What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/193/ (link found by BunScientist@lemmy.zip)) Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.

  • Nikls94@lemmy.world
    4·
    7 days ago

    A French. The language where you have 5 wovels, use 3 for the word goose and the other 2 to pronounce it.

        • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
          2·
          5 days ago

          It’s really not. Maybe if you pronounce an English ‘u’, but not a French one. Source: I’m French Canadian.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          6 days ago

          If you look at an IPA chart, you can see how going from /i/ to /e/ to /a/ is a process of the vowel becoming more and more “open” over time (said with the mouth wider and wider).

          In Quebec, the vowel shift that caused “oi” to have a /wa/ sound didn’t fully happen. So, the word “moi” is often pronounced more like /mwe/ or /mwɛ/. But “oiseau” (bird) is still pronounced with a /wa/.

          The modern French pronunciation of the Loire river /lwaʁ/ influences the English pronunciation /lwɑːr/. But, other languages use a spelling that matches the French but have a different pronunciation. In Italian and Spanish it’s Loira. The Latin name was Liger. So, it used to have a /i/ pronunciation before the vowel shift.

          tl;dr: modern French pronunciation vs spelling is just about as bad as English.