Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o...
by tralarpa on Friday October 03, 2025 @01:10PM
(#45465185)
French orthography competitions are on a different level. Spelling of difficult words combined with grammar rule exceptions.
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o...
by thefringthing on Saturday October 04, 2025 @12:29PM
(#45474523)
French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o...
by 1-more on Monday October 06, 2025 @12:31PM
(#45493126)
Those are "phono-semantic compounds" for anyone looking to do more reading up on them. The example that springs most readily to mind is "嗎" (in Pinyin "mǎ") which is a question particle you put at the end of sentences meaning, roughly, "is it not so?" The left character is "口" meaning "mouth" (in Pinyin "kǒu" but that's neither here nor there) and the right particle is "馬" in Pinyin "mǎ" (and meaning "horse" but that's neither here nor there).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.
I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).