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"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 Wi

"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.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Serbo-Croatian dialects have something like 20 million speakers in total. It seems to be mainly about whether the widely adopted orthography was specifically designed with phonemicity in mind, and whether enough time has passed since then for the pronunciation to diverge (e.g. note Korean - Hangeul was perfectly phonemic when originally designed, but it isn't anymore after >500 years of language evolution). Modern orthographies are more likely to stick for longer though because speech is much more uniform today thanks to universal education and mass media. It also helps when the government steps in. Serbo-Croatian is this way thanks to the efforts of Vuk Karadžić and Ljudevit Gaj being adopted by the corresponding ethnostates as official. Turkish Latin orthography was literally designed by committee to pursue a political goal, and then heavily enforced top-down.
- Jun8 3y ago
  The high score for Turkish may be similar to the reasons for Esperanto that you imply: the alphabet was designed and adopted in 1928 to specifically fit the phonetics of the [Anatolian] Turkish language. Some hiccups, mostly with Arabic loan words remain (famous example: most native speakers mispronounce the word “katil” - murderer) but learning to read/write is ridiculously simple. My son, who was born in the US was never formally taught to read, he picked it up during brief stays in Turkey during summers.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Mandarin seems to be more phonemic for reading than English. Was this trained on pinyin input?
  - int_19h 3y ago
    "For Chinese, we only selected Mandarin words in simplified Chinese and limited to one or two symbols (a.k.a. Hanzis); we then obtained their pronunciation from the CEDICT dataset. ... It is debatable whether Chinese should be included in this study given the term alphabet is usually reserved for largely phonographic systems that have a small number of elements. We decided to include it because our ANN model allowed for alphabets with thousands of graphemes." So it's not really about "phonemic" in the traditional sense where graphemes directly correspond to phonemes. The more accurate description of the generalized metric is "how unambiguously graphemes map to sounds", which is still meaningful even if the mapping is very far from 1:1 as is the case for Chinese. Also, if I understand correctly given what CEDICT is, they basically used pinyin as phonemic transcription (instead of IPA, like for other languages) - i.e. as output. But then again, actual alphabets do this kind of thing too. E.g. Belarusian orthography is almost completely unambiguous (Taraskevica might actually be completely unambiguous even?), but you have quirks like e.g. "я" meaning either /ja/ or /ʲa/ depending on the preceding character, whereas /a/ in other contexts uses a completely different letter "а"; I believe this would score as high as Serbo-Croatian by their metric, although strictly speaking it's less phonemic, because the mapping is not 1:1. So if Chinese characters generally have consistent pronunciations, it ought to score relatively high for reading.
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      Cool. I always suspected that hanzi is actually more phonemic than English, but nice to see this confirmed.
- bonzini 3y ago
  For Italian the main issue in reading is open vs closed vowels, but those are also different between accents and it's expected that two speakers will use them differently without hurting intelligibility. So in some sense the ambiguity is a feature and not a bug, and the paper acknowledges that it's more of an issue with the scoring formula.
- bloak 3y ago
  I'd like to know why Spanish was only 85% for reading in this study. Did they use Spanish texts that were full of English words or foreign names or something like that? Or did they consider some informal colloquial pronunciation to be the "correct" pronunciation? Or did they have a confusing mixture of different varieties of Spanish in their dataset? I'm finding it hard to think of frequent cases in which it is incorrect to pronounce "pure" European Spanish exactly as it's written. Another possible explanation: perhaps their ANN model was incapable of working across word boundaries? (The "n" in "en Bolivia" is pronounced like "m": it's perfectly regular and a simple rule but you do have to look beyond the current word.) EDIT: When I write "exactly as it's written" I mean, of course, that you compute the pronunciation from the spelling by applying some simple rules. For example, B and V are pronounced the same way, and that way depends on the context, but the rules are very simple: they can be expressed in a few hundred words. Also, I don't consider an overly formal pronunciation to be "incorrect" for the purposes of this discussion!
masklinn 3y ago
Possibly Korean? I would expect it to at least have a rather low level of irregularity as it doesn’t have the most complicated phonology and its alphabet was crafted for that purpose relatively recently.

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.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Serbo-Croatian dialects have something like 20 million speakers in total. It seems to be mainly about whether the widely adopted orthography was specifically designed with phonemicity in mind, and whether enough time has passed since then for the pronunciation to diverge (e.g. note Korean - Hangeul was perfectly phonemic when originally designed, but it isn't anymore after >500 years of language evolution). Modern orthographies are more likely to stick for longer though because speech is much more uniform today thanks to universal education and mass media. It also helps when the government steps in. Serbo-Croatian is this way thanks to the efforts of Vuk Karadžić and Ljudevit Gaj being adopted by the corresponding ethnostates as official. Turkish Latin orthography was literally designed by committee to pursue a political goal, and then heavily enforced top-down.
Jun8 3y ago
The high score for Turkish may be similar to the reasons for Esperanto that you imply: the alphabet was designed and adopted in 1928 to specifically fit the phonetics of the [Anatolian] Turkish language. Some hiccups, mostly with Arabic loan words remain (famous example: most native speakers mispronounce the word “katil” - murderer) but learning to read/write is ridiculously simple. My son, who was born in the US was never formally taught to read, he picked it up during brief stays in Turkey during summers.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Mandarin seems to be more phonemic for reading than English. Was this trained on pinyin input?
- int_19h 3y ago
  "For Chinese, we only selected Mandarin words in simplified Chinese and limited to one or two symbols (a.k.a. Hanzis); we then obtained their pronunciation from the CEDICT dataset. ... It is debatable whether Chinese should be included in this study given the term alphabet is usually reserved for largely phonographic systems that have a small number of elements. We decided to include it because our ANN model allowed for alphabets with thousands of graphemes." So it's not really about "phonemic" in the traditional sense where graphemes directly correspond to phonemes. The more accurate description of the generalized metric is "how unambiguously graphemes map to sounds", which is still meaningful even if the mapping is very far from 1:1 as is the case for Chinese. Also, if I understand correctly given what CEDICT is, they basically used pinyin as phonemic transcription (instead of IPA, like for other languages) - i.e. as output. But then again, actual alphabets do this kind of thing too. E.g. Belarusian orthography is almost completely unambiguous (Taraskevica might actually be completely unambiguous even?), but you have quirks like e.g. "я" meaning either /ja/ or /ʲa/ depending on the preceding character, whereas /a/ in other contexts uses a completely different letter "а"; I believe this would score as high as Serbo-Croatian by their metric, although strictly speaking it's less phonemic, because the mapping is not 1:1. So if Chinese characters generally have consistent pronunciations, it ought to score relatively high for reading.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Cool. I always suspected that hanzi is actually more phonemic than English, but nice to see this confirmed.
bonzini 3y ago
For Italian the main issue in reading is open vs closed vowels, but those are also different between accents and it's expected that two speakers will use them differently without hurting intelligibility. So in some sense the ambiguity is a feature and not a bug, and the paper acknowledges that it's more of an issue with the scoring formula.
bloak 3y ago
I'd like to know why Spanish was only 85% for reading in this study. Did they use Spanish texts that were full of English words or foreign names or something like that? Or did they consider some informal colloquial pronunciation to be the "correct" pronunciation? Or did they have a confusing mixture of different varieties of Spanish in their dataset? I'm finding it hard to think of frequent cases in which it is incorrect to pronounce "pure" European Spanish exactly as it's written. Another possible explanation: perhaps their ANN model was incapable of working across word boundaries? (The "n" in "en Bolivia" is pronounced like "m": it's perfectly regular and a simple rule but you do have to look beyond the current word.) EDIT: When I write "exactly as it's written" I mean, of course, that you compute the pronunciation from the spelling by applying some simple rules. For example, B and V are pronounced the same way, and that way depends on the context, but the rules are very simple: they can be expressed in a few hundred words. Also, I don't consider an overly formal pronunciation to be "incorrect" for the purposes of this discussion!

masklinn 3y ago

Possibly Korean? I would expect it to at least have a rather low level of irregularity as it doesn’t have the most complicated phonology and its alphabet was crafted for that purpose relatively recently.