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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.

As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.

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Ha! And don’t even get me started with the Scots and their whiskey. Bruichladdich, Pittyvaich, and Tè Bheag? Bunnahabhain Stiuireadair? Auchroisk??

I swear they only do this to mess with people.

In these cases it's all Scottish Gaelic, which has a complex but very consistent phonics system. Complaining about it would be like complaining that Russian vodka brands are hard to pronounce because you can't read Cyrillic

"Scots and their whiskey"

    >:-(

Nobody in Scotland makes whiskey

What a delight, I haven't seen that smiley in a while!

When and why did we all collectively decide not to use those any more? (I know why, but still.)

So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".

Grenich anyone?

Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster

Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).

It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it.

In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each.

And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.

It's more like gren-itch than gren-each (native UK speaker).

... Hoyk (Hawick), Kircoodbree (Kirkcudbright), Mullguy (Milngavie), Cooriss (Culross), Geeree (Garioch), Eyela (Islay)

However, some Americans even have trouble with Glasgow (Glaz-go, not Glass-gow) and Edinburgh (Ed-in-burra, not Edin-bro)

Edinburgh is morr commonly pronounced “edinbruh”.

Glasgow and Edinburgh are pronounced "Glesca" and "Embra" by their natives but I wouldn't recommend it to others.

I've heard some Americans pronounce it "Edin-bo-ro" which is entirely off.

Southwark is “suh-thuk”. Salisbury “sorlsbry”. Norwich “norrich”.

Yeah trying to map English sounds to Latin letters is the exact problem. It's a very lossy transformation.

Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.

The perks of coming late. Finnish did job properly with only one or two warts...

That depends on how one defines «properly». Finnish, with its nearly 20 noun cases and vowel harmony, has made a spellchecker a computationally unsolvable problem.

If you're counting sounds (i.e. phones), then most languages with those same 5 vowel letters have quite a lot because of numerous allophones.

English is criminal in that it has many vowel phonemes - British more so than American - and then on top of that its mapping of them to vowel letters is completely out of whack with both traditional Latin values of them, and how they're used in most other languages out there. I mean, cmon, <ea> for /i:/?

Still, with a sensible orthography, General American would only need something like 9-10 distinct vowel characters (for monophthongs; but diphthongs are best spelled as the obvious corresponding vowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequences anyway).

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