this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
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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.