Oh god, why? Why!? It burns… The flash cards, the goddamn vocabulary flash cards…
Goes into a state of gibbering PTSD madness
This has to be the most ridiculous topic I’ve ever seen on SD.
I can’t think of one for now, but they must exist. I’ll tell you when I find one. By the way:
I’d pronounce both “close” the same way in that sentence; am I wrong?
Cloze the door that’s clohss to the street.
Uh, I’d pronounce both like your first one. Does it vary from dialect to dialect?
Hush lol. 
Nothing inaccurate with what I said. 
But “all languages phoenetic except for English”? Like out of the many thousands of langauges that English would be the only one that isn’t phoenetic most of the time? He learned the Russian and Greek alphabets and they also “seem to be phoenetic”… he makes that conclusion from learning their alphabets…??? 95%+ of English is completely phonetic anyway. French has many of the exact same words as English.
Another way to pose the question might be: How unambiguous is a written language as to pronunciation?
Thai is pretty good, but there are exceptions, for examples:
[ul]
[li] time = เวลา = E V L A = Vela[/li][li] empty = เปล่า = E P L A = Plao[/li][li] nature = ธรรมชาติ = Dh R R M Ch A T I = Thamachat[/li][/ul]
Listed are English translation, Thai spelling, letter-by-letter transliteration of the Thai spelling, rough rendering of pronunciation.
The words for time and empty are 2- and 1-syllable respectively, but this isn’t clear from the spelling, the two vowels forming a diphthong in the second example.
The third example (nature = ธรรมชาติ) has three distinct spelling oddities:
[ul][li] Thai doesn’t have the phonemes Bh or Dh, but still has consonants borrowed from Sanskrit that are often transliterated that way. The proper name of the present King (Bhumipol) is an example.[/li][li] When R is doubled it ceases to be an R, becoming a schwa instead![/li][li] The final vowel (I) is silent. (In some cases these silent vowels lead to combinations which are otherwise orthographically impossible.)[/li][/ul]
You pronounce the nearby close with a z sound? I didn’t think that varied by dialect … accent really … but maybe. What accent do you have?
So, dear god, Koxinga … an example or two please?
I usually avoid feeding trolls, but what the heck. I didn’t reach a conclusion. I asked a question. If you want to prove it’s a stupid question, I’d prefer information to gibes.
I’m in Canada, and my first language is French. So I figure that maybe I just didn’t learn English right. Thinking about it more, in the sentence fragment “close to the street”, [kloz] and [klos] sound equally right to me. These two consonants are really very similar to each other.
Well, they’re similar because “z” is the voiced version of “s”. Personally, [kloz] sounds awkward to me in that context, I’d say they’re different phonetically in the sentence presented in my dialect.
Off the top of my head, in Mandarin the character 了 is pronounced something like “luh” (very short) when it’s being used as a marker for a past action, but “liaw” (say it like you’re deep in thought) when it comes at the start of a word like 了解 (“to understand”).
The character 還 can sound like either “hai?” or “hwahn?” depending on whether it means “as yet” or “to return [something]”
And there’s an assload of only-in-this-case pronunciations for common characters that have some specific context spoken by some specific idiot thousand-years-dead mandarin or drunken poet, but those don’t crop up in everyday use all that often.
As I understand it, though, it’s Japanese kanji that’s the real killer, as it’s SOP for each and every character to have two different common pronunciations depending on context.
So that’s uff, off, ow, oo, oh, up, ah, and maybe okh or uh. That’s seven plus two that are reaching.
Evil grin…What about sign languages? They have nothing to do with sound!
I beg to differ when it comes to Norwegian, which is continuously updated and pretty much up to speed. I’m not sure what to make of Swedish with regard to it being phonemic, but Danes wouldn’t know intelligible pronunciation if it ran over them with a train, although their writing is more similar to Norwegian than Swedish is.
Also: I’m still learning Hindi, but I’m told that if you know Devanagari, you can pretty much pronounce everything. Seems a legit claim, there should be enough characters. I couldn’t find a number for either alphabets and the count is a bit tricky of course, but I think Devanagari’s got IPA beat when it comes to number of letters.
I used to live in Japan, although I’m not remotely literate in Japanese. But IIRC, the character meaning “bridge” (橋) could be pronounced at least three ways – “hashi”, “bashi”, or occasionally the totally dissimilar “kyo”. “Kyo” didn’t seem to be very common though, and I probably wouldn’t have even realized this was an alternate pronunciation if the name of the bridge in my town hadn’t used that pronunciation.
ETA: Googling just now, this seems to be one of those cases where one character has both a native Japanese pronunciation (or in this instance two similar-but-different Japanese pronunciations) and a totally different pronunciation based on the Chinese.
But with nikud, it’s extremely phonemic - it’s very hard to misread a Hebrew word if it’s spelled out in full.
True, but no modern Hebrew publication uses nikud, except ones that are directed at 5-year-olds, or the Torah/Talmud.