What If We Pronounced EVERY Letter in English?! Yep, It's WEIRD

[@PatrolNation]

😂 Thanks for watching my reaction to Michael McIntyre’s hilarious bit on silent letters! 🤔 Can you imagine if we actually spoke like this? Which word had you laughing the most? Drop your favorites (or the ones that confuse you) in the comments! And if there’s another Michael McIntyre clip I should react to, let me know. Let’s keep the laughs coming! 😂🎤

[@alexandermills9965]

The 'ough' is another one that people who are trying to learning English would struggle through Brought tough enough enough borough drought although Loughborough (always funny) hiccough

[@alpine_newt]

All those silent letters used to be pronounced. We changed how we spoke but kept the spelling. Similar to the names of towns and cities.

[@ansuseiskaviisi]

😂 this was fun, here in Finland (finnish)we also pronounce every letter and when we speak english it kind a sound like that. Very thick finnish accent in english we call "rally-english" since some of our rally drivers speak like that in the interviews. 😂😂😂

[@MannyBrum]

Finnish is a great language. A lot of the Finnish language is pronounced the way Old English was at one time, including vowels a, e, i, o, u and y and ä in Finnish is pronounced like æ in Old English. Plus none of the letters are silent, it has vowels that are longer but make the same sound, and double consonants are pronounced. If a Finnish speaker were to learn Old English, they'd be better at pronouncing it than a lot of the experts in it do who are almost all native English speakers. I'm not sure if I've ever heard a linguist who studies Old English not slip into a Modern English accent at times when speaking Old English.

[@RazielSonicHyrule]

I'm Spanish and I confirm learning to read and to write English is difficult. In Spanish is a lot easier to read what's written just by knowing a couple of rules and, with very few more rules, to write what's said. But, to be fair, you need a lot of courage to dare learn Spanish verbs. I have to admit Spanish verbs are made in Hell. They're useful but terrifying difficult, even for Spanish speakers.

[@alexandermills9965]

The 'ough' is another one that people who are trying to learning English would struggle through Brought tough enough enough borough drought although Loughborough (always funny) hiccough

[@kirstygunn9149]

Loughborough is pronounced Luff bra or Luff burra depending on which part you are from the posh part or the council estates .

[@alexandermills9965]

@@kirstygunn9149 Oh I know I was just thinking about the non native English speakers. At Uni in Luton

[@TheWalrusWasPaul23]

I teach English in a german speaking country. German is a phonetic language where you pronounce all letters (which is why it sounds slightly german when you do that in English as they’re related languages). None of us understand the pronunciation rules of english. The amount of discussions we have in class about why things aren’t pronounced or why the letters ‘ea’ have about 5 different pronunciations… it feels endless. But then comes the latin languages (also teach french) and it gets so much worse somehow

[@alexandermills9965]

The 'ough' is another one that that you must struggle to teach through Brought tough enough enough borough drought although Loughborough (always funny) hiccough

[@MannyBrum]

For it to make sense you have to study the history of English. Old English was simple phonologically though more complex morphology with four noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) and sometimes five (instrumental), weak and strong adjectives, and three grammatical genders. When the Norman Conquest happened and the Normans took over England, Old French (the Norman dialect) became the language of state and was all that was spoken by the kings and nobility and official documents were in Old French. This over the next few hundred years influenced English and a ton of words were added to English based on the French, but it also affected the pronunciation of some words of Old English origin. This is why English is over twice the size of most languages in vocabulary, but that wasn't even the thing that messed with the language the most. The worst thing to happen to English came in the 1600s and 1700s when the first dictionaries were written. Up to that point words were spelled how they were pronounced in a given dialect. When the folks that wrote dictionaries curated the language they picked the spellings that would become the standard, often from multiple dialects, and they tended to favor Romanic words over Germanic ones, and around this time many of the Germanic words that had made it into Modern English stopped being used. You really have to look at the etymology of the words to understand what happened. For instance you say 'EA' has different pronunciations. In the word steak it is pronounced /steɪk/ because in Middle English the word was 'steike' and it was taken from Old Norse. Beast was 'beeste' in Middle English which is pronounced /ˈbɛːst(ə)/ but the double vowels generally became what they are in English today. Beast came from French, but the word tooth came from Old English 'toþ' which had a long o that became doubled in Middle English (sort of like how long vowels are double vowels in Finnish) and then when the vowel shift happened it became what we think of as 'oo' today. In the case of beast, it likely was spelled both beast and beest in Early Modern English dialects and the dictionaries decided on the ea version.

[@davebilson]

@@alexandermills9965 English can be learned with tough thorough thought though! 🙂

[@ESUSAMEX]

Many words like buffet come from French and French is even crazier than English in many ways.

[@Astridsscribbles]

You’re all gonna sound Dutch on this silentletterday 😂😂😂

[@KarlGillcrist]

I think it would be hilarious to address a town meeting speaking this way just to see the reaction of the crowd...Karl from eastern Canada....Happy Holidays

[@yzolakitchi]

I worked years ago for a manager who insisted on saying "An Otel" and not 'a hotel' because technically the h should be dropped and have 'an' rather than 'a'. It was the weirdest thing ever and due to her travelling, she said it A LOT! It is true that our language makes little sense at times 🙂

[@normora5857]

I remember when I was learning English the kn-words confused the heck out of me. Some of the other ones are quite logical if you had Latin at school, such has hora = hour, autumnus = autumn, scola = school and a lot more. The Normans brought Frech to Britain, and Latin was the language of the learned and also the written language at that time. I think a lot of the letters in the spoken language disappeared over the years because it made the pronounciation easier. If you get confused by that, try some French: qu'est-ce que c'est? - pronounced "kes ke seh" - meaning: what is this? That's on a different level!

[@patriciacanadiansenior8130]

This is hysterical, but I've always wondered why the silent letters.

[@RoniFromTN]

I saw this the other day and laughed SO much!!!

[@ritapearl-im3wv]

Spelling Bees would be pointless without those silent letters. [Never heard a bee spell, but never asked either!]

[@jeremyatkinson8179]

This bit is absolutely hhhhilarious!!

[@dagmar.6954]

That was very funny! My mom only spoke German when she came to Canada & learned English. In German you pronounce every letter so it was hard for her to say a lot of words with the silent letters. One we've joked about is the word "Knowledge". Try pronouncing every letter & see how funny it sounds.

[@robertvirnig638]

Yeah, the only other language I've tried to learn was Spanish. It was fairly easy once I got past the weirdness of having to remember whether each inanimate object was masculine or feminine. Words sounded as they were spelled and spelled like they sounded, unless of course, they borrowed a word from English.

[@jackyfriedman1963]

I love Michael McIntyre. Been watching him for decades. I can watch his jokes over and over and still laugh my butt off 😂😂😂😂. More of him please 😉

[@missdragonfire]

Its hilarious but i actually say some of these words with the silent letter when writing them down something i started as a child.

[@joshmurrayreactions]

I literally just posted my reaction to this, then got on and saw you did this 2 days ago! Haha, sorry for the close duplication there lol.

[@sheridanclaude2133]

Lowell, sk-hool is school. 😂 The first time I heard it, the ones that cracked me up the most were Wall-king and Tall-king and clime-bing, but the whole thing is hilarious! His presentation makes it even funnier.

[@jonjohnson2844]

I can speak Portuguese to most people in Portugal, but reading anything in that language I'm flummoxed so I haven't even bothered to learn the intricacies to be fair.

[@dianathompson833]

and then there's the homophones (rain, Reign, rein) and homonyms (row your boat/ have a row) and words that have completely different meanings depending on which syllable is stressed - like reFUSE (not gonna do it) & REFuse (garbage) and so on and so on...

[@claret6937]

Hilarious, of course, it's all because of the origins of the language being in celtic, latin, german, french mixing up in the strange way it does!

[@MuddyCorgi]

That was great! You should also react to his story about going to the dentist. 🤣

[@reindeer7752]

Well, the French lop entire endings of 3 or more letters off. Some of these silent letters in English come from French.

[@janegreene2838]

What about the ending "e"?!

[@dawn6320]

Hey ! You're supposed to be resting ! We will all be here when you're all rested up !! Meditation works wonders to lower BP try it. Be Well 🙏

[@staceysmith8173]

This was recorded about a week or so ago before him going to the hospital but thank you so much for getting on him I NEED reinforcements. 😊😊

[@nekite1]

Pterodactyl is another one...

[@scorpiox100]

I want him to say things like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (Wales) or Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (Massachusetts)

[@franconow3092]

So... Why bother having them writen?

[@debhinkle4413]

Too funny!

[@peggysoutherland1183]

LOL

[@hardtackbeans9790]

🙂