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Comment by dkdbejwi383 | Hacker News Reader

> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

is there no accent variation in Spanish?

Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.

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One of the problems in english (not the only one, but one of them) is that for the vowels there are 5 graphs (is this term correct? Sorry but hope it is understandable) but many more sounds. In Spanish there are 5 vowels in the latin alphabet and exactly five sounds and nothing else.

Valencian has 7 sounds though, two for e and two for o. Similarly, Catalan also (and in some circumstances the o sounds as u, when the stress is not in it and other stuff). But they still have quite strict rules.

Yeah but we represent a lot of vowel sounds by combining vowels - 5 letters (not including y), if we allow any combo of two to represent a different sound that's 25 combos, and if we remember that preceding and following consonants can modify vowels too (though, dough, caught bought vs thou, bao, sour, or; on, con, Ron vs how, cow, ow) that's quite a lot of combos.

Now, you can (and should!) accuse me of cherry-picking examples, since the rules are less consistent and/or vastly more complicated than what I represented. But I maintain that there are orders of magnitude more ways to represent vowel sounds than 5, and the clue is the context. Not, as many will suggest, memorizing each individual case (though there's certainly plenty of that going around, much like Spanish's infamous irregularly verb conjugations), but understanding categories and families and patterns.

English sounds usually are best understood with groups of three letters, rather than one letter at a time. If you looks at throuples, you'll likely find far more of that consistency we all so deeply desire.

Yes, English is VERY consistent. The problem is that there are multiple systems working inside English vocabulary, so you have to get familiar with more than one rule set.

You're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not random deviations from spelling norms.

In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or Korean.

I don't know if Korean is ultimately that good. Hangeul are a monstrous improvement over the old mixed script (which itself is better than the Japanese iteration because the Koreans only used Chinese characters for Chinese loans), but it still has a lot of sound change rules and can be a bit of a pain to read because of how letters flow to the next syllable. It's not in the same league with Finnish or Spanish, at any rate.

Yeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.

For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write:

In Argentina: "autito"

In Colombia: "autico"

In Spain: "autillo"

the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.

In Spain you'll listen the three cases at once and all of them are perfectly valid.

-ito it's almost the universal way everywhere in the Hispanic world.

-ico it's widely used in the South of Navarre and Aragón and everyone will understand you. Heck, it's the diminutive from used by the hick people, and thus, it's uber known, altough you might look like a bumfuck village redneck sheepherd with a beret by using -ico outside of Navarre/Aragón.

-illo it's more from the South, but, again, understood everywhere.

In Argentina everyone will understand you, but if you don't use "ito" then people may ask where are you from.

"ico" is used in many countries of Central America and Caribe. I asked someone from Colombia, so I'm sure about Colombia but I'm no sure about every other country.

Is "illo" used in Madrid? I think I heard it in movies or TV programs from Spain.

Yes, it's used, all over the whole country.

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