this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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I hate French like the next guy, but pronunciation rules are at least consistent compared to English. An English word's pronunciation is everyone's best guess. Sometimes depends on context or tense, even when written the exact same. With French you don't really have that. It's confusing, there are lots of letters, but at least it's consistent.
English pronunciation depends on the language they stole the word from.
It also depends who you're talking to and/or where you are.
That part's not as unique to English though.
Stolen from? The English got invaded by the Romans, Normans, Vikings etc. Didn't have much choice in that word adoption.
Oh, we steal words. And we will continue to steal words until we have them all!
The Celtics got invaded by the Romans, then by Saxons, then by Vikings/Danes, then by Normans in the 11 Century. Then they spent the last 900 years invading everybody else.
Ehh, Normans mostly kept to themselves. The folks didn't have to adopt any of their language, except to speak to the king and upper administration. But French language was perceived as fashionable, so the vocabulary crept into English — the division between crude everyday Norse/Germanic words and ‘elegant’ highbrow Norman words is still present in the choice of which ones were chosen to stay in the language for any particular topic.
What about Normandy?
And guess who they stole a bunch from? Yes, French. Blame the French. Blame the Franks and the Normans specifically for making the pronunciation weird.
English suffers from adopting a lot of words from other languages. We got a mix of Germanic, French, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and for the US English, whatever butchery the Brits did/do. (See: The Great vowel shift and Soccer) You smash all those languages together and then let the Brits spend a few hundred years mangling everything and see what you get for rules.
Today English is still willing to file the serial numbers off of any cool sounds and claim as our own. So, Damn the Rules! It makes for interesting words.
But I still blame the French for no other reason than I can.
It also didn't help that English was standardizing its spelling as the Great Vowel Shift was occurring
I also forgot about the early Dutch press operators that old Bill Caxton hired that gave us the silent h in words like ghost because that was close to ghast. And wh got added because they thought it looked better the the standard hw that was common at the time. Ok, that one is kind of a wash.
The standardization of spelling that printing presses require added a nasty list of silent letters to the English language that weren't there before thanks to those early press operators.
I've spoken French my whole life. The only consistent thing I can think of versus English is the prononciaton of "c" or "g" with the succeeding vowel. Otherwise it's such a mess. "Eau" (water) has three vowels, but is pronounced like the one vowel that is not in it: "o". Almost all words have letters that aren't pronounced, but you can't tell from any rules. You just have to know how the word is pronounced and written.
English pronunciation and spelling is indeed also fairly inconsistent, but I still make a lot less spelling mistakes even though it's not my first language.
Everywhere you see 'eau' or 'eaux' it's pronounced 'o'. Always, no exceptions. It's crazy you never noticed that once you know the pronunciation rules of French you can say every word correctly.
As anything in French, there are exceptions like "femme" et "monsieur" but they are fewer and more manageable than for English.
As someone who has also spoken French their entire life; I disagree. Is French orthography messy? Sure, but it's a consistent mess. Like the other commenter said, once you know "eau" is pronounced "o", you know. Un beau bateau sur l'eau.
Contrast with English, where rough & thorough thought is required throughout tough sentences such as this one just to figure out what the Fuck sound "gh" will make.
I really came to appreciate the difference in English and French when I used to work in pharmacies; my first job was in a French place, and I intuitively knew how to pronounce drug names at first encounter.
I later worked in a place with only Anglophones and I never got the prononciation on the first try. It was a guessing game.
I learned French in school, but no one ever told me how modern French is a combination of divergent old French languages, "Langues D'oc" in the south where the word for yes was "oc" and "Langues d'oïl" where oui was the word for yes in the North.
From the former, we have L'Occitane, and the Languedoc region of the south of France.
I wonder what else i don't know about French. /me reads Wikipedia.