I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, ...
Umm, excuse me, but French can be even harder than English to learn, because it is not spelled as it's pronounced. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, yes, almost rigidly. The others I'm less familiar with, but I'll concede those for now.
One of the most common complaints about French is the inability to spell a word having heard it pronounced correctly. (Pronouncing a written word is considerably easier, though not foolproof.)
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
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Reminds me of George Bernard Shaw's comment that the made up word "ghoti" could be pronounced "fish" (gh from trough, o from women, and ti from nation.
-imran
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"Une ville" versus "une fille", par example.
In the opposite direction (one pronunciation, multiple spellings), the following (from french.about.com) demonstrates the problem. All of these are pronounced similarly: parlerai, été, c'est, peiner, frapper, vous avez
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The English words were spelled phonetically at the time the spellings were determined. That is to say, those silent 'e's at the end of a word were pronounced; and a word like "knight" was actually spoken with a k-sound, the gh as a guttural sound. The spoken language changed but the printed remained relatively stable, so now our words have some incredibly strange spellings. Think cough, hiccough, plough, though, tough, through. I'd hate to have to learn English as an adult...
Update: corrected minor spelling error.
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