Which languages come closest to having an unambiguous written form?

There’s no “t” sound at all in /chruck/ unless you say it funny. :slight_smile:
“Pit” (/p[sup]h[/sup]it/) and “spit” (/spit/) are the classic examples from my schooling.
I’d nominate Russian as a close fit for the OP, as long as you learn the rule about ого and его using the v sound. And have a trained ear for soft and hard signs that a non-native might not catch. And your text-to-speech text uses ё.

What about Latin? It’s been many a year since i studied it in high school, but I don’t remember any letters not getting pronounced.

Well, I do, though it gets me a few strange looks sometimes.

Well. Technically speaking, “B” and “V” are pronounced different. In Spanish we say that there is "“v labiodental” and “B labial” to show that they are pronounced differently. In Spain, this is more common than in the Americas.

As far as “S”, “Z”, they are pronounced differently, but we don’t in the Americas.

mumsiest? :confused:

If by /ch/, you mean the sound at both ends of “church”, then there is a /t/ in there; specifically, the “ch” sound is just a really fast “tsh”.
(Though, on edit, I suppose part of your joke might be the inability to notice the /t/ sound when buried in the /tS/ affricate)

Indonesian is very good about having a few straightforward pronunciation rules and sticking to them. There are a very few exceptions - “penting” is pronounced “pun-ting” for example - but on the whole, it is extremely simple.

I’m guessing that a lot of languages that either did not originally have a written form, or abandoned an ancient script in favor of the Roman alphabet when colonizers/missionaries/etc. came through, tend to be straightforward. For example, IIRC there are a number of Pacific Island languages that were first written down by missionaries who wanted to publish a bible in the local language. They had no interest in complicating the spelling rules.

Welsh.

There are very few irregularities in written Welsh. Years ago I learned how to pronounce the alphabet, and though I can’t speak a word of it, I could read a Welsh book aloud and all my Welsh-speaking friends could understand what I was reading.

Italian is pretty regular too.

Rioplatenses (Argentinians, Uruguayans) pronounce V and B very differently; it’s an influence from Italian. Most other speakers pronounce both as B.

Some Spanish dialects drop the Z sound; speakers from those dialects (the majority, I think) have more problems knowing when to write “c”, “z” and “s” than those of us who differentiate.

Since the letter “h” is mute, you have to remember when is it there.

And of course there’s always “irregular” words; for example, in general anything with the sound ZE is written “ce” - but then you get Nueva Zelanda.

Other than that, Spanish is actually quite good for “direct phonetic correspondence”. So are Italian and French (pity that “their” correspondences are different from ours, or all of Southern Europe would be more multilingual than the Pope).

(My emphasis)

French? As in:

Depuis longtemps, ils mangent chez Bouygues, mais évidemment ça finit toujours brillamment en cystite aiguë.

Oui, that one.

Very slight hijack: why is it possible to be illiterate in some of these languages? I mean illiterate in the sense that one cannot read, not that one cannot write. Clearly in English we have interesting orthography, but in Spanish you could say that it’s read phonetically (just not written that way). Yet, illiteracy is still higher in many Latin American countries than in the United States.

If you weren’t taught the letters, you can’t read them.

(Since my edit window has closed.)

Latin America’s literacy rates are better than much of the the rest of the “less developed” world. And gender differences are smaller in Latin America. If Mom doesn’t know her letters, the kids need extra help.

www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/statistics/literacy2000.htm

Korean I suppose. It was only recently written and so has a very close correspondence between written and spoken forms. Darn near an invented language in a way.

Re: German
German can be spoken 100% accurate from its written form (assuming, of course, that you know how its pronounce), but not vice versa. There are, for instance, two ways to spell the [ai] diphthong: “ai” and “ei”. So if one were to say the German word for “mine” (pronounced as in English), you wouldn’t know whether to spell it “mein” or “main” (it’s the former).
ETA: If you don’t know the language, you also wouldn’t know when to capitalize, as nouns are capitalized, and it can make quite a difference.

Re: Italian
Italian is the opposite. Assuming that the person speaking it is pronouncing their double consonants correctly and the person writing is acute enough to notice, it’s possible to take dictation and spell everything correctly. In the reverse, however, there are some letter combinations that can be pronounced differently in the same context–namely the double “z”, which can be either voiced or unvoiced. The word “mezzo” can mean either “middle” or “half” (with a voiced double “z”) or “overripe” (with an unvoiced double “z”). One can also run into confusion regarding accents: the accent in Italian is usually on the penultimate syllable, but can be on the antepenultimate syllable, and there is no mark to indicate it.

I’m ignoring for the moment the distinctions between open and closed “e” and open and closed “o”, as they are subtle and not as important.

If “Hand” were spelled “Hant” it would be pronounced exactly the same. Final stops are always unvoiced. Not always in the obvious way, since “genug” is prnounced as though it were “genuch”. Initial consonants are generally voiced, so that “Bretzel” would be pronounced the same if it were spelled “Pretzel”.

It seems to me that you can go from spelling to pronunciation pretty automatically, but in the other dierection.

I have always heard that Spanish and Italian are the closest to having a 1-1 correspondence between orthography and pronunciation.

French has no fewer than six words pronounced like “verre” (two of which are spelled the same, but clearly distinct words: vers, verse and vers towards (not even counting vers, the plural of ver, worm, so I guess you could claim there were 7.)

My vote would be Latin. Italian has too much of that dropping of endings. Ricotta as “ri-Ghott”, that kind of thing. Spanish is close.

French? The very antithesis! To pronounce French, you look at the letters on the page, discard them from your mind, and pick from the missing ones they didn’t write to come up with the sound.

English is a mongrel polyglot and pretty low on the list too.

No, “genug” is pronounced [gE-nuk]. “Eisig”, however, would sound like “eisich”. The terminal “g” is funny that way: it is pronounced as an ichlaut after “i” or “e”, as a “k” otherwise. The point still stands, though.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at with “Bretzel; Pretzel”, but “br” and “pr” are quite different.

Properly, “ricotta” would be [ricot:ta] (with an open “o”). Dropping the final syllable is either a dialectic thing or a poetic thing; although, were it a poetic device, it would in fact be spelled “ricot” (I don’t think you’d ever apocopate that one).