Troisnyx

and finding out exceptions that make me exceptionally upset.

RULE: a tréma on a vowel following another vowel makes the two vowels pronounced separately. EXCEPT: foëne /fwɛn/

RULE: e makes one of the three e-like sounds when not silent: /e/, /ə/, or /ɛ/. EXCEPT¹: femme /fam/, solennel /sɔlanɛl/

RULE: except for loanwords², œ is /œ/ and oe is /oe/. EXCEPT: moelle /mwalø/, poêle /pwal/

and of course everyone's favourite:

RULE: oi is /wa/. EXCEPT: oignon /ɔɲɔ̃/

some of these I think are excusable. like foëne maybe migrated from /fɔɛn/ which is understandable if you squish the vowels together. em and en are sometimes is sometimes /ɑ̃n/ (e.g. emmener, entre) so maybe femme and solennel are in that category. but oe and oi above are INEXCUSABLE and I'm very curious to see whether there even are any other words with this orthography and proununciation

1. and -emment adverbs but that's it's own rule so it's fine

2. some loanwords are from Latin, similar to how UK spelling will retain œs in places, and are pronounced /e/ or /ɛ/; others are from German where originally there was an ö, and pronounced /ø/

I'm on the hunt for more oe words that pronounce like /wa/. So far I've found:

• moellon /mwalɔ̃/ - rubble
• coëffe /kwaf/ - archaic spelling of coiffe

from the second one I just remembered that oi also used to be pronounced /we/, and in places like Québec words like moi do tend towards /mwe/, so I suspect both oi and oe were pronounced /we/ and eventually shifted towards /wa/ for the former and dragged the latter along with it. so fine, I guess this is acceptable too, with oë seemingly a common alternate spelling for oe in this case. but that doesn't explain why it's poêle rather than poële!

Thai has a ton of letters that, because of sound mergers, all represent the same sound as each other. According to Wikipedia, "There are 44 consonant letters representing 21 distinct consonant sounds."

Some unstressed vowels in written in languages such as Assamese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and Gujarati are just silent and you just kinda have to know that about them. i've seen theories that a lot of winners of american spelling bees are of south asian descent because they've got a disproportionate amount of practice remembering weird spelling shit

Also, the sheer amount of difference between phonetic transcription versus transliteration for Lhasa Tibetan is truly terrifying. For example, the word Tibet is either "Bod" or "Poi", depending on if you want to represent the spelling or the pronunciation.

Because a bunch of old people decided that it is the case. Not a joke.

As a native speaker, I want to say: I hate this stupid language.

I am a nonnative French speaker and I was recently given some powerful advice by a friend, with regard to my accent and the enunciation issues that come with it —

« Utilise ta voix. »

Use your voice.

I've come to the point of being able to spell things just by feel or by what I hear, which is great, but there are enough people who will throw shade at some of us for even just deviating ever so slightly from the IPA of European French, or anything recognisable as francophone.

Looking at these exceptions above reminds me that I am a native speaker of a language rife with pronunciation exceptions (English), and really, I would have thought we'd be used to it all by now. But we're not. The slightest deviation — including mistakenly reading the words as we see them — and it's either d'où viens tu, vraiment or pourquoi est-ce que tu chantes avec un petit accent là...

C'est une langue qui contient dans ses règles quelque part des exceptions, c'est une langue que j'aime bien. Je suis trop pauvre de visiter et habiter dans un pays francophone, alors laissez-moi utiliser ma propre voix. C'est fatiguant.

I can't begin to tell you all about the amount of times I'd been scared of releasing a song I'd written in French, because of comments I'd get about my accent. I want to be unafraid to sing. I sing in French because it has been part of me for a long time. Learning it has been integral to my scrapped plans of studying medicine, plans rooted in the childish desire to help people. I love the language despite its idiosyncrasies. It matters to me that I sing in it with my voice.