How could the English words possibily be pronounced as they are written, Vincent? The roman Alphabet is not fit for English, it doesn't contain enough letters for so many sounds. This is precisely one of the main reasons why English spelling is so weird... and so tough. Perhaps some symbols should be added then — like these ^ ¨° `, etc.
One problem though. As each variety of English has its own pronunciation, there would be no more standard spelling, which would be a shame for inter comprehension. So what could anyone possibily do about English spelling?
That may not be totally true...we do have the CH sound in Scotland (and Wales) as in "loCH" but I don't think it's quite the same sound as in the German "ich". I think the Scottish version is pronounce more from the throat than is the German in that word. Maybe the German word "rauchen" maybe more like the Scots. Now someone will probably tell me I'm wrong on that.
<< the Scottish version is pronounced>> is what i should have said. I was responding to LanguidMandala.
Damian,
I think you're right, though ich seems to be the normal word chosen for comparisons. My experience is that ch in German varies from almost our "h" - Joachim, through almost "sh" - Michael to the harder sound in rauchen.
The main point though is that h is not silent in loch.
This person pasting up these lists of "silent letters" doesn't seem to understand orthography. Specifically, they don't have the foggiest clue what a digraph is.
Many languages have added some new letters or special symbols to their alphabets because Roman alphabet couldn't represent all of their sounds. In my language, only 8 sounds couldn't be represented by Roman alphabet, so we write two of them as a combination of 2 existing letters ("lj" and "nj") and the other 6 just have some special characters above the letters, but I can't type it here because you probably won't be able to see it. So I think that most languages can adjust the Roman alphabet to their sounds. But English seems to have more sounds than most other languages - is that true or does it only seem like that to me?