Comparing C++ to the English Language

I was reading this article on Wikipedia
[ur]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English[/utl]

And it got me thinking about how no English speaker anywhere could ever learn or use all of those words in a lifetime, and that the common speaker restricts themselves to around 10,000 words for everyday communication. English has thousands of rules, and tens of thousands of exceptions for every one. Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word. Yet, English is the second most-used language in the world, trailing Mandarin by only a small margin, and twice as used as the third most-used language, Spanish.

It then dawned on me, that this is extremely similar to C++. People love to talk about how C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, smashing anything and everything into a huge ball of functionality, the entirety of which nobody could ever fully utilize. Yet, it is one of the most useful and widely-used programming languages in existence.

TL;DR: WE C++ NAO

Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word.
Damn ideograms!

But according to the insighted fellow at http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1330080777/28 , we only know 100 words in a lifetime. AT MOST!

>>2,3
iitaliic 2houtpole2 detected

>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
Current jōyō kanji are those on a list of 2,136 characters issued in 2010.
RISC as hell!

>>2
It's true that English has this is common with an ideographic language, but so do many other European languages (despite the fact that they're obviously not ideographic). I was trying to express that words in English are not spoken as spelled (e.g., "knight"), as opposed to a language like Spanish (in most cases, anyway).

>>6
That's a backwards compatibility problem, not a design problem. Old words were written down a thousand years ago and everyone got used to spelling them one way, and then the pronunciation changed and we didn't fix the spellings. A few spelling changes did happen before England went mad with power and started colonizing the whole world, but they were completely stupid changes that made stuff look more like French (mise -> mice, fisc -> fish) or Dutch (cniht -> knight) instead of actually fixing shit.

This is also why we write vowels differently from the rest of the world.

Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word.
Damn ideograms!

>>7
I'm failing to see how this at all relates to ideograms.

>>8
I was trying to express that words in English are not spoken as spelled (e.g., "knight"), as opposed to a language like Spanish (in most cases, anyway).
I meant to quote this sentence, but forgot.

>>9
Alright, but can we both agree that words in English are generally not pronounced as spelled, and that the average English speaker has little reference point in regards to pronunciation when encountering a new word?

>>10
But I don't agree at all. It's true that there are a few hundred ridiculous exceptions that you have to memorize (women, boatswain, anything with "ugh" after a vowel); still, all other words can be pronounced correctly if you know the rules, and any literate English speaker should know enough of those rules to pronounce the vast majority of English words.

The one thing I'll concede is that a great number of English speakers are not sufficiently literate that the system makes any sense to them whatsoever, and from their point of view, you're right.

Reading eerie thoughts.

>>1
It's true that there are a few hundred ridiculous exceptions that you have to memorize

I disagree. There are thousands upon thousands of words that you can't pronounce by spelling. Compound this by adding in word stress positions (which make the word sound completely wrong if not pronounced correctly) and words with identical spelling patterns but different pronunciations, and I would argue that almost every word in the English language is an 'exception'.

>>13
As an addendum, I will in turn concede that there is a very small set of simple rules that apply in some cases; however (ironically enough), words that abide by these rules are exceptions, rather than the rule.

>>14
If the rules are all wrong 99% of the time then they're imaginary and nobody should ever mention them.

>>11
Read >>15

>>15
If the rules are all wrong 99% of the time
...then we're not talking about the same kind of rule at all.

What I'm saying is that you could write a program that turns words (not individual letters) into pronunciations, and it would be right most of the time. Even when it's wrong, it would most often be a matter of either a slight ambiguity (unionize vs. un-ionize) or a bizarre etymology that the program couldn't detect automatically (you can usually tell if a word is Greek or French). You wouldn't see 100% incorrect pronunciations like the famous "fish = ghoti" joke coming out of left field. And yes, you usually can figure out the correct syllable to stress.

If you guys can find a dozen legitimate "ghoti" examples in English, where the spelling and pronunciation have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I'll shut up. In the meantime, check out this guy who seems to be doing almost exactly what I said: http://www.zompist.com/spell.html