French, a language of ultra compact pronunciation and context-sensitive semantics in total diametric opposition to the satirically lengthy and perplex orthography, precipitating those (non-)syllables like coal within a chimney, is arduous in some aspects and notoriously simple in others: like most languages to varying coefficient, though I prefer to err towards the simpler so as not to get needlessly buggered by the inconsequential.
French, in fact, exhibits numerous properties which might appear bewildering to many. Take the question mark, the exclamation point or even the colon separation from the preceding sentence by a space, contrasting the period or comma. Ex: Quelle heure est-il ?. Except not all forms of French exercise this ‘double punctuation’ policy. Haven’t yet determined the precise mechanics, but it might concern the country of usage.
And from what I’ve been noticing, French pronounces Italian names in a very non-Italian, but rather verbatim French manner. Though I don’t find this laissez-faire approach universal - the Russian names sound relatively authentic considering the native phonetics. But I challenge you to hear the French pronounce Leonardo da Vinci.
Now if we’re to consider pronunciations genuinely funny, you know, funny in a buffoon, pantomime sort of way, I can’t help but make a case for my otherwise beloved Brazilian Portuguese. Its tendency to open syllables closed to much every other language transcends intuition and renders it fairly anti-French in that regard.
At its most charming, I can’t second the musicality of Portuguese but to Parnassus or Lesbos, among such ethereal strongholds populated by bastions of demigods and demigoddesses. At its most vulgar I occasionally find myself, admittingly, close to vomiting. Fortunately there’s far more of the charming and consequently, adjusting for the lack of novelty, it’s the simply speaking best there is.
The simplified pronoun structure and tenses also render it quiet accessible to rapid learning, unlike Spanish, with a tense for every bloody hypothetical subtlety conceivable across past, present and future.
If that wasn’t enough, you might find as many as four, formality-distinguishing second person pronouns: I’m thinking of tu, vos, usted, vosotros (in the older Spanish), vuestra merced, among the personally encountered.
Languages like Spanish and Portuguese excel in their bidirectional regularity. One can fairly accurately write the spoken as well as speak the written. With French, I can only attest to the latter direction, and even so, not free of exceptions.
But English contends for the most irregular candidate par excellence concerning the orthography, uniformity and phonetics. English is notorious for identical consonant-vowel sequences yielding diverse pronunciations across distinct words.
If I didn’t exercise a lifetime majority usage and find it absolutely sublime in the upper registers, I would, I don’t know, issue a boycott towards reform of some sort, were I slightly more industrious.
And then what’s with the superfluous consonants? Between all that phoneme overlapping of C, K, Q and S, not to get started on the doubling up of ck, I’ve always found only a subset of all that necessary, if not a mere half.
Absorbed in genealogical research of late, I’ve never taken a liking to the verbosely confusing cousin once removed, twice removed, etc, methodology as means of designating not only your parents' or grandparents' cousins but equally your cousins' issues! Not sure if other languages suffer from this lack of more precise delineation. Russian certainly doesn’t.
What else can I remark?
Polish, despite an even more diverse case structure than Russian (though I’m strongly fond of case-abundant languages despite the cognitive nuisance for the earlier stages of development), reads and sounds entirely regular: no superfluous letters that come to mind, beautiful sonority, feels close to perfect. Though I’ve never entirely reconciled this strange practice of expressing the compound future tense via the past. Feels almost a tad philosophical. A Polish speaker should know what I’m talking about.
Engaged in Modern Hebrew of late, I’ve not the slightest prior experience with Semitic languages. The vowelless orthography, overloaded consonants (this not drastically different from some of the above), context-sensitive pronunciation and the prefix-suffix structure for indicating a far diverser semantic array than I’m accustomed, makes for the most exotic framework yet. The attractive phonetics, however, more than compensates for the handful of oddities.
Questions, comments? Connect.