3 ms·

In case someone's curious, it's not only Spanish, and it's certainly not unusual[0]. A way to see how a (more) phonemic orthography would look like in English

• yorwba 3y ago
  True phonemic orthographies are actually fairly unusual, e.g. your [0] lists exceptions for Spanish: "(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)" and in general people tend to have an easier time emulating someone's orthography than emulating their pronunciation, so a standardized orthography is often adopted even by people whose phoneme inventory is different.
  • fer 3y ago
    If by true phonemic you mean 1:1 relationship between sound and letter, sure; not all the letters sound the same all the time, and not all sounds are always represented by a single letter. It's a natural language so it's bound to have some irregularity. But those exceptions you listed are either rare exceptions (h is always silent, but with a handful of exceptions, normally loanwords like hámster or hachís; x is always "ks" except in old/historical words like México or Quixote), or just follow more or less complex rules. In general if you read and know basic rules, you know how to pronounce 99.9% of the time, if you listen you need to have some deeper level of orthography/etymology/grammar knowledge to write correctly.