1325: Spelling and Loan Words: Countries Jul 28, 2018

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Spelling is extremely influential to the way that people speak. This occasionally happens when words are loaned from language to another, and was especially true before audio-recordings were readily available. This is why the country Laos is often pronounced with an [s] at the end, even though neither the French colonists nor the locals ever did so, yet Kiribati—only called such since 1979—is known to be pronounced with an [s] at the end even though it is spelled with none. In both cases, the spelling is from non-English orthography being adopted directly, Laos from French which often has silent terminal letter, and Kiribati, which is from the native language whose alphabet has no S and instead uses TI.
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