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The most phonetic languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4559 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 81 of 96 05 December 2012 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Pisces, like most Finns, probably learned/speaks finlandssvenska, which doesn't have pitch accent, explaining the shortcomings of our dictionaries. There are a couple monolingual Swedish dictionaries that include pitch accent, however, and I've seen them in bookstores here in Helsinki. A favorite of mine, Lexin, is available online and also has sound clips of many of the most common words. A great resource. What I actually came here to say, though, is that Swedish word melody is quite predictable once you get the hang of it—and that can take a while, as the rules are not entirely straight-forward. After my initial puzzlement, I worked through two pronunciation guides I got from the library, which helped a lot. In fact, I'd strongly recommend all Swedish learners to take the time to read about the pitch accent. Sure, it's a bit of a bore, but it all pays off in the end. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 82 of 96 05 December 2012 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Can you give any examples of a dictionary entry where pitch accent is included? How is it notated? Numbers? Accent markers such as ´ and `? Just the term "grave" and "acute"? High/low? Are there any hints about how the pitch is different in each regional accent?
As a matter of fact, as long as one know the difference between grave and acute, that will do. Olle "Speech doctor" Kjellin has written a lot about the two accents, how to identify them and to (learn how to) produce them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4559 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 83 of 96 05 December 2012 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's no generally agreed upon convention, but here's the format Lexin uses:
kontrast [kåntrạs:t] last|bil [²lạs:tbi:l] Briefly: - words with a falling tone are marked with a superscript "2" - primary stress is marked with a small dot - long sounds are marked with a colon - the script used is a kind of "phonetic Swedish", where each sound is represented by the letter most commonly associated with it, with the exception of the sje sound and the retroflex consonants, which have their own symbols I'm only aware of dictionaries that list the pitch patterns as they appear in standard Swedish. Edited by sans-serif on 05 December 2012 at 11:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 84 of 96 06 December 2012 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Japanese also has pitch and as far as I know, the average speaker will never look up the pitch. However, people who come from areas outside the large Tokyo area tend to speak with non-Standard pitch, so anyone wishing to work in communications or with the public is required to use the right pitch. As for how many people look words up as opposed to learning them on the spot, I have no idea. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 85 of 96 06 December 2012 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
No system is entirely accurate in its representation of the pronunciation of words unless it also address pitch, tones or stress. In that respect, even hiragana Japanese is not effective. Same applies to German, Russian, Dutch, etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4651 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 86 of 96 14 February 2013 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree that there is no entirely phonetic language in the broad sense, but in the strict sense, there are several. Hawaiian has been put forth. Many Slavic languages are pretty much phonetic. So is Spanish, if we discount the dialectal variation. And Japanese, if we forget about the kanji.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 87 of 96 14 February 2013 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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From the little bit of Ojibwe I've looked at, the language seems quite phonetic, at
least if we're talking about the "double vowel system" of writing. I can't speak to the syllabary at all. But the language itself is pretty phonemically limited. The only trouble spot I could see is accurately representing what's called "metrical feet" - where every group of two syllables is used to mark where stress falls within a word or phrase. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 14 February 2013 at 8:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarlonX19 Diglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4165 days ago 40 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French | Message 88 of 96 04 July 2013 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Portuguese is very phonetic, not 100% phonet but it is when you compare it to English or French for example...
I found the french spelling the worst one! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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