French and English is switched.
French orthography is way more coherent than English. From the spelling you can pretty much tell how a french word is pronounced. Not the other way around, sure, but that’s a damn sight better than English which manages neither.
Meanwhile, Russian is 99% phonetic if you take the total of 5 hours to learn the Cyrillic alphabet (which by the way Duolingo was actually incredible at, just don’t use duo for actually learning the language)
I learned to read Cyrillic from reading Wikipedia. I got obsessed with Russian history and Russian entries in Wikipedia have the English name alongside the Cyrillic spelling. So, I read the Russian words alongside the English spelling to help me how to read in Russian. I also thought I could try reading Greek since Cyrillic is based from it, but for some reason I am struggling. I think I can quickly learn to read letters based from the shape and the sound they represent but Greek letters are a bit more complicated for me.
I’d put Finnish first. Every letter is there for a purpose and no tricks.
Take it from the Serbs then. They have rule that states write as you say it and that means they even change the spelling of foreign words and such. Foreign names for people and towns are spelled as you would pronounce them. So New York is something like Njujork and Michael Jackson becomes Majkl Džekson or somethig similar.
I like the Serbian rule. It’s not unnecessarily complicated.
They do that sometimes in Finnish, less now than before. At least that’s what I read on faisbuk.
I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning. Read this and was like…
“Spanis” 👁👄👁
Yes, I know some of those are technically pronounced differently, but the average English speaker can’t tell.
But honestly, as someone who learned French as an adult, the biggest hurdle is knowing which combinations of letters make which sounds. Many are completely illogical - the 3rd person plural verb conjugations are particularly weird - but there is less inconsistentcy than English. The harder part is actually trying to get your English tongue to say words like “aéroport” or “heureux” or “accueillir” properly.
There are always some outliers, like “oeuf” (egg) being pronounced “uhf” while the plural “oeufs” being pronounced “oo”, but you get used to those.
I think I’d write oeufs as “uhh” in quasiphonetinglish
English pronunciation is much worse than just silent letters. It doesn’t really make any sense and you need to learn tons of words by heart: https://fishofgold.net/2023/12/08/english-pronunciation-is-stupid/
Sometimes even the exact same set of letters are pronounced differently. The verb live vs a live broadcast. Read (present) vs read (past) and many more…. Are you kidding me?
French is actually quite regular with fewer exceptions to the rules of pronounciation.
People like to use french words like “Oiseau” (bird) as an example of why french pronounciation is bad but they just do not know the rules of it!
Take “Oiseau” for example “Oi” is usually pronounced [wa] like in “Oie” with a silent e, “Oise” or other words containing it. -seau is a typical suffix. So a french reader can easily know how to pronounce “oiseau” just from reading it. You just can’t because you don’t know the rules of French pronounciation!
English is so much worse with pronounciations that ignores spelling: Take the word “colonel” for example. What’s worse is that in English there seemingly are no rules whatsoever with vocals being long or short depending on historical reasons and consonants appearing or disapering depending on whether Mercury is in retrograde.
I feel like we might as well just go back to symbol languages. What’s the point of an alphabet if the letters don’t actually convey consistent pronunciation? It’s just more confusing because the letters imply rules which don’t hold.
There are more than one word that must pronounce badly xd
And when the letters are removed, French still lets you know there was a letter at some point by putting a little hat on top of the preceding letter. It makes learning it even funnier.
Forêt and forest. Arrêt and arrest. Hôpital and hospital.
As a native French speaker this may be the laziest part to me. We still say someone was hoSpitalisé, in a hôpital. People can be défeneStrés through fenêtres. Someone can be arrêté through arreStation.
Lots of hidden pains and treasures. When I was a kid I thought learning all this shit was pointless. We should just reform everything and spell like we speak. But then I also learned to appreciate the evolution of the language, and why it’s aisle and isle in English.
We should just reform everything and spell like we speak.
Let me introduce you to slavic languages, where AFAIK it’s the rule, not exception
It’s not a rule in Slovene but pretty much any word is spelled the way you would pronounce it.
Same for Estonian, which is why we need umlauts for letters that don’t exist in many other languages’ versions of the latin alphabet. But since we’re special snowflakes, we also have õ, which is such an uncommon letter in the world that we have a border sign on our biggest island to signify where the language border exists: On the mainland and most places we use õ, but people on Saaremaa people will use ö instead because they’re behind the times.
We also have ž and š but they’re a bit less special, many european languages use them. Because how would you even know how to pronounce gelatine without writing it as želatiin?
Couple of years ago I learned Estonian has letters ž and š, and as a Balkan Slav it made me excited (I’m weird) 😂
I’m curious where the ‘s’ was dropped first, in speech or writing? Written French is quite prescriptive with phonetics so I would guess it dropped from spoken language first? (And each little ‘hat’ is just a ‘tip of the hat’ to the lost letter? (Ok, I’ll see myself out lol))
Indeed. According to a literary website from Lyon’s library, the s was not pronounced in certain words well before we stopped writing them. Apparently it took a few centuries to introduce the circumflex.
Bien que la graphie ait longtemps gardé la présence de ce /s/, on ne le prononçait plus depuis bien avant qu’on ne décide, au XVIIIe siècle (dès l’édition de 1740 du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française), de noter cet amuïssement par le recours systématique à l’accent circonflexe. L’amuïssement du /s/ en position appuyante date pourtant d’après 1066.
Or in English
Although the spelling retained the /s/ for a long time, it had ceased to be pronounced well before the decision was made in the 18th century (starting with the 1740 edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy) to systematically indicate this elision through the use of the circumflex accent. The elision of the /s/ in stressed position, however, dates back to after 1066.
That would be very typical of French. Spoken French is well in advance on the written form. Hence the jokes at its expense.
Maybe in a few other centuries we’ll have made a few other reforms to match what’s written with what we’re saying, but I think most of us kind of like that. The written form is the glue that holds all the varieties of French together and writing formal French also makes one feel a bit smug.
The funniest part of this meme is: English is worse than French.
French pronunciation works by geological principles: over the years, what looks like an intricate arrangement of vowels and consonants gets eroded and folded down to what’s essentially a nuanced grunt.
Sounds like Australian. Or strayn, as I would say to a fellow denizen of this beloved wonderhell.
I think you actually just described Danish.
Why pronounce a consonant when you just can swallow it and use a glottal stop instead?
“A g å a ø i a å” is a proper sentence where I come from.
It means: A goat on an island in a river.
Where is this and how would you pronounce the “g”?
Also, you made me think about a story about a shop in a southern Norwegian city, where the owner put up a sign around lunch time: “e æ a å eder” (I am off to eat), the shop owner across the street saw it and made his own sign saying “e æ a e å” (I am off as well (lit. I am off I also))
It’s North Jutland. The g is pronounced as “ge” almost like German “geh”.
I’m not native, and even after 15 years I sometimes still don’t understand the local dialect.
The Norwegian Kamelåså joke about Danish is funny because its true.
That’s just called language
Gaeilge: awww, you guys are adorable
French: Every living thing is born without meaning, but non-living things have a gender
German: Dogs are male, cats are female, kids are middlesex. Your refrigerator is male.
Dogs are male, cats are female
There’s no way to disprove that! Have you ever seen a cat penis?
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No, the WORDS have a gender because it makes things sound better.
And different words used to name the same thing can have a different gender
French: oui paid for the whole alphabet and by God oui’re using the whole alphabet
And we are going to use the almost all the alphabet to make exactly one sound.
For instance eaux is pronounced o.
> Heard my friend is going to ‘Bordo’
> Look up Bordo
> Mfw it’s spelled Bordeaux
I had the reverse problem when listening to the excellent “the fall of Rome” podcast. At some point, the american host starts to talk extensively about a city port in the South of France named something like “Awol”.
I was confused, thinking : “I lived close to the area he is describing for 3 years as a student, and never heard of that city. Maybe it’s like in Marseille where the port was re discovered in the 80s inland, many hundred meters from the sea.” After more than an hour of listening I realised he was simply saying “Arles” with an American accent.
It is a very famous Roman city with beautiful ruins where I went several times, so I might just be dumb.
Okay how the hell did they messed up the pronounce so much??
I found it. It’s episode 7: the three transformations of Roman Gaul.
He starts to talk about it at minute 7.
Listening to it again he really struggles with this one, which is weird because I have otherwise no difficulty to understand him when he uses other French or Italian names.
I’ve always thought it was funny there is no “o” in “eaux”.
What do you mean ? IT IS obviously the only correct way to write o.
The French word for bird is oiseau, which contains every vowel and none of them are pronounced correctly.
Oi wah
S Z
Eau O
Sound correct to me.
Letters in words are never pronounced like they sound in the alphabet, they are pronounced in syllables like I am showing you here but you probably already know that and chose not to say it because its not against the French language.
Without reason, sure, but with a gender
Assigned with malice
