Aha! British English

[EtchedPixels]

And then, of course there are the Asian languages, especially Mandarin and Japanese which are tonal, and give absolutely NO indication in their written form as to how they should be pronounced....

Pedantically speaking Mandarin doesn't have a written form.  China has a set of many spoken languages and a written language that isn't any of them but a separate symbolic language because it uses symbols for concepts. It's not really tied to any spoken language - which was precisely the idea.

The only real 'western' analogy is the (entirely non western) number system. The squiggle '2' you read as "two", a German reads as "zwei" but to both it is the same concept. '2' is not English or German or French - its a symbol for a concept.

Makes the dictionary really really interesting!

Japanese is a bit complicated - some of it is pronunciation some is not. If you are going to Japan take photos of things you might need (toilet, sandwich, train, taxi(japanese one!)) because you can then wave your phone at someone and get directions.

Without getting into any controversy, no doubt as a result of such experiences, perhaps the 'English' had the right idea during the 'Empire' era, when they insisted on the use of their own language as the 'standard' for

This was actually of course well tested by then. They same was done within England with 'chancery English' because it was no good getting answers from other parts of the country in English given it might as well have been in martian at the time. Chancery actually began the meaningful standardisation of handwriting, grammar and vocabulary and to an extent spelling (although English never succeeded in fixing spelling - or grammar in places).

communication.  In India (for example) where there are at least 500 different languages in one country (as it was then) it made perfect sense.. 

There were of course 'unintended consequences' of such actions. Spike Milligan and Peter Sellars come to mind... ('nuff said).

English is actually a quite bizarre language in many ways. In Welsh for example I can accurately read out an entire document  without having a clue what I am reading - because the spelling is phonetic (we just hide the decoder ring).

Alan

[scottmitchell74]

My recent Torchwood binge allowed me to hear a lot of the Welsh accent (though I figure not hard-core or "country" or some sort of hard to decipher regional version of it) and I love it. Just so unique, and for me, really hard to replicate as an American. It's so distinct. I find it to be sort of musical in relation to other accents from the UK and Ireland.