Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >    In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
> > context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
> > before in your life, nor know what it means.

> Now, see, this is how an alphabetic script is supposed to work. That's 
> the whole idea. The fact that English is a random mixture of a dozen 
> incompatible languages with no rhyme or reason such that it fails this 
> basic definition is another matter...

  Btw, Spanish is another language where you know how to pronounce written
words unambiguously, even without context or previous knowledge.

  OTOH it's slightly "inferior" to Finnish written language in that some
letters have different pronounciations depending on the surrounding letters
(which is something almost completely inexistent in Finnish; AFAIK there's
only one such case). The pronounciation of complete words is still completely
unambiguous, though. It just means that there's no full 1-to-1 correspondence
between letters and how they are pronounced.

  (Written Spanish is also slightly "wasteful" in that the letter H is
completely silent, making it kind of obsolete. It's also a common source
of grammatical mistakes because the pronounciation of the word does not
indicate the presence of the letter. Also, there are words which differ
from each other only in whether they have an additional H or not, which is
confusing and a source of even more grammatical mistakes.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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