tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5455 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin
| Message 57 of 96 20 October 2010 at 6:18pm | IP Logged |
nebojats wrote:
I've just looked through the thread and some people say Spanish isn't completely perfect
(although what language is?).
I would very much like someone to present a random Spanish word which couldn't be pronounced correctly just
from knowing the rules of pronunciation. |
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What about mexicano?
It's harder the other way around since there are sounds that can be written in more than one way: avería, havería,
abería or habería? Jirafa or girafa? In any dialect with seseo, ceceo or yeísmo the number of examples are endless.
Just to give one: cebolla, sebolla, cevolla, sevolla, ceboya, seboya, cevoya, sevoya.
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nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5198 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian
| Message 58 of 96 21 October 2010 at 5:14am | IP Logged |
Oh yeah!!! The X... sometimes like an English H, or KS, or S. I didn't think about that. I'm wrong! If it's just one letter out of the alphabet, though... not too bad. Are there any other letters that can't be spoken with certainity?
It's true that hearing to writing could be a bit of a problem, as you could spell multiple ways (any chatroom will reveal tons of teenagers switching their b's and v's).
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rltodd Newbie United States Joined 5415 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 59 of 96 23 May 2012 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
Like one individual some time ago in this thread, I vote "Hawaiian." If I can see it in print, I can say it. And if I hear a word enunciated, I can spell it correctly *almost* every time. Now if I could just get my ear trained to hear reliably the difference between a couple of diphthongs and long vowels, I could claim the latter at 100%.
E ola mau loa ka ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i!
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Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4624 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian
| Message 60 of 96 23 May 2012 at 10:06am | IP Logged |
I don't like being pedantic as much as I used to, but all languages besides sign languages are "phonetic". What we are talking about here is having a phonemic orthography/spelling.
Finnish does, nearly as much as it could, but not everyone pronounces everything the same way, even though words generally only have one spelling. Some words like 'sydämen' have a single consonant even though it's pronounced double (the 'm') - also words with 'v', for some reason - 'vauva' (baby), 'hauva' (doggy) are pronounced 'vauvva', 'hauvva'. Also I don't know that 'sairaalloinen' (sickly) actually has a double l in speech (I really don't know).
And, as someone said, the writing system doesn't reflect sandhi, but if it did, that would make it more difficult to learn, and I'm not sure what the benefit would be.
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Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5148 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese*
| Message 61 of 96 26 May 2012 at 10:36pm | IP Logged |
The portuguese "s" can be spelled as "s", "ss", "sc", "sç", "c", "ç", "x", "xc", "xç" and
the obsolete "xs".
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montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh
| Message 62 of 96 03 June 2012 at 1:50am | IP Logged |
My wife (who learned it in primary school) tells me that Welsh is fairly phonetic. This
may come as a surprise to many English speakers, but that's just because they don't know
the rules, and if they try to apply the "rules" of English to it, it doesn't work of
course.
I am a little bit surprised to find that Irish isn't the same in this respect, but I
suppose it is a different branch of Celtic.
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baja23 Newbie Yugoslavia Joined 4542 days ago 1 posts - 3 votes
| Message 63 of 96 20 June 2012 at 3:16pm | IP Logged |
hahahaha “If you can't spell it, don't write it.” what a fascist point of view.
I am from Serbia.Voock Carajitz(tz is ć one letter that you don't have at all)(I tried to
make this sounds like its suppose to sound when an English person reads it)( type vuk
karadzic to find out more) created our letter and his main rule was:"One letter,one
sound". It is much more natural to use phonetic alphabet,our's has no accent written but
at least you always know how to read the letters and we don't say r=ar when pronounced or
k=kei,for every letter we only say that letter.Try it.r,k,a=a not ei etc.I think that
learning any kind of phonetic language is great for distinguishing vowel as single
units,and letters as their faithful copies.
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miky95 Diglot Newbie Romania Joined 4526 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English
| Message 64 of 96 06 July 2012 at 5:50pm | IP Logged |
Romanian is a phonetic language that uses an alphabet 26 characters of the Latin alphabet plus a series of five additional characters formed by applying special characters: ă, â, î, ș, ț.
Japanese is a phonetic language because of hiragana and katakana wich make it easier to learn.
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