English is a lot like x86: yeah it's got a lot of warts but it's ubiquitous and fairly simple to learn the basics.
Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.
Also, they aren't universal - France tries really really hard to avoid them. They'll make up new French words for concepts that English would just import.
People may not pronounce croissant like the French do, but they certainly do not pronounce it as written, which would be something like Croy-sant. People say cri-sont.
It's pretty close, well within the range of regional variation in English pronunciation.
The French government publishes ridiculous phrase books for avoidance of convenient English loanwords. Quebec goes further, using the power of the law. The Spanish Royal Academy is the keeper of the Spanish language.
English has no authorities. Therefore English is able to adapt and evolve, and it is able to more easily borrow from other languages. That's part of the success story for English, no doubt, though obviously the dominance of American soft (and hard) power has a great deal to do with it too.
Not so surprising, this is a uniquely american thing~, there is no such thins as spelling bees^ in the rest of the anglosphere either.
~ It's probably bleeding out to the rest of the world now.
^ "spelling bee" itself has an interesting etymology: http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee
edit - how the hell do you escape an asterix on HN?
Also, it's called "asterisk". Asterix only needs to escape from the Romans. ;)
The 'dagger' also called 'obelisk'¹. There's a double dagger (‡) if you need another footnote, but yeah, they're not as versatile as just using numbers.
1: Not to be confused with Obelix: Asterix' chubby friend the Romans are usually (vainly) trying to escape from.
The HN formatting rules are really minimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Granted, I have a _very_ limited knowledge of languages. I speak German. And persist/keep trying to reach some level of competency in English.
German has French (and English .. and more..) loan words as well. I'd still argue that it's _a lot_ easier and more consistent to pronounce than English.
(I might just be entirely blind to German issues that are basically the same, because .. I constantly stumble about English's warts and grew up with the German ones. There's a lot of bias involved, I think)
I wish I had a $currency for every time I used a word that I understand, can spell, know well - and got laughed at by people speaking English natively for the mispronunciation..
So I beg to differ: Going from the written form to the pronunciation is failing quite often, at least for me.
Just Spanish-style accent marks for some of the polysyllabic words would be a win, but it doesn't really matter. No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant. If we did adopt stress diacritics we'd end up with more homophones that differ only in stress, which would complicate an already complex language unnecessarily.
I like English as it is.
would they now?
remember that read rhymes with lead, and also read rhymes with lead
In the case of "read" and "lead" we just learn this by rote early on, shrug our shoulders, and try not to think too much about it. English has a lot of this, but really, not that much, and at the end of the day it's a pretty accessible language (as demonstrated by the many who speak it as a second or third language).
Other languages are more accessible than English. E.g., Spanish. But every language has complexity buried somewhere in it. Spanish has several regular forms of verb irregularities, and also a bunch of irregularly-irregular verbs to boot, with over 4k irregular verbs altogether -- and I'm saying Spanish is more accessible than English, but maybe I'm wrong.
French is rather complex, IMO. Like all Romance languages it has a ton of verb conjugations including a ton of subjunctive moods. It has as much phonetic complexity as English, and a ton of orthography rules ("all words that start with af... have a double-f except for Afrique, and some dozen other words I don't remember").
Japanese has Kanji, counters (over a thousand of those), tons of homophones, four writing systems...
Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Say no more.
Hangul is simple enough, I guess, since it is phonetic, but there must be complexity somewhere in Korean -- perhaps someone will tell us about it, but it's a fair guess on my part that Korean has complexity in it.
Russian is famously difficult to learn.
Etc..
The problem English has with pronunciation is that we have a habit of insisting on importing foreign words with foreign pronunciations and insisting that they be spelled with their foreign spelling. Even if the source language isn't written in Latin script. (Bonus points for people who insist on using foreign case rules for converting to plurals, and double bonus points for people who do it wrong and insist that the wrong way is the most correct spelling.)
* octopi * phenomena * tableaux * oxen
Mostly this is just used for people to show off their erudition, since it would be easier to understand if everybody used the plural suffix rather than these weird declensions.
* octopuses * phenomenons * tableaus * oxes
Also, honorable mention for _childs_.
Congratulations on winning the double bonus points! Octopi is not even the correct Latin plural.