Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules

Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.

The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much.

But, french is much worse!

View on HN

According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than English for the model of the study, but it's really close. Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so I am obviously biased.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321

Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled. The same is not true in English. Americans complain a lot about french spellings '-ioux', 'eau', etc. but they offer no gripe over the difference between '-ough' in 'enough' vs 'through'.

French is funny to me because the written language and the spoken language are in some ways quite different, with written french introducing considerable complexity. aller, allait, allais, allaient, alleé, etc. Since the spoken context for all the conjugations is almost always clear, I'm not sure why someone introduced the extra complexity.

> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.

It's far from as bad as English, but here's a Reddit thread with lots of French words which are not spelt as they are written. Not esoteric words either; along the lines of hier and monsieur

https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1269a2x/is_there_a_...

> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.

Whoa, very much not! I have spent the last 20 years trying to learn how to pronounce french words (my partner is a native french speaker, so I keep trying). The only somewhat consistent pattern I have is that the last few letters of each word are often silent, but even that is not really always consistent.

I'm fluent in 4 languages but french is an impossibly tough nut to crack for me.

I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood.

Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.

> For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before.

Because pronunciation rules exist, they're just never explicitly taught and instead learned through exposure. For example, here's someone reconstructing as many of the rules as they can: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

South Slavic languages have 1-1 mappings thanks to an engineer in disguise [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87#Linguis...

It's really not that hard. Some other examples of the same include Belarusian (albeit with Cyrillic alphabet) and Finnish.

Finnish is extremely easy, there is one sound for each letter and zero exceptions.

Spanish is also very predictable. While there are a few exceptions (like 'c' can be 'c' or 's'), they are very easy rules to follow, so never any surprises.

English and French are in the batshit crazy category. It's pretty much all random, you just have to know from memorization.

French is very hard to write correctly, but it's pretty easy to read - while rules are weird, they are also quite consistent.

English is hard to both read and write.

> But, french is much worse!

Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard. It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the time.

French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.

French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.

An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie", which I think most French natives would likely get wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg

Not nearly as bad as the English pronouncing, say, the name Cholmondeley :-)

I would expect that spelling bees would select words that are not phonetically spelled. This selection bias does not imply that English does not have productive pronunciation rules.

True, in that spelling bees will select for harder words.

But the fact that such words exist, in such large quantities that memorizing them all is so challenging that this becomes a competitive sport, is why engligh is so impossible.

Dutch, which has a pretty reasonable sound-to-orthography mapping (some exceptions of course, but not all that many) also has spelling bees. Often won by the Belgians.

> Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.

> The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

That's two exact opposite things.

Languages for which you know how to pronounce a word just from its written form => you can have spelling bee competition there.

Languages for which you know how to write a word when you hear it pronounced => no spelling bee competition.

I'll take French as an example : if you see "o", "au", "eau" in a word you know how to pronounce it. There is one and only way. But if you hear "o" in a word then good luck knowing how to write it. So you got dictées (spelling bees) even if you can easily guess how a written word sounds like. The existence of spelling bee competition in the English world is not proof that the language written word pronunciation are a guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com