English here. I’m with you. I’m not sure if we stole the idea from French, but we do have a lot of spellings reflecting obsolete pronunciations like they do, if not a load of other funny orthographic habits.
Noah Webster did try to fix things a little for the US, but his success was limited. And of course, the rest of the Anglosphere hasn’t bothered.
(We do seem to have adopted “jail” over “gaol” though, if not a couple of others.)
I don’t know if it’s “fixable”. At this point you just acknowledge that there is very little information about pronuntiation in the spelling of English words and wait for your human brain to figure it out over time.
It’s a shame, because the grammar is pretty simple, but man, the semi-random relationship of noises and words is a mess.
Still not the weirdest thing as a non-native speaker. That’d be when native speakers have a super serious ten minute argument about which specific type of “a” is supposed to go in a word, all of them indistinguishable to my ear.
Then some other native speaker with a wild accent shows up, pronounces the same word in an absolutely unfathomable way and everybody just goes along with it.
It’s been thirty years since I started using the language, I still have no idea what’s going on there.
I remember talking to these girls on discord, and they kept talking about their new fox ears, and then when they showed me, they were bunny ears on a headband. That’s when I realized they were saying faux ears.
Fox-Pass. Yes, people here really say it like that.
I blame the French for that, if you want a word to be pronounced a certain way don’t spell it totally different.
France has many linguistic crimes to answer for…
English spelling can be difficult as well: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Oh I’m aware. The grammar tribunal has many countries on its list.
I urgently need to know if you’re at the very least German, because if you’re anglophone that statement is straight up against the law.
Wenn es so dringend ist hättest du auch mein Profil checken können.
Schönen Tag noch.
Click through something for a social media conversation? Gross.
I did Google Translate that, full disclosure.
What knock-off Google Translate clone did you use?
"If it’s that urgent, you could have checked my profile.
Have a nice day."
Yeah, friend, that’s what I got, too.
What did you think I got? This is a very confusing response. Maybe I should put it back through Translate. Hold on.
There, Translateception.
English here. I’m with you. I’m not sure if we stole the idea from French, but we do have a lot of spellings reflecting obsolete pronunciations like they do, if not a load of other funny orthographic habits.
Noah Webster did try to fix things a little for the US, but his success was limited. And of course, the rest of the Anglosphere hasn’t bothered.
(We do seem to have adopted “jail” over “gaol” though, if not a couple of others.)
I don’t know if it’s “fixable”. At this point you just acknowledge that there is very little information about pronuntiation in the spelling of English words and wait for your human brain to figure it out over time.
It’s a shame, because the grammar is pretty simple, but man, the semi-random relationship of noises and words is a mess.
Still not the weirdest thing as a non-native speaker. That’d be when native speakers have a super serious ten minute argument about which specific type of “a” is supposed to go in a word, all of them indistinguishable to my ear.
Then some other native speaker with a wild accent shows up, pronounces the same word in an absolutely unfathomable way and everybody just goes along with it.
It’s been thirty years since I started using the language, I still have no idea what’s going on there.
I remember talking to these girls on discord, and they kept talking about their new fox ears, and then when they showed me, they were bunny ears on a headband. That’s when I realized they were saying faux ears.