[ELI5] Why have some languages like Spanish kept the pronunciation of the written language so that it can still be read phonetically, while spoken English deviated so much from the original spelling?
In: Culture
It is important to note that spoken languages always evolve in the way that they’re spoken. Spanish is no exception to this; 1600s Spanish is very different to the Spanish of today, and even among different regions and countries, Spanish is spoken differently.
There are a couple of key differences between Spanish and English that makes it more ‘phonetic’:
* Note that both languages use the *Latin alphabet*. The language for which it was most suited for is, by and large, Latin, which had five vowel sounds and some number of consonants. English has always had more than five; hence why we have to distinguish between the *long* vowel sounds and the *short* vowel sounds, and why two vowel letters like ‘ew’ make one sound. Spanish is also not quite a perfect match to Latin’s sounds: letters like ‘h’ are pretty much obsolete as Spanish doesn’t have this sound, and letters like ‘b’ and ‘v’ actually make the same sound in Spanish. So Spanish isn’t as phonetic as it might seem at first glance.
* Spanish has updated its spelling to reflect changing pronunciations. This is largely thanks to a central body governing – written – Spanish: the Réal Academia, which happens to be highly respected by education and the media, and so any decisions they make happens to eventually make it through to all parts of society. English lacks such a central body, and so it’s much harder to convince people to spell differently. For all the rag that English gets, no one actually seems enthusiastic about a more phonetic variant. Quite a few Commonwealth speakers I know seem to scoff at the idea of adopting even American English spelling, even though it was born out of Noah Webster’s (failed) attempt to make English a more phonetic language.
* The pronunciation of Spanish has changed in a way that doesn’t seem contradictory to the way it’s written. For example, ‘g’ and ‘d’ have evolved to a much softer sound than we would say them in English. When a Spanish speaker says ‘de nada’, it’s closer “de natha”, but since Spanish originally had no ‘th’ sound to begin with, d just becomes associated with that ‘th’ sound; same with ‘g’, whose pronunciation is closer to the soft Dutch ‘g’. Contrast this with English; the ‘ea’ in ‘meat’ and ‘ee’ in ‘meet’ where once pronounced differently, but these two sounds merged a few centuries ago to give the modern pronunciation.
This, on top of no one being able to convince speakers to spell them the same when they started to be pronounced the same, creates a very much ‘fossilised’ version of English; a spelling of English that largely reflects its old pronunciation, while Spanish has, for the most part, managed to keep up the way it writes with the speaking populace.
Side-note:
There exists this big misconception that language use is dictated by the way it is written; this is very much false. In all regards, the way a language is written is subservient to the way that the people speak it. Written English (or written Spanish) is not the ‘ideal’ nor ‘correct’ way to use or speak the language; this is just a by-product of the way writing evolves: the elite and educated use writing, therefore how they do it must be somehow ‘correct’. This is, of course, not at all reliable. When the French Revolution occurred, the way the bourgeois used French immediately became stigmatised, and the language of the revolutionaries became the ‘correct’ way. The point being, what happens to be considered the ‘correct’ way of writing or using a language has no objective reason; it’s just that that version happened to be in vogue.
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