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Comment by diogolsq | Hacker News Reader

Portuguese and German are like that.

You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.

English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms.

English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well.

Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know exactly how it’s pronounced.

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Or live and live, read and read (past participle), or castle (the t is mute) or bear, beard, the ea is different.

I do not want to be offensive, there are lots more , but it is an amazing sh*tshow the mapping.

If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)

Hahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like undecipherable.

A lot of nautical terms have unusual pronunciations. English sailors primarily came from coastal regions, and were very happy to have a lingo that was incomprehensible to the landsman. All of this carried over to North America as well.

its just elision. "four-cassle" vs "fo'k'sul."

At least that's often spelled "fo'c'sle" these days, which gives you a good idea of the actual pronunciation.

My personal favorite in English is "colonel" being pronounced the same as "kernel". Which is insane even from an etymological perspective because the word is a derivative of "column" (as in, a colonel is someone who commands/leads a column of soldiers).

Yes, an incredibly rare use of double apostrophes in English! More uncommonly you'll see bo's'n as well, for boatswain.

French is a lot less bad than English in this regard. In French you can usually (though not always) predict how a word is pronounced from its spelling, but not vice versa. In English, both directions are impossible.

French is not a good example. Pronunciation often deviates from spelling in French (e.g. many silent letters and inconsistent mappings).

Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written, as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and English are of type deep orthography.

Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.

The silent letters are not the point - that's why the poster you replied to said it doesn't work speech->writing in French. But writing->speech is much, much more consistent than in English, even if the orthography itself is kinda criminal with all the silent letters and whatnot.

I am inclined to agree.

I've only really been exposed to French in music, where I've sung various French pieces of the years. But from my experience, at least French is consistent? As-written is as-pronounced.

Is this not really the case, and therefore is French also guilty of having the same vowels/consonants pronounced differently for completely arb reasons?

Fritteuse.

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