this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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To be fair, most of the weirdly spelled words come from other languages. Especially French.
Yup, in this case: Yacht comes from the Dutch word "jacht" (hunt). Named after fast sailing vessels to hunt down pirates and enemies.
And "yacht" or variations of it are used in the exact same way in a lot of other languages. It is really an exceptionally unfortunate example the monolinguistic OOP chose to be their point.
hear here. and now we're building the largest yacht for bazos
Brings back a fun memory. On a business trip in France, I was driving and with my coworker (French national).
I had the GPS set to English pronunciation of the signs etc. My coworker spent most of the two hour drive a complaining about the pronunciation and begging to change the settings. I spent the trip laughing my ass off at him and refusing to change it.
Sure we did that. But look at how you spell and pronounce them ! What a slaughter.
French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this
English is the most common
I think phonetic alphabets are a pretty good idea (though I suppose they're mostly phonemic).
I'm surprised more people don't make fun of abjads.
There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I'm sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.
“Strictly phonetic”—no. But more-or-less-strictly phonological, yes. Finnish is also one of those.