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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly like we say the same word, "heim".

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When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predict the pronunciation of a word from the spelling.

English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and subsequently mis-pronouncing it because we had to guess at the pronunciation. E.g. I suffered acute embarrassment from mis-pronouncing "Hermione" when talking to a friend about the Potter books. I grew up in the UK but had never met the name before and my guess at pronunciation was entirely reasonable but entirely wrong.

Though I lived for a while in Ireland, and they have it worse. My friend Mebd laughed at me a lot.

Yes, this is also part of the reason why spelling bees are a uniquely American thing - in most other languages it is trivial to predict pronounciation from spelling, so a competition makes no sense.

It's not possible to predict pronunciation from spelling in Russian and there are no spelling bees in russia

Scotland and Ireland were known to recieve social visits from scandinavians. So there could be a reason behind that.

To add to the confusion, in English people might pronounce the article "a" as "ei" (like when reciting "ABC") or "uh" (like the start of "under"). I think most Americans do the latter. I do, at least.

English vowels are weird compared to most continental European languages, to be fair.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

I'm a native Greek speaker and to my ears all European languages' vowels are weird with the exception of Spanish, which is completely normal. All those airy sounds: caaat dooog, haaaaouse, taaaaime, etc like a little fish trying to eat a much bigger fish. Let me not start with French, or Italian. Conversely, when I hear myself or another Greek speaker speak English it's like there's a little guillotine in the back of the neck that snaps shut just when a vowel is starting to form: c't, d'g, ta'm, etc.

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