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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written.

English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.)

Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

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Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)

So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?

Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.

In my version of English, a router that passes packets rhymes with root, and a router that carves wood rhymes with out.

Is that typical UK English?

Yes :-)

There’s a nice list of other heteronyms at https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-p...

It is. A "rooter" is a piece of network equipment; a "rauw-ter" is a machine for finishing a hole in a piece of work, such as a drill-hole.

I'm perfectly willing to accept american pronunciation of technical terms in IT; IT tech-talk is a kind of jargon that most non-techs are bewildered by. There's little benefit in clinging to customary pronunciations.

But the machine for cleaning holes isn't in that category. If I were talking to e.g. a woodworker, and referred to a "rooter", I expect that would result in some mirth at my expense, for exposing my ignorance.

That's also my pronunciation of the two terms, and I'm from the US (Boston area)

> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.

My favourite example: "banana" has three a's, no two of which are pronounced the same.

I think I pronounce the first and last a's the same (specifically, as /ə/)... it must be a dialectical difference (mine is General American English).

I think you are right.

For me the first a is reduced to almost nothing, the second is a long vowel and the last is a schwa.

I've think I've heard bina:na:, bina:nɚ, and binænə, in addition to bənænə.

That's a good example. I am amused by "record" being pronounced differently whether it's a verb or a noun.

They're called heteronyms, and there are a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

panorama is similar.

I have recently been pulled-up by a fellow native speaker over my pronunciation of the word "poor" ("poo-uh"). She pronounces it the same as "pore" or "paw". Many other words have exhibited the same shift: e.g. moor/more, boor/bore. My natural accent is RP, but I think the distinction I like to draw is not RP. Most of the people I meet that draw this distinction are from the North. Scots, in particular, seem inclined to draw the old distinctions more than southerners.

"The Chaos" is an excellent demonstration of the irregularities of English's spelling/pronunciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

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