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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

But French is even worse. To hell with these non-phonetical languages. I am serious. I'd take Latin over these unpredictable monstrosities any day of the week

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Spanish is an almost ideal modern language - it is straightforward in all important respects, while 90% of its vocabulary should be familiar to pretty much everyone.

Un ironically, Spaniards are too modest to even suggest this, but Spanish seems like an ideal solution to this issue.

And used by ~600m people in latin america.

French writing is quite phonetic and regular, but there's an extra layer of etymological orthography which confuses people who need to learned digraphs and trigraphs. But English has them too, and there's much more irregular.

There is something contradictory and insincere about being so concerned about the eminence of French in multilingual European institutions. Multilingualism is the reality today in Europe, English being only a neutral enough language of convenience for international communication. A tiny comparison of French and English orthography seems a bad argument for promoting French in Europe.

That's the trick : English is _not_ neutral. It is perceived, with quite a bit of truth, as a vehicle for English-speaking culture (duh) and in particular American strategies and worldviews. The way specifically American social topics have exported over social networks to Europe in a linear relationship to the degree of English-speaking is quite telling in that respect. There's also a worry that it would hasten the road to the exact opposite of multi-lingualism, that is mono-culture. There's no universe in which adopting English wholeheartedly would somehow result in German, French, Spanish and others receiving the same amount of attention or respect.

It's a fruitless discussion if you pretend that all languages are equal and have the same inertia and networks effects anyway. The network effects of English are too strong, and there would be absolutely no coming back from openly using it as a Paneuropean vehicular language. It's a massive civilisational choice, not some technical detail.

As for orthography, I was merely making an observation. The formal history of both French and English are interesting. I don't think it's a valid point in favour of one language or the other.

I don't think all languages are created equal. Given the arrogance with which the French expect others to use their language, I prefer English. Or German, as it is the only other working language of the European institutions. Anything but French would be fine.

Literary French is quite phonetic, at least outside proper names. What are some examples where you feel that French writing is not in a one to one relation with pronunciation?

Apart from all the silent letters, which are fairly regular (and I assume is what you're getting at) there's a fair number of pronunciation exceptions.

See the different ways of pronouncing "tous" or the different words that have irregularly silent "l"s (e.g. fusil) and other irregularly silent consonants in the middle of words (e.g. automne).

French has quite a lot of exceptions to its pronunciation rules in addition to its already fairly complex regular relationship between letters and sounds.

EDIT: Oh I forgot my pet peeve: there are so many exceptions to the pronunciation of "er" that it's kind of misleading to give its pronunciation as the equivalent of an English "a" as in "slate" (hiver, cher, cancer, mer, the list goes on and on and on).

Those are some good examples, you're right. It is quite a bit less regular than I remembered from my high-school days.

For 'er' though, isn't the rule essentially that it is pronounced 'a' at the end of verbs, and 'ar' otherwise? I realize that is not a phonetic rule, though.

Unfortunately no. See e.g. boulanger, cahier, etc. (Although I do believe you're correct about verbs, I wasn't able to think of any verbs that pronounce "er" irregularly).

I don't know of any regular, even semantic, rule off the top of my head that covers when it should be pronounced which way for non-verbs. I wonder if someone more versed in French etymology could find one.

Granted, my experience with French is rather limited and the language could be pretty consistent internally. But there's lots of utter madness such as "beacoup" which is literally "buku".

Sorry for being blunt but pronouncing 50% of the letters is extremely non phonetical. There's just no other way of putting it

I think you're confusing things. A difference between the number of written characters and the number of phonemes doesn't make a language "non-phonetic" if you mean consistency between spelling and pronunciation.

What matters is that a sequence of symbols _consistently_ matches a phoneme. For example, you'll find that the "u" phoneme is often written as "ou" in French. Same thing for the "o" sound and "eau" (you misspelt "beaucoup").

What I would consider "non-phonetic" is the set "though", "through", "thorough", and "thought" in English, where "ough" has four different sounds.

Beaucoup is 'boku', not 'buku'. And having groups of letters be pronounced as a single sound is not the opposite of being phonetical, as long as the groups are used consistently (e.g. -eau- is always pronounced 'o', -ou- is always pronounced 'u', final consonants are never pronounced etc.) .

Granted, the sibling comment lists quite a few exceptions to these rules, but it is still quite a regular language.

The system of silent consonants is quite useful in keeping the language have somewhat regular declensions/conjugations. If they were not preserved, it would seem that French conjugations are mad, inventing consonants out of thin air. For example, coup/coupee, meaning to cut/ cut (up), are pronounced ku/kupe. This would make it seem like the participle is adding -pe to the infinitive (and it would add -te or -ze or many others), when in fact the participle is almost always adding -e, which forces the consonant in the root to be pronounced, since French really hates hiatuses.

If anything, French phonetics are the real problem, aggressively dropping consonants of the end of words, but loathing hiatuses, sometimes even between words in literary contexts (where sometimes a 't' or 'z' sound is added between a word ending in a vowel and the next word beginning with a vowel, 'la liaison').

French is fairly predictable, there are pronunciation rules. On the other hand you have English where you have things like "weird", "weight", "heir" and "receipt", "recipe" and say "sniper", this uncertainty around "data", "direct", "neither" etc, and as a pragmatic rule there are no pronunciation rules really, you have to learn the language twice.

If your native language has sane spelling correspondences this feature of English never ceases to amaze and to be honest baffle, even bother you.

Will this vowel in this particular word be the diphthong you'd expect according to the patterns you've inferred up to this point or some wild monophtong just because? Let's find out!

As for the French, good for them, they speak a world language that is also one of the three working languages of the EU. My native language is another world language. English is a lingua franca nowadays, but there's no methaphysical necessity about speaking English, it's just popular enough and therefore convenient.

How many ways are there to spell the sound ō (as in l’eau) in French? I once read that it was over 30, but it might have been a tongue-in-cheek joke, like "ghoti" as an alternate spelling of "fish"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

As far as I know, there are two: 'o' (as in 'bon') and 'eau' (as in 'beau').While that's one more than it should have been necessary, it's not that bad I think.

maux? culot?

I feel like we can find more ;-)

But I have learned I had a misconception about what a phonetic spelling is. I had thought that a phonetic spelling had the property of every sound in the language having one way to spell it, but that is not the case; instead for every grapheme there is one sound.

As a native English speaker, learning a little French (after German and Latin) opened my eyes to the horrors of English. Really French is very tame in comparison.

Forgot about 'au'; I think the x and t in these examples are misleading, they are just part of the general rule that final consonants are not pronounced (though there are exceptions to that rule).

compare with "ough" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

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