Since the standard (the “correct” form) is solely a social construct, there’s some alternate reality out there where the plural of “octopus” is obvious: it’s “octopuses” with -(e)s, just like “glasses”, “cactuses”, *mouses, *oxes, *sheeps, *childs, etc. Simply because that alternate society put a tiny bit more pressure on regularisation of the plurals than in preservation of imported or fossilised irregular forms.

What they called “French silent letters” there is two phenomena: opaque spelling (rules over rules over rules of the spelling) and some letters being read only in a few environments (euphony rules, liaison in this case).

The later is its own iceberg. For example, depending on the speaker that “oiseaux” might be actually [wazoz] if followed by an adjective starting with a vowel. The rule depends on the sounds, phonemes, even on syntactical matters.

Even this sort of language game is language-specific, and often requires intimacy with its phonetic structure.

For example: I didn’t grow with Pig Latin, I grew with língua do pê, common among Portuguese speakers. It works like this:

• split the word into syllables
• repeat the syllables, but sub the onset with /p/
• stress the new /p/ syllables.

So for example “café” /ka’fɛ/ coffee becomes /ka’pa fe’pɛ/… and the vowel from the second original syllable was changed even if not part of the rules due to local phonotactics forbidding non-stressed /ɛ/.

But what about nasal diphthongs as in “mãe” /mãj/ [mɜ̃ɪ̯̃] mother? I’ve seen some kids reduplicating the nasalisation, as /mãj’pã/; some don’t, so you get /mãj’pa/. I don’t recall however kids reduplicating the glide though, showing that they instinctively “know” that it is not part of the syllable centre in Portuguese, unlike in (say) English.

The deeper mess is when you try to label what’s supposed to be part of the alphabet or what isn’t, and then realise that the “Latin” alphabet used by English is not quite the same as the one used by another language… not even Latin itself; no ⟨W⟩, ⟨J⟩ and ⟨U⟩ are variants of ⟨I⟩ and ⟨V⟩, no minuscules, so goes on.

And a lot of those changes are surprisingly recent - Shakespeare for example still wrote “haue” and “vpon”.

Not even the Latin alphabet as used by Latin is the same as the Latin alphabet as used by Latin. Ask people before and after Ruga if ⟨G⟩ is a letter and they might disagree.

It could be worse. German speakers, be glad that the attitude towards German isn’t shaped by how I use the language - 90% of the time with my cat. And you know, how people speak when they talk with cats, right?

And perhaps more importantly, note how the same traits are used to claim that German is “angry” and that French is “fine”: the R (if anything French uses [ʀ ʁ] far more than German does), the front rounded vowels, [ʃ], etc. We do this sort of unconscious “two weights, two measures” towards languages all the time.

What is even a word? If “Rindfleisch” counts as a word, does “cow meat” count as one? You can’t rely on the spelling for that, as words are supposed to be a feature of the spoken language, regardless of its written standard(s).

What about the French expression je l’ai lu = “I read it”? Is it one, two, three, or four words? There’s even a Lemmy server called Jlailu after this expression, and its name highlights that, phonetically speaking, you pronounce it as a single string!

Some Portuguese speakers claim that “saudade” [säʊ.'dä.de]_{[sɐʊ.ˈðä.ðɨ]}[säʊ.'dä.dʒi]*… and as a Portuguese speaker I say that it’s bollocks.

It’s simply “yearning”. It’s rather similar to German Sehnsucht; and in most contexts you can simply translate it as “missing” or “longing”. “Tenho saudades do meu cachorro” = “I miss my dog”. That’s it.

And when you submerge deeper to see the iceberg, you notice the following: all words are translatable, but no word is completely translatable. And the meaning of the exact same word might even vary in a single language, as spoken by a single speaker, depending on the utterance. Semantics are a mess.

Nope. It is not a way to spell “fish”.

Spelling rules aren’t just about the strings that you use to represent certain phonemes, but also when and where. ⟨GH⟩ needs to be final to represent /f/, ⟨TI⟩ is only [ʃ] in -tion, and an ⟨O⟩ in that position would be probably read like [oʊ̯].