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The most phonetic languages

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Journeyer
Triglot
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United States
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 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.


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
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 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
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Bulgaria
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 Message 11 of 96
19 May 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged 
staf250 wrote:
Turkish, my opinion, is a very phonetic language.


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
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 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
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Japan
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 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...

...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
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 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
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Finland
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 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
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 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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