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Tanner Swett
Tanner Swett
6:03 PM
1
Q: Other languages like English whose orthography is "not quite" phonetic

Lance PollardMost languages it seems are pretty much phonetic. (I'm only focusing on alphabet languages, so not Chinese for example). From what I've seen, Spanish is phonetic, Cherokee too, Finnish, Inuktitut, and Hindi. The only one that doesn't seem phonetic is English where you essentially have to memoriz...

phonetics morphology orthography list-of-languages
So wait, is English the only language where spelling is a vague indication of pronunciation?
As opposed to, say, Polish, where it's quite a precise indication of pronunciation, or Chinese, where it barely indicates pronunciation at all?
 
Tanner Swett
Tanner Swett
6:43 PM
With abjads, at least it's clear what information is there and what information is not.
But English...
As they say: the spelling of a Spanish word tells you how to say it; the spelling of an English word tells you how you would have said it in the year 1350.
 

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