Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6879 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language
| Message 9 of 96 19 May 2009 at 8:23am | IP Logged |
Satoshi wrote:
German appears to be pretty weird too, though a lot more regular than English. Not knowing exactly which of the "ch" pronunciations to use is horrible.
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Actually there are phonetic rules for this so you would know which one is correct. Since they are rather simple I would list them but I'm out of practice and also really tired at the moment and so can't recall them clearly. It's not as hard as it would be at first glance though.
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staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5708 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written)
| Message 10 of 96 19 May 2009 at 10:28am | IP Logged |
Turkish, my opinion, is a very phonetic language.
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Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6045 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds
| Message 11 of 96 19 May 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
staf250 wrote:
Turkish, my opinion, is a very phonetic language. |
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Turkey adopted the Latin script only in recent history ( some 50-80 years ago? I'm not sure ) Half a century is probably not enough time for the spelling to drift away from its phonetic transcription.
Some people push forward Bulgarian as the most phonetic language in the Slavic family. It is not completely phonetic (e.g. stress is variable and there are some difficult to distinguish sounds) but overall you write what you hear.
Edited by Sennin on 19 May 2009 at 11:12am
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rlf1810 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6351 days ago 122 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, German, Slovak
| Message 12 of 96 19 May 2009 at 11:31am | IP Logged |
Slovak is a very phonetic language. Every letter has one sound and every word is stressed on the same syllable, unlike some other Slavic languages. You can know 99.9% of the time exactly how to pronounce a word. The ONLY exception being with foreign loanwords, which is a very small matter of a consonant not being soft where it would be in an originally Slovak word.
It's an orthographic dream.
-Robert
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andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7088 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French
| Message 13 of 96 19 May 2009 at 12:59pm | IP Logged |
I think Indonesian is pretty phonetic.
Korean has a lot of spelling irregularities... but these irregularities are regular ;)
Satoshi wrote:
Well, if you count furigana in (or the kanji out), Japanese would be the most phonetic language there is... |
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...Nor count particles は / へ ;)
But yes, using furigana, Japanese definitely is phonetic.
Edited by andee on 19 May 2009 at 1:00pm
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pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5739 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian
| Message 14 of 96 19 May 2009 at 2:17pm | IP Logged |
Polish is definietly a very phonetic language. Stress is very regular (with few exceptions) and once you get the rules (how to pronounce each letter or each diagraph) it goes smoothly.
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Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5683 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian
| Message 15 of 96 19 May 2009 at 2:50pm | IP Logged |
Finnish is indeed a very phonetic language. Everything is spelled like it is written, really, can't think of exceptions right now. I would say the rule thing about Polish above applies to Finnish too, sure the letters are pronounced very differently from English, but once you get how they are pronounced, you can pretty much pronounce everything correctly.
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MartinB Triglot Newbie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5710 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: German*, Esperanto, English
| Message 16 of 96 19 May 2009 at 2:52pm | IP Logged |
From my own experience:
Esperanto is pretty much phonetic.
Hungarian as well. Once you master the pronounciation rules, and some special cases like sz,cs you can easily read a text and have a hungarian understand it.
There are some exceptions to the rules still.
Martin
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