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Soup@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

French does pronounce most of the letters, they just tend to drop the last one. Then there’s our “though” which is often shortened to “tho” with no consequence. English is not creative, either, most of the time the words were actually pronounced in a way that matches and time changed how we spoke them. That and we just kinda lifted the spelling of loan words but said them differently because whichever of our many accents at the time made it otherwise uncomfortable to say.

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obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The letter ‘h’ just entered the chat.

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- Soup@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In French? Yea, it’s there it’s just called, some of the time anyway, an aspirated H. It’s also pretty rare and I’d be willing to bet that that is due to loan words.
  
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bob_lemon@feddit.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
English needs a major spelling reform, but there’s no way to actually implement one. In order to match spelling to pronunciation, you would be to have a well-defined “high English” pronunciation.

But any semblance of uniform pronunciation doesn’t even exist within the UK (or even just England), much less across the entire English-speaking world, including places like Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many more countries.

And even if you somehow manage to create something (this is basically how “high German” was created, after all), good luck getting all the different governments to adopt the reformed spelling.

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- shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  also good luck basically upheaving the entire ESL world by making all the texbooks obsolete. would be pretty wild
  
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