truex

At least you can learn which letters to ignore when pronouncing a word. But English pronunciation is completely f-ed up. How do you pronounce "read" or "lead"?

When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it's true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone -
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don't agree.
Lord Cromer, 1902
- Or "The Chaos", Gerard Nolst Trenité, 1922
- Horse and worse rhyme.
  Also so does cord and word.
  Did I miss something or were they pronounced differently 123 years ago?
People have tried reforming English spelling many times to make it make sense, the only time a reform has actually succeeded is Webster's reform, which is the reason why American English and British English have different spellings.
- With debatable levels of "succeded".

you can say French on the internet, no need to self censor like your mommy will tell you off

A lot of words are acceptable on the internet but under no circumstances whatsoever should anyone type out a word as bad as the F-word. You do not yet know the extent of what you've done…
- Le francais!
- Los Baguettinos
Pardon my Fr*nch
Let him wank himself with his Anglo-Saxon superiority.

The irony of writing the post in English, isn’t lost in you, is it?

Bordeaux

Bor-dewks? NON!

Bor-doh? OUI!

Edinburgh is pronounced how?
- Oh, easy. Ed-in-ur-mom
- Ed in bruh

English mfs copying those words and once again changing their pronunciation <--

I live in a city founded by the French and nothing is pronounced the French way. Can't win.

New Orleans?
- Nawlins*
- Versailles, Kentucky is probably the dumbest one I can think of
- De Troit
- St. Louis?
  Louisville?
  Lafayette?
  Versailles?
  Detroit?
  Baton Rouge?
  Boise?
  Montpelier?
  Montclair?
  Des Moines?
  Eau Claire?
  There are a lot of them. If you look at a map of North America circa 1950 you'll see that the vast majority of the interior is French territory. The only reason that it's under American control now is that the British took it from the French in the 7 years war. The British colonists in North America were so grateful for this additional land that when they settled it, they generously paid taxes to the British to pay them back for the expensive war to conquer this territory... ha, just kidding. They rebelled and simply took the territory for themselves.
- Balluhmer, MD
There's a Buena in New Jersey. Bew-nuh.

English is no much better... In contrast, Korean and Spanish are quite "what you write is what it sounds"

Also in Hawaiian. I was first told “just pronounce all the letters.” This is why you can have words that are all vowels like “Aiea” (basically “a-ee-ay-ya” but kinda fast).
- that’s because fucking missionaries came in, created the written language and standardized the spoken language then beat all the children into compliance
  then their children overthrew the island and beat them for speaking at all so it almost died and the revival was focused on survival of the language over nuance
  it used to have much more spoken variation
Same with portuguese
the same with polish
- Tell that to Mr Wajszczak. Try and get any non polish person to spell it after only hearing it. Then show the name to them, give them a minute to commit it to memory then get them to spell it again. Tried it on 5 different people so far, it's hilarious every time.
- If you ignore the randomly inserted z's, that is

English just saw the French doing this and said: hold my beer

Trageideigh has entered the chat…

Modern day Bordeaux

EEE aaaaa uuuuuu.

Qwa?

EEEEE AAAAA UUUUU!

QWAAAA?

GIVE ME THE DAMN WATER

Is there a high-level explanation of how that clusterfuck happened? I mean, all the roman languages around France are fairly reasonable in their spelling.

People used to pronounce all the letters and then over time they got lazy and stopped pronouncing everything
- And they have actually removed some of them. The ê in forêt indicates it used to be spelled forest but that was so long ago that they're willing to admit it's not necessary. Unlike the k in knife, what would we do without that!
The pronunciation of words evolved but the spelling of most words didn’t.
Like the Great Vowel Shift in English
- Or the much earlier h to k shift (think shirt --> skirt).
  To be clear, the spelling did change with that one. I just find it interesting.
There is an old explanation for this. I asked my French teacher a while ago.
The old French language was written like you pronounce it. During the renaissance, they got into classicism and made the language resemble Latin. Hence tan became temps from the Latin tempus.
- The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.
  So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs ("ils mangent") is silent because the "ent" sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn't for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.
  Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it's all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can't spell "nénuphar" properly. Children's purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.
that's just france being extra fancy again
Maybe it's been around longer than the others? Italian is pretty consistent with pronunciation, but modern Italian is a relatively recent language
Because french borrows from Gaulish, Latin and Frankish and this language stew has been brewing for thousands of years.
This YouTube video explains some
I read somewhere that French was settled harder on purpose when Richelieu created the Académie Française. It was a way to separate the common people from the elite by keeping, adding or changing words to make them harder to pronounce and write if you didn't have proper education.
They're still a bunch of old elitist conservative dudes with questionable positions on many modern topics.

I believe it is a conspiracy by HP to make us use more ink.

A lot of unpronounced letters are actually pronounced conditionally, for example in “Je suis un homme” the last s of suis is pronounced because it is followed by a vowel.

Je suis un omelete du fromaaaaage
It is pronounced z however, and not s
Je sui zun nomme
homme
- Silent h. (Of courses there are some rare, non silent Hs)
  Edit : actually the op was talking about the liaison between "~~sans~~ suis" and "un" here. Though you do also do the same for the N of "un" and the O of "homme" in this sentence according to the same rules (and since that H is silent)

tru

This needs the Mr. Bean meme of the English cheating off the French.

doge being pronounced with a silent e is not very american.

True, it should be dogé.

Mon deux!

Yeah, two can play at this game. 😌

Danish: hold my beer

Also Danish: you thought the French say '92' in a convoluted manner? Hold my øl.
- Tvo halvfems or something

Let's not forget they were some of baddest mfers during the second world war

Edit: some French hating mfers in here‽ The French are some bad ass mfers! Don't care what the doots say, I respect the French!

This is a weird comment but also confusing about why it’s being downvoted.
Is it cuz it’s so random or because people are idiots and think you’re wrong?
The French may have gotten collapsed but they fought tooth and nail the entire war.
- The story is that Paris was taken in 6 hours, and that's often used to mock the French for not resisting much. The truth is that Paris wasn't damaged in the way London or Berlin were in WW2. Seems like a decent tradeoff in the end.