• bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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    11 days ago

    Is there a high-level explanation of how that clusterfuck happened? I mean, all the roman languages around France are fairly reasonable in their spelling.

    • hmonkey@lemy.lol
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      11 days ago

      People used to pronounce all the letters and then over time they got lazy and stopped pronouncing everything

      • Acamon@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        And they have actually removed some of them. The ê in forêt indicates it used to be spelled forest but that was so long ago that they’re willing to admit it’s not necessary. Unlike the k in knife, what would we do without that!

    • thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 days ago

      Maybe it’s been around longer than the others? Italian is pretty consistent with pronunciation, but modern Italian is a relatively recent language