English needs a spelling reform badly. Like the whole point of writing is to put speech in writing. It makes no sense to have spelling be this detached from pronunciation.
busy should be bizy for example
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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English has the problem of taking words literally from other languages including the pronunciation.
Kindergarden - > German. The I gets pronounced differently.
Tibia - > Latin. Fuck who knows how it is pronounced, just do what you want.
Bureaucracy - > French. Yeah well the French hate people who want to learn their language, I guess. Nothing is written like it is pronounced
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This is a non-trivial task, and not simply because people will refuse to change their habits as they always do.
You say that "busy" should be "bizy", but are you sure about that? If we decide that Y should always have an "ee" sound, what do you do with words that start with Y? Or are we going to make it the rule that it always has a Y sound at the beginning of a word and an ee sound at the end? What about a word like "ripe"? That's a different-sounding I than the one you have in "bizy", so would that be "ryp"? In that case, you have to have 3 pronunciations for Y: one each for when it occurs at the beginning, ending, and inside a word.
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I heard that in the US, every business needs to have a publicly listed phone number, not to mention the number of times I see "TEXT ... TO ..." or "CALL ..." displayed more prominently than the URL on ads. Why do they still do so much over the phone?
IF you're thinking that's a legal thing, it is not. In my experience it's the opposite. Companies obscure their phone number because taking calls costs more than dealing with a chat or email.
I know, and phone calls are more annoying for neurodivergent people like me, although I get the reverse is true for old people. I had a job that featured looking up data and for any given active company with employees in Czechia, there is over 90% chance you get an address you can visit (they are legally required to list one but there are obfuscation services), about 70% for some kind of maintained web presence outside the legal registry, and some 50% for a working phone number. The latter two are roughly reversed for one-person establishments.
What happened is that I heard a Czechoslovak emmigrant to the US rambling while visiting his homeland that "phone books are useless in Czechoslo- uh - Czechia because companies aren't required by the Constitution [sic] to keep their data updated there".
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The news department in our national public television has such a service. They have a list of people they can call whenever needed. If e.g. a disaster happens in Eiuýrzbüicuzboßébeor city, they call a native speaker of that country to learn the correct pronunciation of the place or name for the news.
i pronounced "Ascendancy" with a dance in the middle and "Achievement" with a sound like a hissing cat instead of "chief".
I know better now, but i caused some laughs.
Or you can look up how to pronounce it. The IPA and often audio pronunciations aren't that hard to find, unless you speak a more obscure language
So many of the audio pronunciations are computer generated, I used to like IPA but then I stopped drinking so it doesn't really help any more.
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No I will pronounce Latin with guterization so bad it'd make a Catholic priest have an aneurysm. Worst part is it actually sounds close to classical Latin or so I've been told.
Well...im my country there actually is :D You can call them, they are very nice and for bonus points you can also ask them about any questions you have regarding grammar rules and how you would correctly use them in you specific context
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