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"Sean" (properly, Seán) is actually an Irish Gaelic name. Irish, like English, features very many non-phonetic spellings. If the guy deliberately made you feel

• robofanatic 5y ago
  No he was actually a good guy, we became friends later. I apologized for butchering his name.
• julesnp 5y ago
  Having learned some Irish Gaelic in the past, I'd say it actually has much better correlation between spelling and pronunciation than English, it's just that it uses very different rules, which can cause confusion when the words are brought into other languages. 'S' for example is always pronounced like the English 'sh' if it's next to 'e' or 'i', and like a regular English 's' if it's next to 'a', 'o' or 'u'.
• kiliantics 5y ago
  Actually Irish is very phonetic, more like say German than English. The rules are just different because a roman alphabet was used for a non-romanic language. "S" is always pronounced as "sh" when surrounded by slender vowels. Many consonants in Irish have two different sounds for a slender and a broad pronunciation.
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    English has some of that. C or G are usually soft before E or I and hard before A O or U.
• felideon 5y ago
  When we first started working with Irish teammates, we were confused about who people were referring to when they talked about Owen as there was no Owen in Slack at all. There was an Eoghan, though.