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Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is?
by thechao 1y ago
Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is?
- codethief 1y agoSpanish and Italian are.
- trealira 1y agoThere's also Finnish.
- pessimizer 1y agoThis is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not. Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet. Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.