141–150 of 165 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)
To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.
> about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken.
That concept is called pronunciation.
If the ‘e’ is pronounced ‘ah’ then just change the damn spelling of the word to reflect it then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.
> not about pronunciation > about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken. That concept is called pronunciation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.
The famous ghoti as an alternate spelling for fish. Gh like in enough O like in women Ti like in nation
As a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word. English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native…
The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers. And the least phonetically consistent is English.
It's even better than that, there is a single sound for each letter individually. Put together those sounds and that's how the word is deterministically pronounced, no guessing or learning (or even understanding) necessary.
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling. [snip] >By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for…
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling. [snip] >By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for…
I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling. [snip] >By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for…
I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".
Maybe there are cases where the original isn't Latin, but I've never noticed one, and French does not have many words of non-Latin origin. I'm not sure if English speakers commonly know that, but English is a rare case of thoroughly mixed origins.