[davidgay]

> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/

French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:

- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)

- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)

- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")

The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.

[HappMacDonald]

> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)

Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.

My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.

[hirvi74]

To further this, a perfect example are some of the culinary words vs. the animal words in English.

Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.

Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.

It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.

[morpheos137]

No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing to bet that more native English words have irregular spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have irregular spellig is because English has been a written language for a long time. That is why you have words like Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used to be prounouced.