291–300 of 615 posts
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French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.
French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.
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Or live and live, read and read (past participle), or castle (the t is mute) or bear, beard, the ea is different. I do not want to be offensive, there are lots more , but it is an amazing sh*tshow the mapping.
If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)
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That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…
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It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…
At least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.
This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names.
The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.
Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.
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Portuguese and German are like that. You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly. English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms. English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well. Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced diff…
French is a lot less bad than English in this regard. In French you can usually (though not always) predict how a word is pronounced from its spelling, but not vice versa. In English, both directions are impossible.
Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written, as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and English are of type deep orthography.
Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.
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That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries.…
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It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…
I learned to read phonetically, sounding out the words. It worked very well. No other scheme for learning to read has worked remotely as well.
/s?
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Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples. English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization. Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
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It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn by speaking. It's not unique to english.
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I thought the article did a good job of explaining how English uses additional letters where French use accents, like the "h" in "ship" to indicate how the s is pronounced.
that's how "sh" is pronounced, not how "s" is pronounced same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in - sugar - sure - machine - Chicago - mustache - sheikh - nation (!!!!) Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them? English doesn't make any sense.
I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound."
That's an extra letter being used to indicate a different sound than the base sound, similar to how diacritics are used to indicate a different sound than the base sound ("the cedilla has the function of ensuring that a c can be pronounced like an s, despite coming before an a, o, or, u").