At least you can learn which letters to ignore when pronouncing a word. But English pronunciation is completely f-ed up. How do you pronounce "read" or "lead"?
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it's true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone -
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don't agree.
- Lord Cromer, 1902
Or "The Chaos", Gerard Nolst Trenité, 1922
There are a few of them. There's also
Phoney Phonetics.
One reason why I cannot spell,
Although I learned the rules quite well
Is that some words like coup and through
Sound just like threw and flue and Who;
When oo is never spelled the same,
The duice becomes a guessing game;
And then I ponder over though,
Is it spelled so, or throw, or beau,
And bough is never bow, it's bow,
I mean the bow that sounds like plow,
And not the bow that sounds like row -
The row that is pronounced like roe.
I wonder, too, why rough and tough,
That sound the same as gruff and muff,
Are spelled like bough and though, for they
Are both pronounced a different way.
And why can't I spell trough and cough
The same as I do scoff and golf?
Why isn't drought spelled just like route,
or doubt or pout or sauerkraut?
When words all sound so much the same
To change the spelling seems a shame.
There is no sense - see sound like cents -
in making such a difference
Between the sight and sound of words;
Each spelling rule that undergirds
The way a word should look will fail
And often prove to no avail
Because exceptions will negate
The truth of what the rule may state;
So though I try, I still despair
And moan and mutter "It's not fair
That I'm held up to ridicule
And made to look like such a fool
When it's the spelling that's at fault.
Let's call this nonsense to a halt."
- Attributed to Vivian Buchan, 1966
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you can say French on the internet, no need to self censor like your mommy will tell you off
A lot of words are acceptable on the internet but under no circumstances whatsoever should anyone type out a word as bad as the F-word. You do not yet know the extent of what you've done…
Los Baguettinos
Pardon my Fr*nch
Let him wank himself with his Anglo-Saxon superiority.
The irony of writing the post in English, isn’t lost in you, is it?
Neaux
OP found it tough to thoroughly think this one through.
English mfs copying those words and once again changing their pronunciation <--
Bordeaux
Bor-dewks? NON!
Bor-doh? OUI!
I live in a city founded by the French and nothing is pronounced the French way. Can't win.
New Orleans?
Nawlins*
Versailles, Kentucky is probably the dumbest one I can think of
Miami, OK - “mee-am-ah.” Notable for being near Picher, the ghost town/superfund site.
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English is no much better... In contrast, Korean and Spanish are quite "what you write is what it sounds"
Also in Hawaiian. I was first told “just pronounce all the letters.” This is why you can have words that are all vowels like “Aiea” (basically “a-ee-ay-ya” but kinda fast).
that’s because fucking missionaries came in, created the written language and standardized the spoken language then beat all the children into compliance
then their children overthrew the island and beat them for speaking at all so it almost died and the revival was focused on survival of the language over nuance
it used to have much more spoken variation
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EEE aaaaa uuuuuu.
Qwa?
EEEEE AAAAA UUUUU!
QWAAAA?
GIVE ME THE DAMN WATER
English just saw the French doing this and said: hold my beer
Is there a high-level explanation of how that clusterfuck happened? I mean, all the roman languages around France are fairly reasonable in their spelling.
People used to pronounce all the letters and then over time they got lazy and stopped pronouncing everything
And they have actually removed some of them. The ê in forêt indicates it used to be spelled forest but that was so long ago that they're willing to admit it's not necessary. Unlike the k in knife, what would we do without that!
Me: "I'd like to buy a nif, please."
Store clerk: "You sure you don't want some vowels instead?"
The pronunciation of words evolved but the spelling of most words didn’t.
Like the Great Vowel Shift in English
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There is an old explanation for this. I asked my French teacher a while ago.
The old French language was written like you pronounce it. During the renaissance, they got into classicism and made the language resemble Latin. Hence tan became temps from the Latin tempus.
The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.
So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs ("ils mangent") is silent because the "ent" sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn't for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.
Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it's all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can't spell "nénuphar" properly. Children's purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.
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I believe it is a conspiracy by HP to make us use more ink.
A lot of unpronounced letters are actually pronounced conditionally, for example in “Je suis un homme” the last s of suis is pronounced because it is followed by a vowel.
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tru
This needs the Mr. Bean meme of the English cheating off the French.
Mon deux!
Yeah, two can play at this game. 😌
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