…and you have to be taught that certain letter combinations have certain sounds. “Casa” as opposed to “Ceso.”
Swahili is very straightforward. Not only that, it has beauuuuuutiful grammar. You should study it. The morphology’s a bitch, though.
I recognise that this long word or series of syllables was used at the beginning of a song called ‘The Lone Ranger’ by a band called Quantum Jump. What does it mean, if anything? Do I gather from the post that it’s Finnish… and if not, what language is it?
Yeah, but isn’t there some version of the Alphabet song in Spanish? Ah, Be, Ce… it seems like it’d be universal knowledge. Or am I judging literacy too lowly? I would consider the basic ability to sound out words as needed to be literate, not necessarily the ability to read at a graduate level. Come to think of it, what are the World Fact Book specs based on? Third grade or something?
Many people of Italian decent in the NY/NJ area are under the impression that it is correct to drop these final syllables. I have a friend (who’s actually not Italian) that insists the correct way to pronounce manicotti in Italian is “man-ee-gut”. I tell him he’s watched too many episodes of the Sopranos or he’s hanging around a bunch of wannabe’s. Maybe NY/NJ Italians have unwittingly created a new Italian dialect.
I don’t know much about the immigration history of NY/NJ Italians, but it is very possible that this is simply dialectic. The Corleones from “Godfather” were from Sicily, where people speak a language which is almost entirely distinct from Italian. I know that in northern Italy, words are often truncated (in and around Venice, for instance, the word for “house” is "ca’ ", rather than “casa”). “Proper” Italian pronounces all written syllables.
I’m going to revise my earlier statement about Italian. There are situations where one might not know the correct spelling based on sound alone: the words “cieco” (blind), and “ceco” (Czech), are pronounced identically.
an anecdote:
An american family moved to Rome, and their 10 year old daughter tells her new-found Italian friend about her school back in the USA. She proudly tells them that she won the school’s spelling bee. So the Italian kid ask “what’s a spelling bee?”.
The american girl explains the concept, and the Italian kid responds:
“oh. We don’t have anything like that, because we know how to spell.”
(Cite:I heard it from a friend of a friend…but it has the ring of truth.)
It’s a Maori place name. It’s the name of a somewhat pathetic little hill in southern Hawkes Bay (about 2 hours’ drive from my hometown of Napier, but I’ve never gotten around to visiting it). It translates to “The hilltop, where Tamatea with big knees, conqueror of mountains, eater of land, traveller over land and sea, played his koauau to his beloved,” where a koauau is a Maori nose flute. Incidentally, I lived in the suburb of Tamatea in Napier, and went to Tamatea Intermediate School and Tamatea High School, so the name of our big-kneed friend isn’t restricted to that hill.
According to the Wikipedia article, “the name was chanted in the UK pop hit The Lone Ranger by Quantum Jump in 1979”, so you weren’t imagining things.
Huh? Could you define “recently written” then? The language itself, though, isn’t anywhere near an invented language. Its current orthography was purposely designed to reflect not only the featural aspects of the sounds but also the phonemic nature of the syllable represented.
That’s true for a very narrow interpretation of standard German. I agree that your version is the closest to the platonic ideal of modern standard High German and it is what a professional speaker would be taught. In practice there is a noticeable regional variation even within what is generally considered standard German. You can find a continuum from in both cases via the combination above to [k] in both cases.
As a Westphalian in the diaspora I personally lean towards more .
Some dialects including Franconian (e.g. Nuremberg) don’t make that distinction but that’s a lot further from the standard.
Czech is pretty good in this regard. The extended Czech alphabet was largely standardized by Czech theologian and philosopher Jan Hus in an effort to make a phonetic alphabet for Czech as it was then spoken. As a general rule, once you learn the extended alphabet you can pronounce any given word written in it.
In, “Out of Africa,” Doris Lessing said that many times the people working on her coffee plantation would bring her letters to read to them. The letters were written in Masai which she did not speak. She was able to read them because when the English brought Masai into the realm of the written word they made every word read as it sounded.
So I’m going with Masai as the best answer.
Okay, what did I win?
Look at it this way: as others have posted, Korean is a good contender for straight correspondance between signs and sounds. I know the Korean alphabet, meaning that I know the signs and what sounds they represent. However, when I go to Korea, I’m still surrounded by texts that are at first glance incomprehensible. If I stop and take the time, I can decipher what’s written. Okay, that’s k… a… m… … s… a… … oh! Kamsa! There’s no way I could possibly have the time and energy to decipher more than a restaurant menu. On the other hand, if I glance at a text written in French or English or Japanese, the words sort of effortlessly jump into my mind.
There is a lot more to reading than just knowing the name of the characters (and that’s even assuming you know them). You need to spend hundreds of hours to go from my Korean reading skills to actual literacy.
Bulgarian.
There are exactly as many letters as there are sounds in the language. Spelling is so easy that they don’t have a word for “spelling”. When I ask my kids to spell stuff in English for me, I have to explain in Bulgarian that they need to “give me the word, letter by letter”. I explained the concept of spelling bees to my counterpart, she thought it was hilarious.
When someone asks me my name in English, I often follow it up by spelling it (which doesn’t stop them from writing incorrectly half the time anyway…). I’ve learned that there’s not even a point to spelling it in Bulgarian - they’ve already got it written, correctly, before I finish spelling it.
The only trouble I personally have is that as a native English speaker, the letter ъ, which represents the only sound in Bulgarian that is difficult to convey with Latin letters, confuses the heck out of me with the spoken -> text direction. I’ve been known to misspell words that contain ъ, just because I guess I forget it exists and replace it with letters that seem more natural to me, like E or A. But a native speaker, though, would never do this.
I nominate Hindi (or Sanskrit) - totally phonetic, and all vowels and consonants are written and pronounced. No silent letters, or ambiguous vowel sounds. The consonants are clearly differentiated, and while some English sounds (such as W) don’t exist, they aren’t used in the language or the script, so there’s no ambiguity there either.
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The precise featural makeup of affricates is still up in the air, to some extent. The English affricate is unambiguously a stop + fricative combonation in most dialect, but there are other languages in which this isn’t the case. As far as I know, the two most popular theories these days are that affricates are either a) complex segments, e.g. they contain a chain of successive values for a given feature, such that “ch”, for instance, begins as [-cont] and ends as [+cont], or b) that affricates are strident stops.
[/hijack]
Oh, and for the record, I say “trucks” with a “t” stop. ^_~
Interesting. (Out of curiosity, since you say “in most dialects”, do you know of any dialects of English where the situation is different, or at least murkier?)
Heh, so do I. During my first linguistics class in college, a friend and I, mistakenly assuming our accents were identical in all respects, got into a heated argument about the pronunciation of words starting with “tr” or “dr”. I was absolutely flabbergasted that anyone could claim to pronounce them with “ch” and “j” sounds, and he was absolutely flabbergasted that anyone could claim to not.
Long story short, he’s now my ex-friend. (No, no, I kid…)