Re^2: OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit

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
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

Comment on Re^2: OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit

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Re^3: OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit by fergal (Chaplain) on Dec 20, 2005 at 18:28 UTC
In English we have "though" and "trough" where the "gh" is inconsistent. Can you give me a similar example from French. I'm not saying there isn't one but I did try to think of one before posting the reply above and couldn't (mais ma Francais n'est pas trop chaud :). I think Italian and Spanish have simpler pronunciation rules with less (no?) dependency on position within a word but I think French might still be conistent. update:"ville" and "gentille" ("veel" vs "jontiya") are an example but the fact that nobody else has posted an example makes me think that examples in French are exceedingly rare.	[reply]
Re^4: OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit by CountOrlok (Friar) on Dec 21, 2005 at 06:29 UTC
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	[reply]
Re: OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit by benizi (Hermit) on Dec 21, 2005 at 17:39 UTC
"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	[reply]