English does use a phonetic script. The letters represent phonemes and carry no semantic meaning on their own, as opposed to an ideographic or logographic script. That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.
There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
>English does use a phonetic script. (...) That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.
The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
> The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.
The fact that it uses Latin letters doesn't make it phonetic if the same letter consistently resolves to different phonemes or lack thereof, depending on its context.
You may argue it's not a very good phonetic script, with all of the special cases present... But letters mostly represent sounds, unlike written languages where characters represent concepts.
A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
I don't know what kind it uses, but it's not phonetic, because the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your claims.
If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.
If it was not phonetic, what "idea" would the letter "r" represent? That it can represent different phonetics depending on other rules doesn't change that it represents phonetics.
English is an alphabetic language not a phonetic one.
In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.
Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.
You are not wrong in idea, but you are wrong in specifics. Does English use a 1:1 phonetic language? No. Of course not. Just like most "functional programming" languages have a lot of differences between them. The colloquial use of the term is not nearly as precise as many think it is.
Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D
People confidently stating as fact stuff they know little or nothing about. Ask any competent linguist: English has a phonetic script. (Not a very good one, perhaps, but phonetic nonetheless.)
The issue in this thread is confusion between two separate ideas: "English is a phonetic langauge" and "English uses a phonetic script".
The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.
The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.
"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.
There were blog posts that surfaced in the '10s trying to make a case for official inclusion of emoji into the written language. Thankfully that concept got little traction.
There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.