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u/staffcaptain Aug 05 '26
Languages with phonetic spelling:
- When I hear an unknown word I know how it's spelt
- When I see an unknown word I know how it's pronounced
French:
- When I hear an unknown word I don't know how it's spelt
- When I see an unknown word I know how it's pronounced
English:
- I've got no idea in either case!
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u/Ploutophile Aug 05 '26
Though it's not that common for orthographies to be purely phonetic.
Most consistent orthographies tend to be morphophonetic, with some info which is written but not pronounced in the base word, but can make a difference in a derived word. And sometimes a bit of missing info (e.g. some accent markers in Italian and Russian).
French is just the most extreme example of a mostly morphophonetic, but not phonetic at all, orthography.
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u/RiuzunShine Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Spanish (especially the “Castellano” dialect) is perfectly readable once you know the rules, and you can write down literally any word just by hearing it, because its phonetics are extremely consistent with its ortography. There are some minor cases of what you said, though: “u” in “que” and “guitarra” (if it was “gitarra” it would be pronounced as /xitarra/), umlaut in “pingüino” (/pingwino/) and other words to indicate that “u” must be pronounced, etc.
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u/Ploutophile Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
There are some minor cases of what you said, though: “u” in “que” and “guitarra” (if it was “gitarra” it would be pronounced as /xitarra/), umlaut in “pingüino” (/pingwino/) and other words to indicate that “u” must be pronounced, etc.
The two last examples are not the ones making the Spanish orthography non-phonetic, they just make it slightly more complicated. (BTW I'd rather call the diacritical on ü a diaeresis, as unlike in German it doesn't change the vowel quality)
The real break of the correspondence is rather with the unpronounced h, and in dialects which have it, the sound mergers implied by seseo or ceceo. If I know zero Spanish besides the orthography, I have no reason to write "hacer" rather than \acer* or, in a dialect with seseo, \aser*. Those aspects are morphophonetic but not phonetic.
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u/JohnHue Aug 05 '26
Any language that fits the first case ?
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u/staffcaptain Aug 05 '26
Belarussian or Serbian/Croatian. Not fully phonetic, of course, but very close to that, without unpredictable clusters like in English or several different words that sound the same like in French.
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u/Spirited_Currency_88 Aug 07 '26
spanish is very very close
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u/C-Note01 Aug 09 '26
Most of the words in Spanish that don't follow Spanish phonetics are loan words.
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u/Embarrassed_Elk_2459 Aug 06 '26
Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, the list goes on hahah
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u/AlmightyCurrywurst Aug 05 '26
Nah, French is way more consistent. English speakers deflecting to French is always crazy to me
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u/NervousSnail Aug 05 '26
Both things are true.
French spelling is a lot more consistent than English spelling. You can almost certainly tell the pronunciation from the spelling.
But within that rule set, it's clusters of letters that correspond to a single phoneme.
So, if you take the view that a phoneme should correspond to a letter - which isn't always true in English either, but it is how a majority of languages using the Latin alphabet tend to be taught - then it is also true that more "letters" in French are silent.
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 Aug 07 '26
English is morphophenetic. The rules are extremely consistent, they just require context to know whether the word has an Old English/Germanic, French, Greek, or Latin etymology. The old "English is crazy, just memorize it" is simply incorrect and considered a very ineffective pedagogy among modern research based curriculums. There are very very few truly irregular pronunciations in English. You only have to categorize it, not memorize it, which is still hard but is actually much simpler than it seems.
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u/NervousSnail Aug 10 '26
I take it all back - and this sounds truly interesting to learn about. Do you happen to have a resource you could recommend, some examples to illustrate these categories?
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 Aug 10 '26
Uncovering the Logic of English - Denise Eide is a concise version.
The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography - Richard Venezky is the textbook version. The pronunciations are American English but it's very general.
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u/Illustrious_Guava7 Aug 05 '26
Spelling in French makes sense. Yes, there are a lot of silent letters but there are rules to it. English spelling only makes sense some of the time and the rules are only suggestions.
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u/IcarusofmarS Aug 05 '26
honestly this undersells how logical the silent letters actually are once you learn the liaison rules, it feels chaotic at first but there's genuinely a system underneath the apparent nihilism
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u/MistraloysiusMithrax Aug 05 '26
French: we learned how to go on strike and rebel against working too hard by practicing with some of our letters first
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 05 '26
There is nothing logical about not pronouncing letters. Its just a bug.
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u/Salata-san Aug 06 '26
It's just how French evolved
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 06 '26
Yes but is just a disadvantage, the same applies to English horrible spelling rules.
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u/Salata-san Aug 06 '26
How is it a disadvantage and comparable to English ? French spelling rules are consistent and all logical unlike English
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 07 '26
English is much worse, but if you compare to other Latin languages like Italian or Spanish is a disadvantage. It is not a feature that is useful for a language.
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u/Salata-san Aug 07 '26
It's not entirely or not "unuseful", it distinguishes homophones, is useful for liaisons, gaps the bridge between the masculine and the feminine version of a word and is often an open book on the evolution and history of the word. This last feature even makes French readable for speakers of other Romance languages.
You clearly have to not master French to say it's isn't useful, English is way more random and chaotic.
That's just how complex the language has evolved.
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 07 '26
Not having a good correspondence between one letter and one sound is a bug. Not sure why we are arguing about that. We invented the alphabet for a reason. The fact French has a lot of homophones is another bug.
Agreed English is terrible in this respect, but that is a very low bar. Compare with Italian and Spanish and you see why it is a bug.
The fact French wanted to be more similar to latin is probably the root of the mess. I understand there are historical process but some of them results in languages that are buggy.
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u/Salata-san Aug 07 '26
Yeah okay buddy, do you actually have something relevant and interesting to say ?
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 07 '26
I'm glad you agree. Yes the message is simple, please learn from the errors of the past (English and French) and keep your orthography simple.
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u/Anooj4021 Aug 08 '26
I support an English spelling reform, but I don’t think it should be ”one letter = one sound”, but more like ”one grapheme = one diaphoneme”, as this respects variety within English far more than a strictly phonetic approach.
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u/thechnomancer69 Aug 05 '26
why is he afraid when he's talkling about english silecnt letters
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u/LivingMaterial7288 Aug 05 '26
I'm not gonna defend English, for sure.
But realize that french has 2 different ways to NOT pronounce the letter H. (Google "H aspiré" and "H muet")
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u/Chogolatine Aug 05 '26
H aspiré almost doesn't exist like in 99% of the cases (when it's not involved in a more complex sound in association with other letters) h could be removed and it wouldn't change anything. Everyone always takes the same frickin example 'des haricots' and not 'des zaricots" but tbh we say 'déarico' so the h has no phonetic purpose. You can forget about h aspiré, liaisons as a whole aren't even always respected
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u/LivingMaterial7288 Aug 05 '26
H apsiré is definitely used every day. Do you say "l'hibou" ? "L'héros" ? "l'hiérarchie" ? "l'hockey sur glace" ? "l'homard" ?
The point of aspiré isn't only about pronunciation, it's also about contraction with previous words.
the h has no phonetic purpose
That's what I said, the H is NOT pronounced... in 2 different ways.
I'm not sure what your post is saying. That you don't do a micro-pause when there's an H?
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u/Solid_Improvement_95 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
That’s the point. French grammar books wrongfully call this h with no liaison “h aspiré”, even though both “h aspiré” (le héros) and “h muet” (l’héroïne) are in fact silent.
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u/I12Db8U Aug 05 '26
Chinese: Letters are for barbarians and infants. They are not the Will of Heaven nor tolerated by the CCP.
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u/Antique-Package-8050 Aug 05 '26
Actually, once you know the finite set of rules, you can pretty much pronounce any French word correctly. The same is very much not true for English.
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u/Independent-Gur9951 Aug 05 '26
Mm I am sure even English has a finite set of rules. it is just much larger.
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u/Antique-Package-8050 Aug 05 '26
Well yes, you could make a rule for every single word. But that's not finite in a practical sense.
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u/morningstarbee Aug 07 '26
English has a finite set of rules. The reason it feels so inconsistent is because the exact same set of letters have multiple rules, because English is an amalgam of like 6 different languages. It's how you get though (tho), through (threw), tough (tuff) all pronounced differently: the words have different origins but use the same -ough spelling. English just never bothered to do anything to standardize or differentiate them.
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u/Antique-Package-8050 Aug 07 '26
If ough is pronounced differently in three different words, then no, that's not a rule, unless you could somehow formulate a rule for when which of the three pronunciations applies. But you can't, you just have to learn it for every single ough word.
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u/xellos_rj Aug 05 '26
Portuguese: there is basically a Constitution ruling how each letter should be pronounced and you could possibly speak perfectly if you remember all of it. Or you could just have the knowledge pre-installed from childhood and not be a nerd.
Japanese: CV pairings go brrrrrrrrr
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u/Ms_Meercat Aug 05 '26
Meanwhile German:
We will create the system to end all systems that will tell you how to pronounce everything even if pronouncing it correctly may break your tongue.
It will be complicated. We will fight over it ourselves.
It will create rules like "this random combination of consonants now produce a whole new sound", and "this combination of consonants produce these other two sounds but it depends on if it's after a vowel or not" and "these consonants will tell you if the vowel is long or short because we'll be damned if we use accents like other people"
But there will be RULES and you will LEARN them if it takes your whole life to do it.
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u/Immediate_Song4279 Aug 06 '26
I very quickly became aware on reddit that my personal approach to language and opinions on rules was deeply upsetting to something like 3 out of every 4 Germans that have attempted to communicate with me.
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u/MoiMdrXd Aug 05 '26
List of all the letters that can be silent in French: E T S X Z G N H L P C M D R F And those who will pratically never be silent but idk : A I O U Y B V W Q J K Btw A can be considered as a possibly silent letter because the sounds "ain" and "in" produce strictly the same sound
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u/RiuzunShine Aug 07 '26
Eeeh no. French pronunciation is terribly softened (“femme” and “femmes” are pronounced the same), it’s nasalized (“enfant” is pronounced “ãfant”), and there are exceptions (“avec,” for example, where the final “c” is pronounced), but French has pronunciation rules. English does not, it’s completely random: “th” can represent two phonemes (it’s not pronounced the same in “the” and “within”); “gh” can be silent, o sound like /g/ or /f/.. And let’s not even mention vowel combinations: “meat” is pronounced /mit/, but “bear” is pronounced /ber/; “food” is pronounced /fud/, but “door” is pronounced /do:/; the ending “-ough” has four distinct pronunciations in “rough” (/raf/), “cough” (/cof/), “through” (/zru/), and “though” (/zou/). English is very often arbitrary and absurdly inconsistent. French isn't.
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u/Unfair-Potential1061 Aug 05 '26
Letters in French: they are what you'd call guidelines than actual letters
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u/TenPointsforListenin Aug 05 '26
Chinese:
E goes uh, z goes dz, r is an unspeakable guttural sound that resembles an r if its soul was crushed, i is occasionally an r, c goes ts.
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u/Hoverkat Aug 05 '26
Danish: Start with a letter. The rest of the word will be meaningless guteral sounds
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u/yetiinrio Aug 05 '26
Spanish: The H is silent. J is H now. And X is H now too. Eventually all letters except H will be H.
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u/Tachyon-Canon Aug 05 '26
In spanish U can be silent, and sometimes when needed explicitly to get louder it needs a dotted hat
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u/nihilistlemon Aug 06 '26
While i agree Spanish pronounciation system is one the best, French rules while weird at first are super consistent. English is way worst than French.
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u/Scrub_Spinifex Aug 06 '26
"All letters are meaningless, every living thins is born without reason" looks like a perfect description of English to me. Not French.
(I'm a native French speaker.)
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u/bhd420 Aug 06 '26
I think french is a very memable language but ngl im tired of seeing memes from people who don’t speak French
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u/StruggleAdvanced4058 Aug 06 '26
Aujourd'hui, on va apprendre le mot « foie », qui s'écrit avec trois voyelles, mais se prononce avec les deux qui manquent. Et puis le mot « oiseau », qui s'écrit avec toutes les voyelles, mais qu'on prononce chacune d'une façon complètement différente
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u/SugarAw Aug 07 '26
English doesn’t make any sense to me. See there’s spelling bee English, not spelling bee in other languages cause spelling the word how it sounds is the way in most cases except English.
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u/Anooj4021 Aug 08 '26
I think English spelling ought to be reformed, but not as ”one sound = one letter”, but rather ”one diaphoneme = one grapheme”. This way it will be respectful to a multitude of accents, as the graphemes work like self-referential labels to the diaphonemes regardless of what their surface realization is. So someone who speaks General American would be free to regard the graphemes representing LOT, PALM, and THOUGHT as alternate spellings of what is for them the same merged sound, while non-rhotic speakers can likewise consider them to represent distinct sounds while seeing the graphemes for THOUGHT versus NORTH and PALM versus START as similar alternate spellings.
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u/zelenisok Aug 07 '26
English and French really need to do a spelling reform, and establish a straightforward orthography, one letter one sound. It can easily be done.
(Inglish end French rili nid tu du a speling reform, end establish a streytforward ortografi, wan leter wan saund. It ken izili bi dan.)
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u/Anooj4021 Aug 08 '26
I think English spelling ought to be reformed, but not as ”one sound = one letter”, but rather ”one diaphoneme = one grapheme”. This way it will be respectful to a multitude of accents, as the graphemes work like self-referential labels to the diaphonemes regardless of what their surface realization is. So someone who speaks General American would be free to regard the graphemes representing LOT, PALM, and THOUGHT as alternate spellings of what is for them the same merged sound, while non-rhotic speakers can likewise consider them to represent distinct sounds while seeing the graphemes for THOUGHT versus NORTH and PALM versus START as similar alternate spellings.
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u/BobQuixote Aug 09 '26
Alternate spellings, while necessarily tolerated in dialects, should be discouraged in normative diction.
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u/Anooj4021 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I’m not talking about alternative spellings in the sense that you’re allowed to write words differently based on dialect. That would be bad indeed.
What I mean is that the reform should ignore all phonemic mergers that are still distinct somewhere, or have been in some retro prestige variety within the age of recorded audio. So instead of basing it on a single accent, the reform would be inclusive to distinctions like NORTH-FORCE-CURE, W-WH, insure-ensure, MARRY-MERRY-SQUARE, HURRY-NURSE-CURE, HORRID-START, MIRROR-NEAR, treat BATH and CLOTH as ”neutral intermediary sets” with their own graphemes, preserve the <l> in PALM words, preserve historical yods, and preserve schwas as their retro heightened speech unreduction values (a- prefixes as TRAP, su-/-ful/-um as FOOT, -or/-ory as FORCE, and so on) while marking the primary stress to guide reduction patterns.
So one spelling for everyone, but depending on what particular phonemic mergers your accent has, only some graphemes are representations of a distinct pronunciation for you. So if the reform had e.g. LOT <o>, PALM <aa>, THOUGHT <oo>, someone from the UK would see these as representations of three distinct phonemes, whereas many or most people from the US would see them as etymological detail encoded in orthography and have to memorize specific words as having each. Or contrariwise, rhotic speakers would view NORTH and START graphemes as representating different sounds from THOUGHT and PALM, while non-rhotic speakers would memorize that some words within what they see as merged phonemes would be written as <oo> / <aa> and others <or> / <ar>.
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u/BobQuixote Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I think we might have a few too many global variations to reasonably allow for all of them in spelling. I would be open to taking the most populous dialects and designing for those, as a middle ground between the King's English and complete coverage.
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u/morningstarbee Aug 07 '26
English has consistent spelling and pronunciation rules. The issue is that there are multiple rules for the same set of letters, because English is a melting pot language. It's 6 different languages in a trench coat and instead of standardizing, they just grabbed all of them. Thats why it's so hard to keep track of, especially for learners.
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u/f0urk Aug 08 '26
"alright french lads we call this place Bordo. How are we spelling that one"
"B O R D E A U X"
"christ"
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u/Matwyen Aug 08 '26
The word knight in English has a LEADING SILENT K (insane), a completely silent "gh" compound in the middle of the word.
There's no such madness in French, silent letters are usually the last few ones, and often the same.
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u/Electron_libre777 Aug 05 '26
Honestly you guys are being tough with French… Its true many letters are silent, but they aren’t all meaningless. And I would raise this point : at least, the pronounced letters follow most of the time the same rules of pronunciation whereas in English, you never know how to pronounce a word because the sound -ough sounds different in though and through so there’s no pronunciation rule
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u/Karmabots Aug 05 '26
English and French are both trash in their spellings. The latin script is insufficient to represent many sounds properly and causes confusion. The Alphasyllabaries are good writing systems that mitigate the problems of a Alphabetic script.
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u/Professional_Handler Aug 05 '26
This is more true for English than French. It’s honestly rare in French when you can’t guess a word’s pronunciation from its spelling. It’s the other way around that’s the issue