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?

  • TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
    3·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    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

    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.

    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)