3 ms·

That is more like "speak as it is written" -- ie, the pronunciation derives consistently from the orthography. That is slightly different from "write as you spe

That is more like "speak as it is written" -- ie, the pronunciation derives consistently from the orthography. That is slightly different from "write as you speak" where the spelling of a word is literally speaking it slow enough so the individual sounds can be distinguished. Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get. (ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.

romanoderoma 6y ago
Not disagreeing with you either, but as an Italian it's not the C, it's the combination of C and other letters after it. Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C. It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it). Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C C+e, C+i = soft C So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affricate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri... hard c = Voiceless velar plosive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)

romanoderoma 6y ago

Not disagreeing with you either, but as an Italian it's not the C, it's the combination of C and other letters after it. Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C. It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it). Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C C+e, C+i = soft C So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affricate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri... hard c = Voiceless velar plosive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)