a living as a writer and editor.

...When Fibonacci brought the Indo-Arabic positional numbering system to Europe in the 1300's, literacy and numeracy may have been even less common than in the Roman Era, ...
So an alphabetic revolution (please not a linguistic one, unless everyone agrees with me that the language of choice is Chinese) would be of far greater magnitude than the switch to positional numbering....I just got around to reading this part of your post.

Personally, the arab invention of zero (I think they did it) is IMHO one of mankind's greatest advances. Without any symbol to indicate "None" in the modern postional notation numbering system it would not be possible to distinguish between eleven and one hundred and one. I.e. in this example, we use a zero to indicate that there are not any tens in the ten's place in the positional numbering system.

If you care to explain in more detail why you think Chinese is the "language of choice" I would like to learn more from you. I am sure you have good reason for saying that and bet it is not just that there are a lot of Chinese.

All of those Chinese people can read and write a minimum of 2,000 han zi. Don't invent a phonetic alphabet on their account!
They already had to invent one when they started using keyboards.

In Taiwan they use a system whereby they have to hit several keys to create one graphological Chinese character.

But in mainland China the system most widely used is the pinyin (spell-sound) method using latin letters to create Chinese words phonetically.

Maybe theyre like the Germans you mentioned. The Chairman just stood up and said "let it be thus"...and the people answered with one voice.

Jawohl!!!...or whatever. :o

sanskrit
Good choice...the sounds of the letters are also the names of the letters, making it easy to sound out any given word.

If you care to explain in more detail why you think Chinese is the "language of choice" I would like to learn more from you. I am sure you have good reason for saying that and bet it is not just that there are a lot of Chinese.China is the world's longest-running continuous civilization, so the linear development of its language was never interrupted by dissipation like Greek or conquest like Anglo-Saxon. For thousands of years the people have been steadily modernizing their language to keep up with the modernization of their civilization. They discarded relics of the Stone Age (like a pitifully small and almost unenlargeable set of prepositions for expressing all relationships--that were possible when living in a cave), meaningless noise words (like articles), morphemes that take up a lot of bandwidth but add little value (like inflections) and, finally, entire paradigms that constrain their way of thinking into predetermined formats (like parts of speech: Chinese has only nouns and verbs).

The result is an incredibly adaptable language. They effortlessly coin words for new concepts like telephone (two syllables) and computer programmer (four). With the low syllable count (my informal effort tallied an average of seven Chinese syllables to ten in English, which is a very concise language itself) it can and is spoken rather slowly, making comprehension easier, especially for students and foreigners.

The phonetics are also easy. Each morpheme is a single syllable, with a mandatory vowel (which could be a diphthong, triphthong, or even R or Z, but still there aren't as many as in English), an optional single consonant at the beginning, and only two possible final consonants, both nasals. There are no words that twist the tongue of a native speaker like "nuclear." Yes it has tones but only four, they're exaggerated and not at all difficult to say correctly--and it gives them the advantage of not being able to express feelings vaguely with tone of voice: they have to express them precisely in words. An additional advantage of this phonetic parsimony is that it's virtually impossible to borrow foreign words--only someone who's studied a foreign language could even come close to pronouncing them. All words are Chinese and formed more or less logically from Chinese roots. (With amusing exceptions: "thing" is dong xi, "east-west.")

To an outsider it seems like a disadvantage that this phonetic compression results in an average of four morphemes being compressed into the same spoken syllable. But most "words" contain at least two morphemes, giving two and a half million possible combinations, so at the level we would consider a "word," there are no homonyms.

With the obvious exception of musicians, sculptors, etc., the majority of our thoughts are formed in language. The limitations of our language limit our thoughts. Chinese has few limitations. If you can think in Chinese, your thoughts will have few limitations.
They already had to invent one when they started using keyboards. In Taiwan they use a system whereby they have to hit several keys to create one graphological Chinese character.Well sure, but the 28 keystrokes that manifest as seven one-syllable characters are equivalent to ten syllables of English, which require roughly the same number of strokes. (Remember, we have to type spaces; they don't.) Our way has no clear advantage. The deconstruction of the characters comes naturally to any literate Chinese because it's the same system they use for looking them up in a dictionary.
But in mainland China the system most widely used is the pinyin (spell-sound) method using latin letters to create Chinese words phonetically.That will only work when they've Mandarinized the whole country. The various Chinese languages use the same words in the same sequence (about 99% anyway) but pronounce them much differently. ("Five" is wu in Mandarin but ng in Cantonese.) These are not dialects like British vs. American English, these are separate languages like Polish vs. Croatian. There's no possible phonetic writing system that will be legible to speakers of all of them.
Maybe theyre like the Germans you mentioned. The Chairman just stood up and said "let it be thus"...and the people answered with one voice.The communist government has indeed made it a goal to stamp out all languages except Beijing-standard Mandarin. 1984 arrived early and stayed late there, so everyone has been forced to go along with it. There aren't very many Chinese under age fifty who don't speak Mandarin at least passably well.

i love you frag

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i love you fragme too.

I had expected to learn from him when I asked why, but not that jackpot of information.

My POV on the economic future of China vs the US is well known here. Brief summary for the few who may not know: In a few decades the relative importance in the world will be reversed and China will surpass the US economically in a few years after the run on the dollar starts* (less than a decade from now.)

Because of my age, I had decided it was too late for me to try to learn Mandarin (Portuguese, is giving me enough trouble, here in Brazil) After Fraggel's post I may want to reconsider that decision. I have a short wave radio and when spending nites alone in a motel use it. Quite often I hear good signals teaching Chinese, but in past I have quickly tunned elsewhere. That at least will change.

It may not be only their better language for clear thinking that makes the Chinese test better in math and disproportionately do well in sciences courses (in my experience in US universities) but also they may have been more naturally selected for their problem solving and planning abilities. - Just a theory of mine based on fact all humans came out of Africa.

Those groups that traveled thru long and difficult routes probably selectively lost "the dumber ones" - I.e. only the more intelligent ones made it over the mountains that start in Turkey, pass thru Tibet etc. or across the vast deserts of central China etc. They tested the strange white "flat land" in valleys we now call "iced over rivers," which their African father had never seen before walking out on it etc.

By this theory, the Japanese should be even more intelligent than the Chinese as they did all that AND crossed a Sea. Caucasians should on average be dumber than both and the "stay behinds" in Africa who did not have these new envirmental challenges as selection agents should have the lowest intelligence on average. That is not PC, so I hasten to state that any differences that this theory suggests are very minute compared to the variation in all groups. - I.e. given the same educactional experience from birth probably the top 49% of the groups that never left Africa are intrensically more intellignet than the bottom 49% of the Japanese. But this is only a theory, put forth by a Caucasian. - So who would give that much credit? - It is sort of self contradictory is is not? - If it were valid, some Japanese would have published it long ago. ;)

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*China could start it tomorrow, but will not as they still need the US and EU markets for their productive capacity. The rapidly growing domestic wealth and long term obligations China has signed to assure its needed imports of energy, raw material and food stocks will be paid for by Chinese products in trade with these suppliers. When the total demand of this non-US, Non-EU trade plus domestic demand can absorb the Chinese factory output, then it will be to China's advantage to destroy the dollar as the resulting depression in US & EU will reduce the cost of these essential imports more than the losses in their central bank reserves of dollars.)
Of course, one of the major Arab sellers of oil may act first to cause/ trigger the run on the dollar. There is considerable advantage to being the first to do so. There was consideralbe speculation about jointly decoupling from the Dollar prior to the just concluded meeting of these sellers. - sort of scary that not one word about that is in their released summary.

i thought the arabs got their math from the hindus
frag? ;)

i thought the arabs got their math from the hindus
frag? ;)

I suspect they had earlier access(or rather retained) to old Egyptian, Greek or mesopotamian math, while Europe was getting fucked over by the Christians.

abacus shit?
thats kid stuff
frag? ;)

Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?
finnish.

abacus shit?
thats kid stuff
frag? ;)

Go away Philistine.

pardon
no insult directed at you
just the babs and egyptians
the abacus is chinese actually

the greeks could'nt add worth a shit
dont blame em tho
buggering lil boys is kinda fun, i guess
math? will it fit. friction? vaseline

/rotfl

Turkish. Again I'm out of my field of expertise, but I believe there's a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, with no digraphs. I'm not sure syllabic accent is strong, important or irregular in Turkish, so the lack of an indicator may not be a problem.

I speak Turkish, and I can say that this is completely true. I've never read or written anything in Turkish until I was about fifteen-years old, because the situation never arose living in an English-speaking nation. Anyway, when I did go to write/read, it was instant, and very easy (even for words I didn't know). The language is spelled and read just as it sounds, which is very convenient.

I thought the Arabs got their math from the Hindus?India is one of the world's six original, independently arising civilizations (Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt, Olmec, Inca). It was well advanced by the time the Neolithic Arab and other Middle Eastern tribes coalesced into an offshoot of nearby Mesopotamian civilization, which had already diverged into distinct cultures such as Phoenician, Persian and Greco-Roman. The golden age of Arab civilization came during the first millennium CE. They assimilated the mathematics of the (also nearby) Indians, who had not advanced beyond the Greeks in pure theory but had made the important practical breakthrough of a positional numeral notation. The Arabs perfected this by establishing a workable representation for the concept and value of zero, giving rise to the decimal numbering system that is now in universal use.
I suspect they had earlier access (or rather retained) to old Egyptian, Greek or mesopotamian math, while Europe was getting fucked over by the Christians.During the Dark Ages--the millennium of ignorance and squalor during which European civilization, under theocratic/bureaucratic leadership, regressed from the achievements of the Romans including some of their most important inventions like the sewer--the Arabs rescued much of the scholarship of the Classical Era. Of course this included the rudimentary science developed by the Greeks as well as their mathematics. AFAIK this was the most advanced on the planet from a theoretical standpoint, although other cultures had astounding mastery of practical math (or arithmetic), judging by their astronomy which is still in use by astrologers. Coupled with what they acquired from India, this put the Arabs in the position of being leaders in mathematics--or co-leaders, since the Indians had hardly stopped work in the field.

Leonardo Fibonacci traveled to the Arabian lands and brought their positional decimal numbering system to Europe in the early 1200s. This spectacular technology must have astounded Europe's scientists and mathematicians, who immediately adopted it and soon progressed into their own astounding advances in mathematics, as well as helping to bring about the Enlightenment which saw the beginnings of modern science as we know it.

Nonetheless it is instructive to note that no one else in Europe, not even shopkeepers who had bookkeeping to do as a matter of daily life, bothered to convert to "Arabic" numerals for about 300 years. Given this observation on human nature, those who criticize us Americans for being reluctant to adopt the metric system should instead marvel at the British for adopting it. :)
Abacus shit? That's kid stuff?The earliest abacus-like technology was a tablet covered with a layer of fine sand, upon which words or symbols were written and (relatively) easily erased or changed to chart the progress of a transaction. The use of pebbles to indicate numbers was a natural evolution, and this recognizable form of the abacus was in use by the Babylonians in the 3rd millennium BCE. Evidence indicates that the next elaboration with beads on strings was invented somewhere in the larger region of the three overlapping civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. The earliest versions used a sexagesimal (base-60) system, with beads representing factors of 2, 2, 3 and 5. The Chinese played a large part in perfecting this cumbersome device into its familiar decimal-system form.
Finnish.My question is still unanswered: Since syllabic stress ("accent") is not indicated in Finnish writing, is it invariant, e.g. always on the first syllable like Czech, the penultimate like Polish, or the final like French?

Or is it not prominent enough to be phonemic and it doesn't matter, like Chinese and Japanese?
The abacus is Chinese actually.As noted above, it was invented by the Mesopotamians and perfected into its physical form with strings and beads by them or their neighbors. The Chinese had a hand in adapting it to the decimal system, but it cannot properly be called an artifact of Chinese technology.
The Greeks couldn't add worth a shit.A strange comment considering that they calculated pi, square roots and trigonometric functions to several decimal places. They also carried forward the intricately precise calculations of celestial orbits passed down from earlier cultures. They had indisputably mastered what we today consider arithmetic.
I speak Turkish, and I can say that this is completely true. The language is spelled and read just as it sounds, which is very convenient.I have the same question regarding syllabic stress ("accent") as with Finnish. Does it matter? And if so is it invariant or at least so regular that it does not need to be indicated in writing?

A writing system is not completely phonetic unless it transcribes all phonemes.

To Fraggle Rocker:

Have you ever thought of writting a book with a title like:

"Development of the Apes that Speaks"

Many would miss understand and pick up a book with that title expecting to read about some scientific project, which has taught some apes to speak, etc. not appreciating initially how remakable* it is than "nature" long ago made one that does, in many different forms. I recommend avoiding the word "History" in the title as reltaive few, I think, browsing in a book store even go to the History section, but you could check this out before chosing your title. (Perhaps that is just my bias as I seldom do.) "History" could replace "Development" for a more compact title. More compact is: A History of Speaking Apes

If you do, and use that title, I expect to buy one at the "author's cost." I will tell where in USA or Brazil you can send it after cashing my check.
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*As I am sure you know, no machine is even close to speaking (or communicating via a keyboard and screen) well enough to be mistaken for one of these apes. I.e. the "Turing test." Wiki reports: "...There is an ongoing $10,000 bet at the Long Bet Project between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil about the question whether a computer will pass a Turing Test by the year 2029. The bet specifies the Turing Test in some detail. ..." My "side bet" of a lesser sum would be "Machine fails" if test is of couple of days duration, even if the date is extended to 2049. What do you think?

Have you ever thought of writting a book with a title like: Development of the Ape that Speaks?I don't have the background to write a book on linguistics. I may pass for an expert here because I can stop and double-check the information in every line of every post, but out in the world of publishing I'm just an enthusiastic amateur.
Many would misunderstand and pick up a book with that title expecting to read about some scientific project, which has taught some apes to speak.Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee were taught to speak in ASL, which I think is a truly stupendous development. The last I heard, the speaking apes were teaching it to their companions. The experiment seems to have drifted off of the news radar and I'm not sure where it stands today. I've been waiting for some deaf people to become enthused about it and get the necessary education to join the project. They'd have a much different perspective on it from the primatologists who had to learn ASL. For a human who speaks ASL as his primary language to speak to an ape who was taught it by another ape would be a real milestone.
How remarkable it is that "nature" long ago made one that does, in many different forms.I wouldn't be so quick to give nature the credit. We don't know that complex oral communication was not an idea that occurred to an early human as a combination of curiosity, imagination and fortuitous observation, like farming probably was. The only "natural" thing about it might be that humans are "by nature" curious, imaginative and observant.
As I am sure you know, no machine is even close to speaking (or communicating via a keyboard and screen) well enough to be mistaken for one of these apes. I.e. the "Turing test."My profession is IT so I know where we stand with computer mastery of human language.
There is an ongoing $10,000 bet at the Long Bet Project between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil about the question whether a computer will pass a Turing Test by the year 2029. The bet specifies the Turing Test in some detail.Remembering the state of the art 22 years ago in 1985, I'd not be so confident about being able to predict the state of the art 22 years from now in 2029. I don't think it's going to happen quite that soon either, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on that bet.
My "side bet" of a lesser sum would be "Machine fails" if test is of couple of days duration, even if the date is extended to 2049. What do you think?I think you'd be foolish to predict the state of the art 42 years in the future. Computers were into the third generation 42 years ago in 1965. No one predicted that by now a computer would have beat a chess champion, yet they'd still not be able to play go at tournament level. The difference between two problems can be inscrutable and some just turn out to be more difficult than others. We go players get a big chuckle out of the computers agreeing with us: Yes indeed, chess is much easier!

Much of what we have today was predicted, including the internet. (E.g., The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.) We just couldn't say when because we couldn't predict the rate of progress in hardware and software development. But AFAIK no one even predicted MPRPGs, because the concept didn't occur to anyone, and that is a rather amazing technology. I have no doubt that an artifact will one day pass the Turing test, or for that matter that one day androids like Cmdr. Data will walk the earth.

So I guess what I'm saying is:

22 years? Probably not.

Ever? Definitely yes.

42 years? Who knows. But even if not, there will be many amazing things that that we never thought of. Perhaps computers will finally be good enough to compete in go tournaments. :)

... out in the world of publishing I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee were taught to speak in ASL, which I think is a truly stupendous development. ...Don't sell your self short. Your readers would be "enthusiastic amateurs" much less qualified than you in the subject I intended to suggest, but think you did not understand what I was suggesting. Also you do write well and already know a great deal that is interesting in the field I was actually trying to suggest.

I am a little surprised that you too thought I was refering to man's closest and quite hairy relatives. (I stated my expectation that the book store browser might be initially tricked into picking up you book by thinking the "Apes" in my suggested title were really the hairy ones in our common family of apes.) The "Apes" in the title are the "Naked Apes" i.e. man, the only ape highly gifted, at least in ability to comunicate, oin the relatively small family called "apes."

There has been a great deal written (pro and con) about ability of some of the hairy apes to understand (I own a old book on that subject alone.) but I was only refering to humans as apes, which we are, if no arbitary divisions are employed to separate us for other apes.

Your knowledge about mankind's progress as reflected in his improvements in communication, especially the written forms, is what I was suggesting you write about. (Not febble results of the "hairy apes", but the amazing capacity* of the "naked one".)
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*We both agree that it is amazing as the Turing Test passing machine is many years into the future.

I am a little surprised that you too thought I was refering to man's closest and quite hairy relatives. The "Apes" in the title are the "Naked Apes" i.e. man, the only ape highly gifted, at least in ability to comunicate, in the relatively small family called "apes."Apes are a superfamily, Hominoidea. Great apes, Hominidae, and gibbons, Hylobatidae, are the two families.
There has been a great deal written (pro and con) about ability of some of the hairy apes to understand (I own a old book on that subject alone.)Forgive me if I got off on a tangent, I didn't really misunderstand your post. I'm just so excited about the ongoing research into the language abilities of the other hominoid apes. Just yesterday I stumbled across an account of two bonobos who had learned to understand a vocabulary of 3,000 printed words on a computer screen and could use the keyboard to manipulate them into sentences using proper, if primitive, English syntax.

That means that at least four of the hominoid or "great ape" species--chimps, bonobos, at least one of the two gorillas, and humans--have language capability. I wouldn't hold out much hope for orangutans, the only non-social species in the family, who would therefore have no evolutionary drive to develop strong communication skills.

It was easy--a "no-brainer" as it were--to assume that Homo sapiens's uniquely massive forebrain gave us the unique ability to develop language as we know it. The inescapable realization that cetaceans are also communicating at a level beyond single-phoneme epithets shook that up. When Koko saw her first zebra and signed to her keeper, "White tiger," it cinched it for me.
I was only refering to humans as apes, which we are, if no arbitary divisions are employed to separate us for other apes.Many biologists reached the conclusion that humans are apes in the 19th century, but for obvious reasons it was not widely promoted. I think today's new nomenclature is a bit of a compulsive overreaction to years of suppression of that reality, especially in the face of the Evolution Denial movement. The family of "great apes" we now call "Hominidae" was once "Pongidae," named after the oldest branch of the tree, the orangutan.

The DNA differential between humans and the two species of chimps, and even the not-so-closely related two species of gorillas is remarkably small, and the physical manifestations are very slight. Hairlessness, the most striking of the lot, is so ephemeral as to be inconsequential. The brain case, which requires a too-short gestation period and results in the most helpless of all mammalian infants in order to make it through the birth canal, is the key to our intelligence as well as our social structure, since those infants need more than a decade of care as the brain completes its physical development. You'd think the trait people would focus on in this sex-obsessed era would be the realignment of the pelvis that gives us permanent bipedal posture... but also permits face-to-face copulation which regardless of its romantic implications is a tremendous advantage in watching for predators at a moment of reduced defensive ability. Another singular human trait is the buoyancy that permits us to swim. We also have those vestigial webs between our fingers that are one of the key bits of evidence for the Aquatic Ape Theory.

But even if our DNA and physical characteristics were vastly different from the other apes, our relationship within the line classifies us as apes. This is in line with the recent reclassification of the cetaceans as a family (or possibly subfamily) within the order of artiodactyls--even-toed hooved mammals. Despite the lack of hooves they are descended from primitive hippopotamuses who lost the need and ability to return to land. Whales and dolphins are kin to cattle, antelope, sheep, giraffes, pigs, deer and camels.

I appreciate your kind remarks about my writing. I am enjoying a rare and probably short opportunity to make a living at it, and a very non-technical essay I wrote was, surprisingly, published as a chapter in a very arcane technical book. Perhaps in a few years, if I ever get to retire, I'll concentrate more on it.

sucking up?
frag, you will not withstand my scrutiny.

...When Koko saw her first zebra and signed to her keeper, "White tiger," it cinched it for me....I forget which educated non-human punched out "water bird" on the communication board upon first seeing a duck, but that did the same for me.

I assume you have seen the news on TV that in some memory tests, which requre touching randomly located digits (0 thru 9) on a touch senstive display screen, the non-human primate is both faster and and more accurate than all the graduate students at that Japanese university trying to do the same.
This result in the "easy version" of the test, which statically displays the digits for a few seconds, could be just better gross manual movement abilities, such as years of daily swinging thru trees etc. might be expected to produce.

The more difficult verions displays the 10 different digits for only a small fraction of a second be fore their locations are "masked" by identical white squares. There is too little time to touch more than one, before they all disappear and only the white squares mark where the digits were. The non-human subject still quickly touch these white squares in the correct order, but humans can not remember what was where and make many mistakes or fail to even try all before the screen goes blank, just prior to the next trial.

Persponally, I am glad to seen the egotistical humans taken down a notch.
Even back in highschool, I delighted in advancing the argument that dogs were smarter than men who only do better on tests that humans have designd to measure intelligence. I even made an IQ test up for use on both humans and dogs. One of the questions was: Did a female or male wear these pants last week? etc. I no longer remember any other questions* / parts of the "Dog best IQ test", but most all agreed that the dogs would do better on the IQ test I had designed for their benefit.

Perhaps that POV is natural for all us bots designed to emulate humans. Whoops! ;)

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*I will make another up now which exploits the fact that humans are dominated by their vision to believe many false things. Such as that in a movie the words heard are sounds originating from where they see the film image's lips moving instead of coming from approxinately 90 degrees to the right or left of that, where the wall speakers are located. No dog would be so dumb.

Is there any such thing as a language that is spelled exactly as its pronounced...that is intelligently designed?

Has anyone mentioned Spanish yet? I'd say it's reasonably well spelled, at least when contrasted with English and French. The letters "b" and "v" catch you though.


Esperanto was designed so that one letter is one sound and it closely follows the International Phonetic Alphabet, so perhaps that qualifies. I don't know if it counts as intelligently designed but German is the most like that of all "natural" European languages.

To a great extent, yeah. I know, however, that "doch" and "hoch" don't rhyme. The former has the vowel sound /ɔ/, and the latter /o/. I think. And I'm still not confident with the pronunciation of "durch" and the "-ig" suffix in words like "zwanzig". I've read that "g" in that context is /ç/, but a native speaker told me it's /ɡ/ (and implicitly /k/ at the end of a word, per German pronunciation rules).

Has anyone mentioned Spanish yet? I'd say it's reasonably well spelled, at least when contrasted with English and French. The letters "b" and "v" catch you though.The biggest problem in English, French and Spanish (and many other languages) is going the other way. Figuring out how to write a word. I don't need to elaborate on that in regard to English and French with their bounty of silent letters, but even in Spanish it's a problem. Is it danio or daño? Arroyo or arrollo? (In fact both spellings are used depending on whether you mean the topographical feature or the process.) Cocer, "cook" or coser, sew? Admittedly the LL/Y and C/S are the results of the leveling of Castilian pronunciation into Latin American. But that's a major reason that spelling reforms are not done in many languages: Which dialect is "standard?" You'll never come up with a system for that both Americans and Brits agree is phonetic! Chinese is the way it is because over the millennia dialects have diverged into separate languages so Mandarin wu (five) is Cantonese ng. They all read the same han zi but there's no way to render those disparate words phonetically.

Nonetheless I agree with you in spirit and give Spanish high marks. It has done away with doubled letters and uses an accent mark when the stress is not in the standard place. If they'd replace Ñ with NI (as the Catalonians have with NY) it would go a long way.
To a great extent, yeah. I know, however, that "doch" and "hoch" don't rhyme. The former has the vowel sound /ɔ/, and the latter /o/. I think.Hmm. There are many dialects of German but I was taught that those do indeed rhyme, with a vowel about midway between those two, somewhat like the way the Brits pronounce "call."
And I'm still not confident with the pronunciation of "durch" and the "-ig" suffix in words like "zwanzig". I've read that "g" in that context is /ç/, but a native speaker told me it's /ɡ/ (and implicitly /k/ at the end of a word, per German pronunciation rules).The soft CH varies by dialect, from almost a SCH to almost (but not quite!) a hard CH. The ig suffix is K in some dialects, in others it is a soft CH, with the whole spectrum that comes with that. It's only G if it's followed by a grammatical suffix and then it's invariant in any dialect.