English is weird.
Take the double oo for example.
There are so many different pronunciations for it and there seems to be no rules whatsoever.

mood
wood
blood
door

All different

All the three E in Mercedes are pronounced differently.

yeah, there's plenty:

https://thesoundofenglish.org/oo-pr...

that's just something you have to learn as part of your vocabulary.

I for example never had problem with the oo pronunciation because I just learned by listening and mimicking english speaker in an early age. Rules be damned, it was just natural for me that Blood is pronounced as /blʌd/ and Door was always a /dɔː/.

@Floydimus Mercedes is a German word and every e is pronounced the same.

Now do “ough”!

Don't know about this one in particular, but IIRC there are cases like this where every word has vastly different etymology and has been spelled differently before simplifying it to its current state - so you might have this here as well.

apparently a lot of letters were added to words just to embellish. that's why there are spelling bees

If you think English is weird, try French where a word pronounced as "oh" can be written as: au, aux, eau, eaux, ô, oh.

@happygimp0 In German, the first and third 'e' in "Mercedes" are the same, but the second is different.

@Fast-Nop yeah French is probably the uncontested champion of weird pronunciation "rules" (or the lack of rules).
I wonder if English would take the second place.

@happygimp0 Mercedes is originally a Spanish name adopted by the German car brand

In English all three "e"s are indeed pronounced differently. In Spanish thre first and last are pronounced [ɛ] and the middle is pronounced [e]

@happygimp0 they're not, though. But they are nearly the same if you compare to the English pronunciation. The German pronunciation is mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs.

@horus as someone who speaks no french, my impression is that for every letter, you roll a dice to determine if it is pronounced at all, and if yes, if it is pronounced as whatever it is or a random different letter

I take that over giving a gender to every fucking noun, irregular plurals, verb conjugations, whatever the fuck the Finnish language does to its words (fascinating language tho!) or even the unbelievable amount of rules in Arabic.
At least English is easy for new users.

Best would be for languages to evolve, but nowadays you don't see that often.

Oh, also, if you inspect the Irish and Scottish pronunciations, you'd notice that they have changed a lot of pronunciations as time went by. Which I'm guessing is why the above words are pronounced differently. Similar thing happened when Americans/migrants started speaking English.

Although, I think it for the best. Languages need evolution to become easier and more relatable for people in their respective time or generation.

@NoMad part of the problem with written English is that it doesn't evolve while the spoken word does. It's also a strength that regional changes in spoken language don't change the written language more than the minor differences between American and British versions.

@electrineer idk man. We started from Sanskrit and suddenly we have all these flavors of Latin in Europe alone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Suddenly === mere few thousands of years

you guys need accentuation

Fusty English 'r kicketh the bucket wench!

@tosensei I learned some French in high school (or should I rather say "some French was taught to me in high school") and it is indeed more phonetically predictive than English, i.e. once you get all the rules, you can correctly read text with unknown words in it; it's things like verb conjugation that have tons of exclusions.

@zlice see also

What if your beau’s bow’s bow bows off the bow?

English is shit and has a ton of nonsense. Like most other languages, but somehow they work.

@black-kite There is no English Mercedes, it is a name and it should be spoken the same in all language. It is called Mercedes and not Märceidis.