this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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In the original post, it is explained that it’s spelled that way because of grammar rules in Latin.
That's a very anglocentric take on how things are things are "supposed" to be spelled.
As someone who was not born speaking English but now does, I maintain English is the weird one.
Supposed to be spelled? english? Are you implying that english has any spelling rules to begin with?
I take your point, but... well there are certain things.
For one the vowels are fucked because of the great vowel change.
I've never really had an issue with spelling English words like "necessary" (one of the most misspelled words), "diarrhoea" or things like that, because my brain sort of stores them the way I used to read them in Finnish before I started thinking in English. Whereas I do sometimes have trouble when people spell words out, because even to this day, the fact that the vowels are essentially in cipher (the most simple cipher possible but still technically a cipher) causing my brain to sometimes brainfart.
I don't have trouble writing things people are spelling out, but out of those two things that's the one I more have trouble with.
When you take an English word like geography and look at the IPA guide for it, it doesn't even resemble the word most times; geography = /dʒiˈɒɡɹəfi
Whereas Finnish words end up looking like themselves because the language is just said as it's written. Which I think won't make sense even as an idea to most English speakers lol, not having a thing called "pronunciation".
hevonen (horse) = [ˈheʋonen], hernekeitto (pea soup) = [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo], tule! (come) [ˈtuˌle]
As in if you take 3 native English speakers and 3 native Finnish speaker and give them all a list of, say, random words/names from other languages.
The English speakers will sort of try to guess the pronunciations based on their understanding of any given languages. Ie they'll be more or less guesses, but maybe sometimes will be more or less correct. You'll get 3 completely different pronunciations for each word.
The Finns on the other hand, will butcher every single pronunciation unless it happens to coincide with how Finnish reads things, but they'll all butcher the names in the exact same way.
Thanks for the explanation, the example at the end was really helpful for understanding the point.
I read this in my replied and 100% thought you were being sarcastic about some other comment I've made.
My pleasure, languages are infinitely intriguing.
Like one similar difference you can consider is the differences between languages which use logographic script and language which use phonographic script.
Just like how English struggles with standards of how to pronounce weird names, Chinese would struggle to write it down. As in if I wrote book and all my characters have weird names which don't mean anything but are just weird nouns...
Just like English (and other languages) has to sort of invent or agree on how to pronounce a thing ("gif" vs "jif" anyone?), logographic scripts have to agree how to write it.
I’m a native English speaker, and even I recognize how weird the language is comparatively to other languages.
"How things are things are"
What.
Sorry I write on mobile, rarely proofread and it was probably a massive brainfart because I changed to take that screenshot.
Latin didn’t have the letter j.