Aside from the vowels a e i o u (which are special) and also the pseudo-vowel y, the rest of the consonants roughly split into a few kind of groups. The -ee endings (b, c, d, etc.) is the most common, but there is also e- (like s, l), -ay (like k), a- (like r). There’s also some weird ones like q (kyu) and the worst offender is “double u” (w).

If the pronunciations of the consonants were standardised, what should be the new “standard” for pronouncing them? Should it be -ee, or something like -ay? How would the alphabet song sound?

  • Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    German (my first language) is actually very phonetically consistent. Generally speaking if you know how it’s spelled you know how it’s pronounced. A lot of languages work that way, many of which use the Latin alphabet. English is a bit special being a Germanic language with a plethora of Romance loan words and almost kind of a case-by-case spelling situation. So right off the bat this idea would probably be pretty inconveniencing for non English speakers while providing little to no benefit for anyone. If you want to standardise letter pronunciation I’d probably do it similar to Turkish so “A, Bee, Cee, Dee, Fee, Gee, Hee, I, Jee, …” and so on.

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      Oh yeah it would be a nightmare for non-english speakers for sure. Interesting that German is more phonetically consistent than English (stuff like “Karl” make more sense now)