> 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.
>

How does Finnish deal with foreign words?  For example, the "ch" in many 
words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

>    (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.)
>

While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of spanish is limited to having a 
Latin-American neighbor and having been to Mexico a few times.  I may be 
totally wrong.
-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

Post a reply to this message