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A comment on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong. Parent comment

Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong by generalizations on Monday April 17, 2023 @12:24PM (#35603002)
Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a combination of several older languages, saxon and french included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which language the word construction originated in.

English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.

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Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong by pclmulqdq on Monday April 17, 2023 @12:52PM (#35603387)
Multimodal - Germanic languages, French, Latin, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Slavic languages have all produced common words in the English lexicon.
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Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong by tomjakubowski on Monday April 17, 2023 @01:19PM (#35603699)
"tough", "rough", "though" and "borough" all come from Old English, without any French influence. The wackiness in pronouncing "ough" is sadly not predictable from any set of rules and as you'd probably expect varies between dialects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

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Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong by hydrok9 on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @12:31AM (#35609974)
"at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English, and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them."
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