When A Random Thought Just Pops in Your Brain

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I love it when people use words that I don’t know to describe concepts that I don’t understand to realize that I wasted four years not to learn a darn thing.

Orthography is the way a language is written, and can differ wildly from the way a language is actually pronounced, due to historical influences and spelling generally lagging behind in language change. This is why cough for example is spelled with gh but pronounced with an f. Phonemes only apply to sloken language, and are the individual sounds that words are made of. In some languages, like Spanish and Finnish, the spelling is very regular and there’s an almost 1:1 phoneme to letter conversion (letters are always pronounced the same way). English, however, has many different spellings for the same sound (think f/ph/gh for an f-sound), and many sounds for the same spelling (think ou for an ow/oo/uh/etc sound)