5 ms·
Well, the measuring stick is not English. Is it Latin? Which version? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alph
by heliodor 9y ago
Well, the measuring stick is not English.
Is it Latin? Which version? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
Or is it all modern non-Cyrillic letters used in Europe that don't have diacritics?
In any case, diacritics are a positive. They're used to make a language as phonetic as possible, which is a net positive. As anyone can attest, learning to pronounce English words (or French, for that matter) is a lot of people wasting a lot of effort, which would be better spent elsewhere!
- ahakki 9y agoLearing to pronounce French words is rather easy. English is a huge mess.
- gerdesj 9y agoReally? French (there are quite a few of them - think CA for example) has just as many idiosyncrasies as English when you really get in to it.
- umanwizard 9y agoThis is categorically wrong. French spelling has absolutely nowhere near as many idiosyncrasies as English spelling. It is totally impossible to predict how an unfamiliar written word is pronounced in English, but quite easy in French (barring some ambiguous situations like if a noun ends in “s”.) By the way, I don’t know what CA means. If you’re referring to the French word “ça”, its pronunciation is completely regular and predictable given the spelling.
- y_molodtsov 9y agoWell, it's possible, but only if you know where did the word come from.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoIt’s relatively easy for an English speaker to learn because we have a lot of French vocabulary, but the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling isn’t simple[1]—although granted it is somewhat simpler than English[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_spelling_correspondences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_sp... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_p...
- saryant 9y agoI don't think it's obvious that 3 of 7 letters in "mangent" are silent (as in "ils mangent").
- umanwizard 9y agoYes it is obvious once you learn French. It’s usually (not always) clear how a word is pronounced in French if you know its spelling.
- snovv_crash 9y agoWhat isn't clear is how you spell the word after hearing it.
- heliodor 9y agoEasy? Fine. But it's still a huge waste of time on a global scale compared to phonetic languages, when you consider how many people have to learn French, English, etc.
- eCa 9y agoWe are in complete agreement, sorry for making my argument a bit on the terse side.