From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Apr 6 15:33:13 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A6DAF37C26B for ; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 15:33:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id AAA01833 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Fri, 7 Apr 2000 00:33:04 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id XAA50071 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 23:59:45 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: BSDCon East Date: 6 Apr 2000 23:59:44 +0200 Message-ID: <8cj1cg$1gse$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <8cgj1a$313f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Brad Knowles wrote: > > If the language in question has > > a strong divergence between spelling and pronunciation (English is > > pathological in this respect), > > On a side-note, English may be bad at things like this, but my > experience so far is that French is worse. I disagree. For French the mapping from spelling to pronunciation is mostly regular, although complex. If you encounter a French word you've never seen before, there's usually no problem to pronounce it correctly. Admittedly the reverse direction is something of a problem, since there are often many (combinations of) letters that map to the same sound as well as all those silent final consonants. You can observe the difficulties this causes for native speakers over on the French language newsgroups (fr.*). English, of course, is just plain irregular. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message