system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is French seemingly so different from other Romance languages?

Spanish, Portuguese,  and Italian more or less pronounce words how they are spelled with very few exceptions or silent letters (I would add Romanian in here but I’m not quite as confident in that statement). However, French seems like chaos in terms of pronunciations in comparison. What happened along the way that made French so different from the other major Romance languages?
gpt
French nouns come from the Old French oblique case. 

Latin had a variety of case endings, with the nominative being the one given in a dictionary and used when the noun is the is subject of a sentence. The other cases were used when the noun was an object or indirect object, instrument, or possessive. All those other cases merged into Old French's oblique case, which was used whenever the noun was _not_ the subject of a sentence, leaving Old French with only a nominative and oblique case. Then, as that oblique/nominative distinction fell away, Modern French took the oblique case as the usual form of the word.

Most other Romance languages have nouns descended from the Latin nominative case. 

In terms of spelling and pronunciation, earlier Old French was pronounced much more closely to how it was spelled early on. By the later Old French period, many of the modern pronunciations began to develop. The spelling didn't keep up, but it didn't need to. Everyone knew when a word-final consonant was silent, but it was silent in a consistent way. It's not chaotic. There are rules, and French is fairly consistent with those rules. They are just different from the rules of other languages that use the Latin alphabet.