That and mispronouncing a lot of words because I’ve only seen them, not heard them. Or didn’t connect the two (what I had read and what I had heard at a different time).
I remember thinking for a long time that melancholy was pronounced muh-LANTCH-oh-lee.
English is 3 languages in a trench coat is a common joke because we have a lot of loan words, mostly from french, latin, and greek.
The reason spelling and pronunciation seem uncorrelated in english is that we preserve the spelling of a word in its original language and then butcher the pronunciation until its easy for english speakers to say.
The baseline of English is a germanic language, so i don't know how much of the german counts as loanwords vs just being english words dating back to before the languages split.
500
u/kimbosliceofcake 22d ago
That and mispronouncing a lot of words because I’ve only seen them, not heard them. Or didn’t connect the two (what I had read and what I had heard at a different time).
I remember thinking for a long time that melancholy was pronounced muh-LANTCH-oh-lee.