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Yes. But they are very few and consistent rules. The sound of "H" will be consistent, unless it is actually a "CH", which is another letter phonetically speakin
by helloguillecl 7y ago
Yes. But they are very few and consistent rules. The sound of "H" will be consistent, unless it is actually a "CH", which is another letter phonetically speaking (some dictionaries would treat it a a separate letter).
- kingofpandora 7y agoEngland has rules - albeit not simple ones - such that about 85% (IIRC) of never before seen words can be pronounced correctly. Obviously I'm paraphrasing someone else's study here and may be getting it slightly wrong but the gist is that English is more decipherable than it first appears.
- frobozz 7y agoI like that you use the word albeit in that comment. It's one of the words where the pronunciation rules go awry. No one is denying that English has rules mapping spelling to pronunciation for the lion's share of text. It's just that the rules are (as you say) complex and there are a lot of exceptions. On the production side, there are a number of different opshuns for righting the seim sownds, sum ov witch are legitimate homophones, rather than just misspellings. In languages like Spanish (or even better, Welsh, where sandhi is actually written down), as long as you know the rules, you can correctly pronounce 100% of never before seen words, and you can correctly spell a higher proportion of words than in English.
- InitialLastName 7y agoThere are so many words in your second sentence that belie your point that it almost seems like you wrote it that way.