It is a pity that, when the first two different linguistic groups met, after the necessary killing and so on, had decided 'Hmmm, we need to have an extensible set of glyphs based on sounds - we light allow a diacritic, but we will not allow vowel combinations and no way can a glyph be overloaded with two sounds'.

The phonetic pronunciation for dictionaries includes some sort of standardized attempt at this. It looks like a bad bowl of alphabet soup with some strange futhark runes thrown in, but it supposedly covers most/all of the sounds. 

That 'oo' gives us:
achoo
door
afoot
wood
book
behooved
foot
blood
roof
cooperation (we shouldn't have dropped the 'o-o' version co-operation) (oh-aw)
coordinator (again, an 'o-o' could help but its a bit of a different 'o-o' from the prior one) (oh-oh)

I haven't go them all yet!

The English (or their ancestors) have a lot to answer for (Leicestershire as 'Lester'.... Worcestershire as 'Wooster'... argh).



On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 2:12 PM Jim Catchpole - jlcatchpole at googlemail.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
According to a friend of mine who speaks Welsh, it's actually very simple.

Because the Latin alphabet was used to transcribe the language phonetically, there is
one way to write down spoken language and one way to pronounce the written form.

The only problem for English speakers is that to cover all the phonetic components of
Welsh, letter combinations are used, not just single letters and they mostly represent
*different* sounds than in English. Hence, the pronounciation is not what an English
speaker expects.

And yes, I believe that is the correct transcription of Tudor using the Welsh mapping.

On 10/09/2020 18:58, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) wrote:
According to an article I read once in NatGeo;

It's spelled 'Dhuibne" & pronounced 'gweeny'. (a placename)

I've also read that the big problem was that Gaelic had no alphabet so it had to use the Latin one.

Was the welsh spellinmg of 'Tudor' really 'Twydyyr'?

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On Thursday, September 10, 2020, 06:46:33 AM MST, David Shaw <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


If you think English is bad with it's non-phonetic spellings, don't even think of looking at Gaelic! As  just one example, the River Sgitheach in Ross-shire. Have a guess at how it's pronounced before I let you know (BTW, this is one of the easier ones to guess).

David Shaw


On Thu, 10 Sep 2020, 14:31 , <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 8:47 AM Jim Catchpole - jlcatchpole at googlemail.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Not to mention oddball cases like flammable and inflammable where two words that should be opposites mean the same thing.

Trying to teach my 13 year old english spelling (which is often not phonetic in any respect) 

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