A Case for Pronunciation over Spelling, or Multitude of Alphabets

Istanbul

What if natives of languages using non-Latin writing systems (Arabic, Japanese, Korean) pronounce English (lingua franca of the day) better than ones using Latin alphabets (French, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish)? Better in the sense of only the correct vowels and consonants, with the correct ‘intention’ in a way; not in the sense of saying /k/ better, that depends on the native language’s phonology.

Microsoft: The Japanese say /maɪkuɾosoɸuto/ (マイクロソフト) and the French say /mikʁosoft/ (Fr. Microsoft). The Turkish say ‘mikrosoft’, most likely due to getting the word ‘mikro’ from the French and continuing the trend but this new company (Microsoft) uses an English pronunciation. Even though Russian has the prefix ‘микро-‘ (like the French), they write the company as ‘Ма́йкрософт’, leading to the people of Russia pronouncing it with /aɪ/ (the correct vowels). But because the French use the same symbols for their alphabet as English, they don’t mess with the spelling and pronounce it like it’s their word. Maybe they could have written ‘Majcrosoft’ instead.

René Descartes: French is not the lingua franca of the world in 2021. If someone has not heard this man’s name from a pronunciation with the correct omissions, it’s very easy for them to pronounce it with their own phonology (only in the case of natives of languages using Latin alphabets. Koreans just say /ɾɯne teɡʱɑlɯtʰɯ/ (르네 데카르트), writing it in its pronunciation, not by overlaying the French characters onto their alphabet. One Forvo pronunciation from Spanish of this name says /Deskaɾtes/ which is very much expected, with the Spanish not changing the spelling. Russians write Декарт, Azeris write Dekart (an exception, making the whole population pronounce it correctly), Arabs write ديكارت. I presume many people of his day would have said ‘Renatus Cartesius’ ironically, the European scientific lingua franca being Latin in those days.

If some language doesn’t use a Latin alphabet, then its speakers learn English with its Latin alphabet, having only English phonology in their head associated with Latin characters. Their own language doesn’t have any part in their interpretation of those characters. They only know the letters from English, or maybe another Latin language.

All alphabets (or writing systems) adopting foreign words, even though they may have the same characters, in a pronunciation considered fashion, rather than spelling, would result in a uniform pronunciation of famous names across the globe. As Joshua Foer’s story goes, there would be one philosopher Descartes, not two. For starters, the English would write Decart.

Languages using Latin alphabets not changing the spelling of words, adopted from another language with a Latin alphabet, seems like an illusion. These alphabets are different, albeit they may use characters similar to each other. Each one has different sounds in another language. Going the route of Azerbaijani would be helpful in reducing the distinct pronunciations of common names.

This also goes for English. The English and the Americans say /pæɹɪs/ & /pɛɹɪs/ (Paris) respectively, but the French way is /paʁi/. They could have written Pari and the entire States (330~ million) would have said it like the French. Ice Cube, an actor invited to the festival at the age of 22, would have said /kæn/ instead of /kænz/ if they had spelled it ‘Can’ in English decades ago.

Admittedly, the world has become much more writing-oriented, and searching phrases on documents, people would have to differentiate between different languages using Latin alphabets but this is not much of a problem because most people don’t know more than 2 languages (knowing a language meaning with a very high proficiency level) and no one searches for documents outside their language capabilities. Also, the concept ‘language’ is oral, writing is a tool. Speech is a tool, it can be argued, but no one is born with a pen.

KFC: In Istanbul, I heard a woman saying /keːfeːd͡ʒeː/ (KFC) the other day (which also prompted the idea presented here). Forvo entry of KFC provides other examples: Spanish and Dutch pronunciations with their own phonologies −quite different than the original−, while a Thai person pronouncing it in the original.