> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very

> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare. I don't think that's true. From the northern Indian languages schwa deletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_l...) to the extreme divergence between the standard formal and spoken forms of languages in Southern languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia), it's a stretch to say the scripts mirror what is spoken. It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English. Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).