yobar Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7043 days ago 52 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: German, Spanish, Irish
| Message 25 of 96 25 May 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
Journeyer wrote:
I've heard that Irish is indeed a chaotic orthographic jungle. |
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It is. I fought with it for a coupla months, finally surrendered, and let the Celtic mumbo-jumbo wash over me. It was as if a light went on in my head and its nonsense finally made sense. All the vowel combinations <--(for some reason the forum's spellchecker thinks this word is misspelled) are madness!! And some of the vowels are mere buffers around consonants.
Spanish is phonectic, compared to English and Russian is phonetic for the most part. Unaccented vowels tend to get minimalized/schwa'd.
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Akipenda Lugha Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5749 days ago 78 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Swahili, Sign Language, Spanish
| Message 26 of 96 26 May 2009 at 6:56pm | IP Logged |
IANAL (I am not a linguist),
but as far as I'm aware, Swahili is a completely phonetic language. This is probably a
product of it having been transliterated into the roman script (used to be in arabic
script) in this century. But by its nature, most words are made up of two-letter
syllable units containing one consonant and one vowel, and you just say it as its
written, with stress on the penultimate syllable.
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zhiguli Senior Member Canada Joined 6452 days ago 176 posts - 221 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Mandarin
| Message 27 of 96 28 May 2009 at 6:20am | IP Logged |
There was another thread about this
My vote still goes to Georgian, nearly all the other languages mentioned here fall a bit short of the ideal of "one letter = one sound".
pesahson wrote:
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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Yes, but Polish has - digraphs, final consonant hardening, assimilations, duplicate letters like ó/u and ż/rz, letters like si/ś that can be spelled two different ways, etc. though the rules are fairly consistent, it can't be considered a "phonetic" language by this definition.
MartinB wrote:
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. |
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Yes, but in spoken language long vowels and even consonants get shortened (and this is standard, educated Budapest speech - other parts of the country have other peculiarities). Many Hungarians (especially from the diaspora) have problems with spelling because they write exactly as they speak.
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Calvino Diglot Groupie Sweden sammafllod.wordpress Joined 5977 days ago 65 posts - 66 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: French, Spanish, German
| Message 28 of 96 28 May 2009 at 5:41pm | IP Logged |
sanskrit
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hinomaruko Diglot Newbie United States d.hatena.ne.jp/hinomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5643 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Japanese*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian
| Message 29 of 96 24 June 2009 at 8:42pm | IP Logged |
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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I second that hiragana and katakana are very phonetic :-)
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Intervigilium Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 5732 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog* Studies: Korean
| Message 30 of 96 08 July 2009 at 8:01am | IP Logged |
Tagalog is (almost) 100% phonetic. More so if you use the diacritical marks (for syllable stress and glottal stops). It's unfortunate though that no one uses diacritics with Tagalog anymore.
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tritone Senior Member United States reflectionsinpo Joined 6131 days ago 246 posts - 385 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, French
| Message 31 of 96 08 July 2009 at 8:26pm | IP Logged |
Latin
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J.C. Diglot Newbie Scotland Joined 5715 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Russian Studies: French, German, Italian, Croatian, Serbian
| Message 32 of 96 12 July 2009 at 9:33pm | IP Logged |
TheBiscuit wrote:
Esperanto?
One I found to be incredibly phonetic was Croatian. |
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I agree.
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