Here’s one. I must say I have never given it a thought before, but now, when I have, I think that French spelling (weird as it is ;)) seems more consistent with pronunciation, although, as someone has already pointed out, it doesn’t work the other way.
But <ma mère est une femme> has.
That may very well be the rule (I don’t know if it is), but that won’t really help you since you don’t know by simply reading the word if the syllable is stressed or not. My personal guess is that ie in German is, as a rule, pronounced as a long i, like “ee” in English. Exceptions exist where the word has been adopted from another language (such as “Familie” from Latin “familia”) together with its pronunciation. I can’t think of a way of telling, based on the spelling of the word, which of the two pronunciations it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that the long i is way more frequent. So it might be good advice to memorise this as a rule and learn the exceptions individually - which is, of course, not very satsifactory.
Isn’t there a rule taht if the last syllable ends in a vowel, it is unstressed? I know it’s true for e, at least.
Also, there’s no way English or German could be as phonetically perfect as Spanish. Spanish has only five vowels. German and English both have more than 10. You’d need to pull out something like IPA symbols for them.
When I studied French I had (no, scratch that, I still have) a lot of trouble discerning various different nasals from each other, e.g. en/un/an, when listening to spoken French. On the other hand, knowing how to spell given words came easily.
ETA: As for German spelling reform, I never quite understood why it was needed. Standard German always seemed remarkably consistent with regard to spelling; now that, apparently, I’m supposed to write ‘ss’ a little more and ‘ß’ a little less than I originally learned to do–if I don’t want it to be immediately obvious that I learned German in the 1970s.
Two of those are the same. The four nasals are “un bon vin blanc.”
That supposed rule doesn’t make sense, particularly for monosyllabic words. The general rule for stress in German is actually quite simple: the first syllable receives the stress. Exceptions include some words of foreign origin (which keep their original stress), -ieren verbs (which get stress on the penultimate syllable), certain compound adverbs, and of course verbs with prefixes (separable or otherwise), which are governed by their own set of stress rules.
Say about the spelling reform what you will, in the case of ß vs. ss it has undoubtedly made things simpler - regardless of what many Germans themselves think, who somehow believe that the ß has been abolished. It’s quite simple, really - put a ß after a long vowel or a diphtong (ei, au, eu, …), put ss after short vowels. This does not get rid of all inconsistencies (why is it Bus, not Buss?), but if you knew where to put ß before, you now know whether to put ss or ß.
If I’m not mistaken (not fluent in French), you still don’t pronounce the t when speaking very informally. That’s the thing about French, it does mostly follow the rules, but the rules are incredibly complicated. For instance, you don’t pronounce the final consonant(s) of a word unless they’re particular consonants (with exceptions to that like blanc) or if they form a liason and the conditions for the liason are very complex and actually change with level of politeness. And knowing when to pronounce e isn’t so simple either. I could go on and on about other aspects of the language, but I’ll stick to pronunciation since that’s the topic of the thread.
German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian etc have spellings which are consistent and the rules can be written in less than a page. English has over 300 spelling patterns and the main rules take many pages.
All these languages have many dialects, like English, but their spellings emphasise phonemes, the sounds important for words in that language, not phonetics, which are all speech sounds.’
They were updated, whereas English reform has sought to change spelling radically.
We could update present spelling to cut out 149 less familiar spelling patterns, and make English far quicker to learn to read and spell. The rules would take less than a page.
Spanish spelling isn’t the result of a deliberate reform: that would have required a governing body of some sort deciding on spelling, and there wasn’t one at the time. It’s a result of having most of our writers, for a very long time, come from the areas between the Tajo and the Pyrinees - spell those dialects phonetically, and all you’ll see is differences in some stress marks. The biggest differences between those dialects are of vocabulary and stress, not phonetic ones. Once you have your most important texts in a specific dialect, students learn from those books and learn to spell things that way.
There is a distinct group of dialects (nowadays used by the majority of speakers) which would have a different spelling than the Castillian one for some consonants: these are dialects which originated in Southern Spain or which are descended from those southern Spanish ones.
What is deliberate about Spanish spelling is the (general) precedence of “Castillian spelling” over “whatever an actual speaker would use” for anything which isn’t dialogue (and even if it’s dialogue, so long as it’s from one of those northern dialects it will use the same phonetics as Castillian); also, in theory if a text is in a given dialect and some words (words, not sentences from a given character) are spelled out with a different set of phonetics, or the general text is “words you’d find in the diccionary” and a few words are not, you’re supposed to mark these outliers by putting them in italics. Note that these deliberate conventions are the result of the creation of a governing body of sorts, the Academies of the Spanish Language - but the consistant spelling is several centuries older than RAE.
I realized the last paragraph was unclear but it was too late to edit and anyway it took me a while to come up with a better way to say it…
What I meant was deliberate is having a story were you have every character speak in a given dialect, but the text between dialogue is not in that dialect.
I’m a native German speaker and have never ever heard the word Ervilie - where did you stumble over it?
It’s interesting to realize that, although we need combinations of letters like sch and ch, the pronounciation rules in German are still pretty easy compared to English, considering that the Turks complain that our letters don’t represent the sounds. Well, of course they have it easier - they got the Latin alphabet under Atatürk, so only 100 years ago! With so little time of language drift - and five dark and five light vowels - naturally their letters are closer to the sounds than ours.
Don’t know about Spanish, but there were previous Rechtschreibreformen. Which is interesting when reading old texts before the turn of the 20th century, where it’s still written as Thür (now Tür) and French loanwords are still spelled closer to the original. Nobody mentioned that during the heated discussion of the last reform.
Why it was needed, or rather, if it was needed at all, and if it was necessary to do it the top-down way, was part of the large, heated discussion between the different groups - teachers, Germanists, the normal population, the intellectuals - during the years of the reform (Talk about the reform, introduction of the reform, resistance to the reform, partly take-back of the reform).
The official reason given was that the rules for spelling were outdated, made no sense and were difficult to teach/learn for children, so instead of going by the root of the word and follow that to all derivations, words should be written as they sound like. Likewise for loanwords - no longer Ph for greek words because it’s PH in the greek Alphabet; if it’s pronounced F, it’s spelled f, no matter how funny that looks.
The problem was that while the basic idea might have been right (why spell a word like the root if the root is not obviously, or commonly known anymore), a lot of the new rules had similarly arbitrary logic, that was impenetrable for the adults. You knew that you wrote “Am Abend” because you’d always written it that way; now you had to think if “Abends” was also an adjective or a noun and therefore, the same rules applied or not.
As for being obvious - the average German uses a mixture of old and new spelling, because of the haphazard way in which the reform was done. One major newspaper for example refused to follow the reform and went with the traditional way (partly apparently for pure obstinancy and partly because they had good arguments against the reform); children in school, teachers and people working in publishing houses and similar important places took courses to learn the new correct spelling - but the average person out of school didn’t bother. Children’s books published during the reform have been rewritten to the new rules which looks weird to older readers.
When they took a few measures back, some of the worst, most-weird looking words were replaced with the old spelling. Others, like Foto instead of Photo, had been around before (probably due to English influence in this case).
More on the changes, background and discussion of the reform forexample here.
So nobody will notice old spelling in people over 20 years.
I would think the reason why you pronounce the t in <est une> is something that has developed simply to distinguish it from <et une> when spoken.
There’s quite a number of words ending in -ie that are stressed on the last syllable (with the i being a long \i). Batterie or *Havarie[/ui], for instance. I don’t know if such an emphasis rule exists for simple e; I can’t think of anything violating such a rule, except for monosyllabic words borrowed from other languages such as French ending in a silent e.
Without having ready access to my handy book on historical French phonology, I would say it’s more probable that the <t> in <et> is one of those annoying changes introduced in the early modern period, to bring the spelling into line with Latin. There’s no consonant at all in Spanish (and I think in Portuguese?), and only in Italian before a vowel. This suggests to me that the final vowel was lost early on (a common enough process in Proto-Romance), probably even before there was such a thing as “French”.
French orthography would certainly be closer to phonology if meddlesome writers hadn’t had a vogue three or four hundred years ago of “correcting” the spelling of words!
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but how can a monosyllabic German word end in a written <e> but have the stress elsewhere?
Sounds very probable (and there’s no <t> in Portuguese, BTW).
Try learning Finnish or Hungarian.