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romanoderoma

Yes, but even considering this particular case, it is consistent

Au in French is never pronounced as it is written (like augen in German or aulico in Italian), but always as a O

Once you know the rules it's pretty easy

Also French (like Italian, Spanish and others) have accents to help you decide how to pronounce a word

Now consider these popular examples of English inconsistencies

The bandage was wound around his leg to cover his wound.

The insurance on the invalid was invalid

I did not object to the object.

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A poem driving this home: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.... (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos)

That is more like "speak as it is written" -- ie, the pronunciation derives consistently from the orthography. That is slightly different from "write as you speak" where the spelling of a word is literally speaking it slow enough so the individual sounds can be distinguished.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.

(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.

Not disagreeing with you either, but as an Italian it's not the C, it's the combination of C and other letters after it.

Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C.

It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it).

Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that

C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C

C+e, C+i = soft C

So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same

Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though

Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri...

hard c = Voiceless velar plosive

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive

They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)

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