5 ms·

> For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there a

> For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there are plenty of exceptions, eg. the letter "x". And of course Spanish writing completely ignores the huge dialectal variations in pronouncing "ll", "c", "z" etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography

yosito 3y ago
Not to mention the confusion over B and V.
- argentinian 3y ago
  What confusion? These are 2 symbols that are pronounced in the same way https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-pronunciacion-de-b-y-v https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-...
  - int_19h 3y ago
    The confusion is that you have to know which one to use to spell a word correctly; you can't just "spell it as you hear it". But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
    - TuringTest 3y ago
      They do have different pronunciations, it's just than most speakers have lost the distinction. B is plosive and V is fricative. Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        If most speakers have lost the distinction, then by definition the dialects that still distinguish the two are more marginal, so how can they be considered normative? Sure, historically they were consistently distinguished if you go back far enough, but what difference does it make wrt modern Spanish?
        TuringTest 3y ago
        To modern Spanish, very little difference. It was not consistent in past times either, with classic authors from the Spanish golden age using varying spellings. Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.
argentinian 3y ago
As a Spanish speaker I can say that even if it has some phonetic exceptions, Spanish is still extremely easy to pronounce compared to English. However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  >> However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar. So true. Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects: https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjectives/nouns/#:~:text=Most%20Italian%20nouns%20ending%20in,automobile%2C%20stazione%2C%20carne https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...). Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female: https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-moto-o-la-moto/ https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
  - argentinian 3y ago
    Certainly. English can express the same ideas with less tenses, and having a gender for inanimate objects is absurd.
    - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
      But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
      - argentinian 3y ago
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
"the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa." (from the linked Wikipedia article) Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English. But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms? >> ignores the huge dialectal variations Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.
- int_19h 3y ago
  There was an amusing study where they tried to measure how phonemic various language orthographies are by training an ANN model on some data to convert back and forth between spelling and pronunciation, and then checking the error rate on more inputs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321. Here's the table from that paper; numbers are percentages of accurate guesses. Orthography Write Read ----------- ---------- ---------- ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3 br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6 de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5 en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3 eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1 es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3 fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8 fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7 it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9 ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5 nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2 pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9 ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5 sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3 tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6 zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9 It's easy to see here that English is truly dismal, so being better than it is not a great achievement. Spanish is okay but far from the best. Esperanto (eo) tops the chart for obvious reasons, but note how Serbo-Croatian (sh) is an example of truly outstanding phonemic orthography for an already existing language. Turkish (tr) and Finnish (fi) are also impressive.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Turkish is especially interesting because it has a solid 80-90 million speakers to sh and fi's 5 million.
riffraff 3y ago
Same for Italian, it's 99% there but there's a few holes: the mute "h" in "hotel", "scienza" and "conoscenza" sounding the same "sce" but having an extra i, "gl" has two different pronunciations etc.. It's still far, far better than English.
SilasX 3y ago
Also, the silent h and y versus ll. There's a scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse ridicules Skinny Pete for spelling "street" as "streat", and in the Spanish subtitles, it's replaced with "calle" (the word for street) and "caye" (a misspelling). Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled. Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.

yosito 3y ago

Not to mention the confusion over B and V.

argentinian 3y ago
What confusion? These are 2 symbols that are pronounced in the same way https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-pronunciacion-de-b-y-v https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-...
- int_19h 3y ago
  The confusion is that you have to know which one to use to spell a word correctly; you can't just "spell it as you hear it". But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
  - TuringTest 3y ago
    They do have different pronunciations, it's just than most speakers have lost the distinction. B is plosive and V is fricative. Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      If most speakers have lost the distinction, then by definition the dialects that still distinguish the two are more marginal, so how can they be considered normative? Sure, historically they were consistently distinguished if you go back far enough, but what difference does it make wrt modern Spanish?
      - TuringTest 3y ago
        To modern Spanish, very little difference. It was not consistent in past times either, with classic authors from the Spanish golden age using varying spellings. Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.

argentinian 3y ago

As a Spanish speaker I can say that even if it has some phonetic exceptions, Spanish is still extremely easy to pronounce compared to English. However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
>> However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar. So true. Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects: https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjectives/nouns/#:~:text=Most%20Italian%20nouns%20ending%20in,automobile%2C%20stazione%2C%20carne https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...). Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female: https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-moto-o-la-moto/ https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
- argentinian 3y ago
  Certainly. English can express the same ideas with less tenses, and having a gender for inanimate objects is absurd.
  - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
    But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
    - argentinian 3y ago

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

"the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa." (from the linked Wikipedia article) Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English. But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms? >> ignores the huge dialectal variations Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.

int_19h 3y ago
There was an amusing study where they tried to measure how phonemic various language orthographies are by training an ANN model on some data to convert back and forth between spelling and pronunciation, and then checking the error rate on more inputs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321. Here's the table from that paper; numbers are percentages of accurate guesses. Orthography Write Read ----------- ---------- ---------- ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3 br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6 de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5 en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3 eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1 es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3 fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8 fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7 it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9 ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5 nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2 pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9 ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5 sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3 tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6 zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9 It's easy to see here that English is truly dismal, so being better than it is not a great achievement. Spanish is okay but far from the best. Esperanto (eo) tops the chart for obvious reasons, but note how Serbo-Croatian (sh) is an example of truly outstanding phonemic orthography for an already existing language. Turkish (tr) and Finnish (fi) are also impressive.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Turkish is especially interesting because it has a solid 80-90 million speakers to sh and fi's 5 million.

riffraff 3y ago

Same for Italian, it's 99% there but there's a few holes: the mute "h" in "hotel", "scienza" and "conoscenza" sounding the same "sce" but having an extra i, "gl" has two different pronunciations etc.. It's still far, far better than English.

SilasX 3y ago

Also, the silent h and y versus ll. There's a scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse ridicules Skinny Pete for spelling "street" as "streat", and in the Spanish subtitles, it's replaced with "calle" (the word for street) and "caye" (a misspelling). Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled. Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.