[kergonath]

> And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords.

Or the spelling. I mean, I know how the letters are pronounced, so I can see that fåtölj is actually a good transcription, but visually it bears no resemblance whatsoever with fauteuil.

I have found that French words that ended up in English were actually quite difficult to recognise in a conversation, even though they are written exactly as in French most of the time.

I guess it’s related to the great vowel shift (but not only, even consonants are weird), but English really is weird compared to a lot of continental European languages. For example, a /r/ sounds like a /r/ in anything from Spanish to Finnish. Granted, there are differences in prononciation, but it is still not distorted beyond recognition. Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.

[yorwba]

> Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.

Compare English "iron" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg

German "eiern" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg

French "ailler" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-...

None of the <r>s is anything like [r].

[saghm]

Maybe I just pronounce it weird, but I tend to pronounce "iron" the same way as the phrase "I earn", just with less space between them. Obviously the "r" is closer to the "n" in my pronunciation, but it feels like a stretch to say that it's the "r" with the weird pronunciation. If anything, the vowels are what seem weird to me; the "i" is long, which does not seem obvious it would be the case from the spelling alone, and the "o" is just completely silent, which is the only case of that in English I can think of off the top of my head (although I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few others).

[yorwba]

"iron" probably underwent a process called r-metathesis after the spelling was standardized (or the spelling was based on a different dialect). If the spelling had been based on the later version, it would've been "iorn". I was going to give a lengthy explanation, but someone on StackExchange already did: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662

[funnybeam]

A lot of it is also due to French pronunciation changes. There are many "french" loan words where the english version is much closer to the original french than the modern french pronunciation is -oyster for example.

Then again several of the more obviously "french" words are drifting the other way as people assume they should be pronounced like modern french - valet is a great example here where most english people now drop the final 't'