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0 pointsdragonwriter5y ago0 comments

> The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master.

Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish).

Compared to languages where the primary script isn't even phonetic, though, I don't see it.

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fiddlerwoaroof5y ago· 2 in thread

What I’ve always wondered about this is if there’s a better way to present this: pronunciation in English is sort of path-dependent and I wonder if a two-phase approach of recognizing the etymological groups (Germanic-origin, French-origin, Spanish-origin, etc.) and then applying the rules for that group would make the pronunciation appear more regular.

necrobrit5y ago

I can immediately think of a counter example: corps vs corpse. Literally from the same word origin, wildly different pronunciation.

fiddlerwoaroof5y ago

That’s not a counter-example: the Latin root “corpus” was borrowed through French twice: once in the 16th century (corps) and once in Middle English (first corse, then corpse). This is a case of path-dependence: the newer borrowing is pronounced more like French while the older one has been regularized.

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