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It's a definite advantage if a language is phonetic (eg German, Turkish) but there are also worse than English. French springs to mind. English pronunciation i
by cletus 6y ago
It's a definite advantage if a language is phonetic (eg German, Turkish) but there are also worse than English. French springs to mind.
English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin).
Also, at least the vowels are written in English (unlike, say, Arabic or Hebrew, generally speaking).
- samatman 6y agoI don't think that's true about French. It has some weird rules, the refusal to pronounce the last consonant in a word is especially galling (ok, pun was intended), but it's fairly consistent once you figure it out. English, though, is a slough. Enough practice, thorough practice, and you'll get through it. But it's rough going.
- jjgreen 6y agoAs a late learner of French, I was delighted to discover that the exceptions are CRLF, so DOS line-endings
- kergonath 6y agoFrench pronunciation is more consistent than English, by far. Not that it is a high bar. There are more rules (digraph, silent letters and such), which is more complicated initially, but English is particularly inconsistent. I don’t think words become more regular with time, actually. There are plenty of irregular words of Saxon origin much older than the Norman conquest. This can be seen easily in lists of irregular verbs: there is almost no Latin root there.