English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) by Certhas on Saturday November 28, 2015 @12:44PM (#10641722)

In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible).

In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.

You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html

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Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) by jfim on Saturday November 28, 2015 @03:04PM (#10642202)

French isn't as deterministic as you make it sound.

For example many letters are silent and it's not always obvious why. Contrast the last sounds of these words: grec (ɡʁɛk) and tabac (ta.ba), chef (ʃɛf) vs nerf (nɛʁ), six (sis) vs prix (pʁi), etc. There are also some heteronyms, for example, les poules couvent (ku.v) but les soeurs restent au couvent (ku.vɑ̃).

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