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Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine having a language like Estonian (or Finnish) as your first language, basically every letter has one sound corresponding to it, the length of any vowel is signified by how many there are and stress is always on the first syllable.. Exceptions are incredibly rare, one can count them on a single hand.

The concept of a spelling bee made literally 0 sense to me until I had to actually learn English.

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Imagine a spelling bee of all the European languages where you have to determine what language a word is and then spell it...

That's an English spelling bee.

That's actually very much what spelling (or pronunciation, going the other way) is like in English, because there are rules for spelling English words—it's just that there are several sets depending on which language we mugged the word from.

Not just European: a few Hebrew words and the rare Inuit loanword can also make it.

In Polish stress is always on the second-last syllable and all sounds have the same length, there's no concept of long sounds ;)

But we do have 3 sounds with multiple letters possible (ó/u, ch/h, rz/ż or sz) so we have something like a spelling bee in schools, just the other way - teacher reads a story and kids have to write it down correctly.

It's so damn close to a fully phonetic system that it frustrates me we didn't go the last few miles and made it fully phonetic when the last reform happened ;)

Thai also: there are 19+ vowels but they all sound only one way wherever they appear. Sometimes if I don't know how to pronounce a brand name, I'll try to find their Thai packaging and read it there.

Unfortunately they do have some loan words from Sanskrit that are irregular, and the system for writing tones is needlessly arcane (there are 3 arbitrary classes of consonants that you just have to memorise, and the tone markers change meaning depending on class)

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