[ziml77]

The flip-side of that pronunciation thing is that we're flexible on how things are pronounced. Just listen to the differences between British and American English or even regional differences in those countries. Us native English speakers know all the different ways our letters can sound, so differing pronunciations tend to remain recognizable as long as you don't form a homophone with another word that would work in context.

[mlinhares]

Nah, that's no flip-side.

Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_.

And this just doesn't exist in English as there are multiple words that are written the same but are pronounced differently. So while there are some rules as to how English is spoken the written language does not encode them, mostly because someone somewhere decided to use an orthography that would link the word to its source word in latin or french or whatever.

[euroderf]

And in that sense, English to some degree resembles written Chinese. Not only do spellings often not indicate pronunciation, but also pronunciations of words can vary drastically from area to area.