6 ms·

Same as German. I wonder if actually English is just the exception and most other languages have this "rule"/trait.

• zaat 6y ago
  Bonjour Monsieur, la langue française veut vous parler.
  • 1-more 6y ago
    French is pretty good in my limited experience of having one way of pronouncing a written word (although I'll give you that Monsieur breaks all the rules). But for going from speech to writing it's no good. "Trois vers verts traversent vers le verre" comes to mind.
    • zaat 6y ago
      The rule was "write as you speak". There are some words in French where the rule apply, "avec" for example, but they are the exception.
      • 1-more 6y ago
        I flipped that didn't I? Damn. Good point.
    • fanf2 6y ago
      French is one of the few languages where competitive dictation is a thing. Like a spelling bee but with more puns.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• jaclaz 6y ago
  ... and all Latin/Romance languages, English is the exception, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are all pronounced as they are written (or at the most with some always-the-same reading conventions).
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    French and Catalan aren't pronounced as they are written at all. Both languages have spelling competitions/TV shows. There is an excellent TEDx video where two linguists that are advocating for a reform of the French orthography invent a word and then write a script to list all the ways it can be spelled, following the existing rules of French spelling. The result is 240 ways to spell it. https://youtu.be/5YO7Vg1ByA8?t=266 https://youtu.be/5YO7Vg1ByA8?t=266
  • 1-more 6y ago
    All of those languages went through a deliberate reform where the language academy said "this is how we spell things from now on." English didn't really have that, but a bunch of dictionary writers did make changes that have stuck. In the US we can credit Noah Webster for having us drop the unpronounced "u" in "colour" or write "centre" with the kind-of-metathesis spelled out.
  • toolslive 6y ago
    > Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are all pronounced as they are written. ?? I dont' quite follow what you're saying. The sound 'o' can be written in French in a lot of different ways, some of them even don't even have an 'o' in them ("au", "eau", "aux" "aux" and I probably forgot some). It's notoriously difficult to write things in French just because of the discrepancy between what you hear and what you should write.
    • romanoderoma 6y ago
      Yes, but even considering this particular case, it is consistent Au in French is never pronounced as it is written (like augen in German or aulico in Italian), but always as a O Once you know the rules it's pretty easy Also French (like Italian, Spanish and others) have accents to help you decide how to pronounce a word Now consider these popular examples of English inconsistencies The bandage was wound around his leg to cover his wound. The insurance on the invalid was invalid I did not object to the object.
      • 6y ago
• brudgers 6y ago
  If a language doesn’t support spelling as a competitive sport, it is not like English.
• gok 6y ago
  This is more generally the concept of Orthographic depth [1] A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321
  • mumblemumble 6y ago
    asterisk note: The study only looked at 14 languages. The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
    • madhadron 6y ago
      French is so ambiguous that they have dictation bees where people try to figure out what words someone just said and accurately record them.
      • nrclark 6y ago
        Are those different than American spelling bees?
        • mumblemumble 6y ago
          In a dictée, you listen to a longer passage, and the challenge is to transcribe what the person wrote. They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
  • tasogare 6y ago