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Both in Arabic and Persian the sequence /īna/ is written اينـ initially and ـينـ non-initially.

The silent letters do not explain the difference in pronunciation. "Physic" and "physics" are mediaeval or renaissance borrowings from Latin physica. … "Physique" is a recent (19th-century) borrowing from French retaining the French spelling and also the French pronunciation with a stressed final syllable. …

I think you are asking about the vowel signs (ḥarakāt)? What you need is a dictionary (the best one is Wehr) and a grammar.

The traditional English pronunciation of the digraph “ae” is /i:/, as in Caesar, encyclopaedia (US: “e”), haematoma (US: “e”), paedophilia (US: “e”) and lots more. … The (historically) correct pronunciation of Latin “ae” is /aj/, and one hears this occasionally in the English rendering of non-assimilated or partially assimilated borrowings like “larvae”, but there …

Our friend Draconis has given a very good answer, especially for the final /n/. I have only a few words about the Aramaic and Arabic forms. The Syriac form šlīmōn seems to be a re-Semitisation of the …

Michaelyus has given a good answer to the "why" part of your question. To reply only to the last part of the question: there are not any "strange" rules you could learn to help you to pronounce a new …

Mehri has voiced and voiceless laterals, conventionally transcribed as “l” and “ś” respectively. Many scholars ascribe this contrast to proto-Semitic.

“Plummy” is not a term in phonetics, but at best in socio-linguistics. The Oxford English Dictionary qualifies it as “colloquial” and defines it as: “Of a person's voice, speech, etc.: mellow, dee …

“Armenian” is հայերեն for which the usual transliteration is hayeren. ր is a single-tap /r/, as opposed to the trilled ռ, transliterated as ṙ.

Nobody knows what PIE sounded like. The symbols used to represent PIE phonemes are essentially "algebraic" symbols. When we propose a PIE phoneme *bh, this is merely shorthand for "the PIE phoneme whi …

There are doubtless many languages where the prestige idiom is “clearer” than many non-prestige dialects. But I can think of counter-examples. In the non-prestige “rustic” dialects of Southern France …

Modern Mandarin and Hán Việt both derive from Middle Chinese, in the same way that French and Romanian both derive from Latin, in both cases in the course of centuries. There is no magic formula for c …

In French there is no phonological contrast between [o] and [ɔ] in closed syllables. Thus, phonologically you could analyse “rose” either as /ʁoz/ or equally well as /ʁɔz/. It is merely a matter of co …

The sun letters in Arabic are (or at least were in early Arabic) coronal consonants: t, d, ṭ, s, z etc., pronounced with the front part of the tongue touching the teeth or the roof of the mouth. In ma …

o, u with a small superscript “e”, but I cannot find these in Unicode) were used to indicate the umlauted forms of a, o and u, but the distinction between e and ä was dictated by etymology and not by pronunciation … The spoken distinction between “e” /eː/ and “ä” /ɛː/ is essentially a spelling pronunciation adopted in the standard “Bühnenaussprache”. …