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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The simplest way to use the alphabet is to do it like Spanish does: It is purely phonetic so you write the way you pronunce and you read the way it is written. Simple. That's how they end up with "fútbol" for "football": That's how it's pronunced in Spanish so that's how they spell it, and anyone can immediately read it as well.

Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same because French loves silent letters.

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In case someone's curious, it's not only Spanish, and it's certainly not unusual[0].

A way to see how a (more) phonemic orthography would look like in English is to have a look at BBC Pidgin[1], though the increased "phonemicity" isn't the only difference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography

[1] https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

True phonemic orthographies are actually fairly unusual, e.g. your [0] lists exceptions for Spanish: "(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)" and in general people tend to have an easier time emulating someone's orthography than emulating their pronunciation, so a standardized orthography is often adopted even by people whose phoneme inventory is different.

If by true phonemic you mean 1:1 relationship between sound and letter, sure; not all the letters sound the same all the time, and not all sounds are always represented by a single letter. It's a natural language so it's bound to have some irregularity.

But those exceptions you listed are either rare exceptions (h is always silent, but with a handful of exceptions, normally loanwords like hámster or hachís; x is always "ks" except in old/historical words like México or Quixote), or just follow more or less complex rules.

In general if you read and know basic rules, you know how to pronounce 99.9% of the time, if you listen you need to have some deeper level of orthography/etymology/grammar knowledge to write correctly.

English has more than 26 sounds, so we need more than 26 letters. There are many solutions to this problem, but all require learning a new way of writting and so will be hard to teach.

Spanish considers 'll' a different letter from 'l' and a couple other examples, but they can do that because they have about attackany sounds as the latin alphabet (I don't remember the exact number, but Spanish doesn't use some letters at all so counting would need some effort)

You don't need more than 26 letters to represent more than 26 sounds. What you want is that a specific combination of letters is always pronounced the same.

I'm calling ll a different letter from l above. This is semantics.

What we need is if you see a sequence of letters there is exactly one consistent way to pronounce it, and if you hear a new word there is exactly one way to spell it. There are many ways to pull that off.

Have you ever heard of someone tying a cow onto a car's roof rack? Sadly, it doesn't go the other way 'round.

Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.

But "whisky" is just an Anglicisation of Gaelic "uisge".

Why is "güisqui" an abomination, but "whisky" not?

It's not an 'abomination' at all, it's a phonetic transcription within the language. You could argue that writing "whisky" in a Spanish sentence would equally be an abomination.

The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.

It's something that would make sense centuries ago. Nowadays it's just awkward/annoying/pointless that there are a handful exceptions finger-appointed by the RAE, and everything else is treated like a proper/foreign name.

I think we would get used to it pretty quickly if it was adopted into English. No one thinks that we should write about Αθήνα or Владимир Путин or 東京都 in English, either.

> It is purely phonetic

No such thing as dialect or regional variation in pronunciation in Spanish then? What about Mexican Spanish?

Accents change how letters are pronounced, but it isn't a large difference, and it is consistent across all words that share that letter.

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