"Entrepreneur" is a such a difficult word to pronounce that I give up the idea of becoming one as soon as it strikes me which, believe me, it does pretty often. The word is such a tongue twister, something in me always stops me from trying to pronounce it. It's so irritating to say it or hear it. Click Here with your speakers turned on, to hear "Entrepreneur". It's pronounced as "ontroprinyure". Nobody can guess this pronunciation by just looking at the spelling. There are many other such words which I don't like to utter. Most of the Hindi Gaalis for example. The same Gaalis in English sound ok and more civilized but less intense at the same time. They don't usually have any impact though. I think the golden rule is - give gaalis to someone in Hindi if you really mean to hurt the person, and in English if it's just for fun. Englis is a phunny languaga na. So use it for phun.
Another such word is "Rendezvous". I hate it. Click on the link to hear it. It's pronounced as something like "Rondavu". This sounds like a Hindi gaali. What I don't understand is, if "Rondavu" is the way it is supposed to be pronounced, why spell it as "Rendezvous". English is full of this kind of words. Ok, I know English is not phonetc and all. But that's the point...why the hell is it not? Isn't a script meant to be a symbolic depiction of sounds of a language? And even if English is not phonetic, that doesn't give you the liberty to spell words in some way and pronounce in some other way for no good reason. It's totally unnecessary. It seems like a bunch of mischievous people sat together and invented this confusing script and defined its inconsistent usage, just to have some fun. Can we do something about it?
Laguage is a medium for verbal expression. It's for communication via speech and sound. For any language, there have to be words which have meanings and fixed ways of pronunciation. A script is a set of symbols by which we can write whatever is spoken, so that it can be read later on to produce the same sounds as if we are hearing all that. So a script is a way of storing data, which can be retrieved as and when desired. The process of "Reading" a script is to convert it to lingual sounds.
Assuming that all languages are on an equal level in terms of having words, meanings and pronunciations, let's try to understand how having a phonetic script is better than having a non-phonetic script. In case of a phonetic script, there is nothing like a spelling. If you know the script and the syntax, you can write any word, any sound in any language. The concept of spelling becomes crucial in case of non-phonetic scripts like that of English, because even if you know the entire alphabet, you cannot spell any word straightaway coz those alphabets don't behave in a reliably similar way at all places. So you have to "know" the spelling as defined by some authority. As a result, such languages end up consuming a lot of your memory to remember the spellings of all the words you know. That's an inefficient model to follow. Why not have a phonetic script instead? Learn the script and you are done!
Another advantage with phonetic scripts is that you can program a computer to read them. That's possible because when the rules are fixed and are consistently followed, you can always program a machine to work according to them. For non-phonetic scripts like that of English, there are more exceptions than rules, which will result in inefficient programs and the output will be a mess. Pronunciation of names is one good example. Mis-Pronunciation is less likely if names are written in phonetic scripts. With non-phonetic scripts, the computer may need a huge database of all the words with their correct pronunciations. You may not bother about wasting some memory of the computer and there could be algorithms to browse the database faster for each word, but all that is absolutely unnecessary. And what about the new words that keep getting added to the language? And imagine, probably we've already created such a database in our brains when we learnt written English. May be, our brains are too fast and efficient to make this clutter noticable...And I guess, as I am typing this article, the way I'm browsing my database - words and sounds to their spellings - is opposite to what I do when I read something...so the brain might need to work harder when I read or write in English, thereby consuming resources which I could otherwise have contributed to the clarity of my thought.
It's impossible to get rid of English or its script at this stage. We've come too far away with English to replace the language or its script with any other language or script. It's grown to become the laguage connecting people all over the world. English has to stay, inspite of all the problems associated with it.
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