I’ve been trying to learn a new language (Vietnamese) and a thing that has been driving me crazy are all these instances of letters being randomly pronounced differently in different words sometimes. If you don’t think about it too much, it’s easy to go “this language is dumb, why do they do this?” But then I think about English and we have so many examples of this or other linguistic oddities that make no sense but which I’ve just accepted since I learned them so long ago.
So I wanted to generalize my question: For all the languages where this applies, why are there these cases where letters have inconsistent pronunciations? For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one? For cases where the letter or combination of letters creates a new sound not already covered by existing letters, why not make a new one? How did this happen? What is the history? Is there linguistic logic to it beyond these being quirks of how the languages historically developed?
Sometimes it’s because of linguistic shifts (like in the case of english), the letters were pronounced the same, but the pronunciation shifted while the writing didn’t
Sometimes it can also depend on things like stress, so for native speakers the sounds are the “same” just stressed/unstressed, so they have the same letter, but if you don’t know the rule it seems arbitrary
And it can also come from the use of loan words. If a language has an established writing system, but users adopt a word that uses a sound not otherwise present in the language they’ll write is as close phonetically and simply know that loan words have an exception to the rule, while this again is not obivous to an outsider
Probably some other cases too, and im not sure which one applies to the specific sound you’re struggling with but a couple of examples
A recent example I came across while doing Vietnamese vocab was several letters being used to make an “Z” or “L” sound in some cases. For compound sounds, there are things like “ng” sounding like an “M” in front of words sometimes in Vietnamese or in English we have things like “th” or “ch” where the resulting sound doesn’t sound like it comes from either of the building blocks. “T” is pronounced like “tuh” and “H” is pronounced “huh”, (there is a certain irony in trying to use letters to communicate the pronunciation of letters, but whatever.) so you’d think that “th” would be something like “tuh huh” instead of the actual pronunciation. While I was writing this I thought of an example where this is how it works: “tw” gets pronounced like “twuh” like in “twelve” or “twenty”… and then I remembered “two” exists and sounds like “too” (and “to”) for some reason. So yeah. It’s really hard to come up with a consistent rule for a lot of these.
EDIT: Oh I just remembered another funny exception for “ch”: In “Chemistry” the “H” is neither pronounced nor does it modify the “C” to make the normal “ch” sound. It just sounds like there is a “C” there. Like “Cemistry.” Except looking at that, that pattern is used in something like “Cemetery” and then the “C” sounds like an “S”. I’m going to stop now because there are so many of these I could probably go on forever if I kept thinking about it.
There’s actually a similar thing in my native language, where we have multiple letters for the same sound :3. (Ų and Ū make the same long “oo” sound) those letters were originally distinct with Ų being nasal and Ū being long, but the nasal letters have come to simply be longer variants of the base letter, however both letters are still useful as they serve a distinct grammatical role :3… the letter clusters ei and iai also tend to sound the same but be used for different purposes
Sometimes the letters can also make the same sound in some words but not others due to palletization, I don’t know if vietnamese palletizes any letters, but it can make certain letters sound the same especially in some letter clusters, despite being otherwise distinct
Th is a fun one, because it did originally have distinct letters for both of the possible sounds it makes (þ and Ð) but with the rise of the printing press from germany which did not have those letters they were replaced with other letters like y (ye olde) and later th :3
But yes, the twelve/two example is due to the sounds shifting I believe, as that’s where most of the silent letters in English come from excluding the french origin words (so it would’ve been twuh-o back in the day instead of too)
What is your native language?
Seems like you skipped a small but vital detail.
Lithuanian :3
Cool.
That one’s the loanword problem. Greek has letters Κ (kappa) and Χ (chi, pronounced similar to “key” but from the back of the throat). Kappa is a close approximation to the English K, while chi doesn’t have anything like it in English. So loanwords from Greek that used chi are written differently.
Wall of random language knowledge coming:
In the Latin language, where our alphabet derives, C was originally always hard (like “calendar” as opposed to “celery”). When Greek loanwords entered Latin, kappa was transliterated to C (Kronos—Cronus). Chi, being similar but just a bit more breathy, was transliterated as Ch (Chimera).
Latin experienced pronunciation shifts and gradually branched off into the modern romance languages. In several of them, the letter C conditionally softened (e.g. cerveza in Spanish, cent in French, etc).
The Latin alphabet did not enter use for the English language until Christianity came to Britain in the middle ages. Before then, Old English, which should be more accurately called the Anglo-Saxon language, was written in Futhorc, a runic system like old Norse. The Latin alphabet was adapted to Anglo-Saxon, but there were not always 1:1 pronunciations, so pronunciation of certain letters shifted and some runic holdovers from Futhorc like Þ (thorn) for Th remained in use.
In the intervening centuries, Anglo-Saxon/English would undergo a pronunciation shift, a series of invasions from the Danes and Normans, and Ecclesiastical Latin (Latin after undergoing a pronunciation shift) remained present for religious purposes. All of these would introduce new loanwords and expand the English vocabulary at different times. The Germanic loanwords would be transliterated, while the Romantic loanwords would be lifted directly or edited slightly because they already used the same writing system. The softer Ch sound (like “chair”) existed in English by the time the Normans arrived, and they started writing it like Ch because that sounded closer to its use in French.
Finally, this was all further complicated by the invention of the printing press. By the time this occurred, the Latin alphabet became the de facto writing system for most of Europe, but languages did not quite meet 1:1 on which letters were used. Some innovations like the letter W stuck, because it was very convenient for German. And as it happens, the German printing presses invented by Gutenberg were the first to cross over into Britain. The German W was a convenient enough replacement for the English Ƿ (Wynn), but German had no equivalent for Þ (thorn) or Ð (eth, the th pronounced like “that”), so early English printers first approximated by using the letter Y for being less common and looking close enough (“ye old” is really “the old”) before eventually settling on Th.
Okay, one final note. On the random topic of W, and why it looks like two Vs, V is how U was written in classical Latin, and so W is double that. You’ll find the logic of W persists in a lot of words if you replace it with a U, even though we think of W as a consonant and U as a vowel. You can look at an edited word like “flouer” and potentially still read it as “flower” because we have other words like “flour” which have the same sound.
There’s a reason kids in Spelling Bee competitions are allowed to ask for the language of origin of a word.
It can often give a hint that a certain sound is spelled an unusual way. The “Ch” of “Chemistry” comes through Greek where it’s spelled with their letter “chi”, which for reasons I won’t get into, looks like our X.
Kids in a spelling bee wouldn’t need to ask about “Chemistry”, of course, but there may be other examples where that would be useful.