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by qalmakka 1796 days ago
Also known as "pronouncing Latin alphabet vowels as in Latin" :)

I like how English managed to offset for his relatively simple grammar by totally destroying its spelling. The whole fact that things like "spelling bees" can exist was very hard to grasp to me as a kid watching stuff dubbed in Italian.

Seven years old me was always very confused by why the kids in TV shows were rewarded for knowing how to spell stuff, which is something every second grader can do in Italy for any arbitrary word. In Italian you just write things the way you hear them, and there's an almost 1:1 strong correspondence between written and spoken language. If you don't know how to write something, you also don't know how to say it.

1 comments

They had a crazy vowel shift where vowels, which for example in Romanian are defined as sounds that "stand by themselves" [1] all became 2-sound things.

To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "ă" which is pronounced "uh").

A became ei.

E became i (ok, this one's the exception, but in practice it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! - pronunciations for it).

I became ai.

O became ău.

U became iu.

So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which is crazy enough anyway).

I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't used in Latin.

[1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't need an additional supporting sound.

Without counting all those circumstances where A is still /a/, u is /a/ or a similar vowel, and so on. Basically, there's nothing that's still pronounced as it should :)