You can work it out through tough thorough thought, though.

Seriously!

We have a third grader, and he's pretty good at reading. Recently he has been arguing with us about the pronunciation of some new words from his homework.

The problem is, his arguments are sound! He's accurately following the rules he learned for sounding out words.

When this has come up in the past, all I've been able to do is acknowledge his argument and explain to him how English has all kinds of weird rules and exceptions, and it's the kind of thing you remember with experience using the words. Like, there is no new rule to learn, and you don't have to freak out about remembering all these exceptions. It will just come with time. (Because we all know there's nothing that kids like more than olds telling them to just wait or give it time, lol)

Of all people, Gallagher made the point in the 80s. I think George Carlin also did a set about English words once.

English is basically three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat

But this is someone complaining about an English word and how it is pronounced compared to spelling. Yes, it comes from another language. That is the entire reason English has a lot of examples like this.

Even if you have heard an English word before, you're probably still pronouncing it wrong

"Tough" ought to be written as "tuff"

But the point is that the person complaining isn't complaining about the French, but about some imagined English dude who picked the pronunciation of rendezvous for fun

English is * the last language that should complain; unfortunately, 54% of the US population has a literacy level below that of a 6th-grade student.

edit: typo

WUH

Is that a German or English w?

english readers will reads this as räng de wah xD

rung de voo i would pronounce it ron de voo tho

FTFY

Hero.

Wait wait wait wait.........I'm pretty good at catching things. You're saying I could get a drive by kitten adoption? That sounds super fast, efficient, and then I'd have a kitten on my way home from work!

No no a Mongoose is a small carnivorous animal. She called you a Monologue.

mongolia is not part of china

I'm pretty sure she called you a mango

I got chu, fam

We must self censor. To comply with the shitfeed updoots.

No thanks, I'm a bit tired right now. Maybe later 🤷

I blame the Danish

They stole the sound from French letters during the Franco-Swedish War.

When some of them had one[1] with with some of the French?

[1: A rendezvous]

JESUS, warn me before befowling my eyes so!

And you also have words like Wednesday...

French in particular gets a lot of words with original spellings because it used to be the language of the courts in England.

Not always, the word skosh(meaning just a little bit or a tiny amount) comes from the Japanese word sukoshi(少し), but that can probably be attributed to the language not generally using romanized letters.

It's a very interesting word to me since its one of the very few words that migrated from Japanese to English and isn't a name of something. The way it came over is also rather interesting, as it was through collaboration between US and Japanese soldiers during the Korean war.

My favorite are British English, who can't stand the French to the point that they say things like filet with a hard T.

This also reminds me of a recent trip to Colorado, where they do the same thing with Spanish words, anglicizing all of them. Salida (sa-LIE-da) is the first one that's coming to mind, but I know there are other cities in Colorado that are clearly Spanish words that they've just abused.

In "there" own fashion huh ?

I like liver noise

We got some fun ones by me too, like Ausable river, that comes from French. But we pronounce it Ah-sable(but sable like a sable hair brush)