From: Adam Twardoch (list.adam@twardoch.com)
Date: Fri Apr 03 2009 - 05:55:01 CST
> On 2 Apr 2009, at 03:46, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>> Others may differ, but for me it's some of the Gaelic languages, which
>> have managed to completely free the orthography of the hegemony of
>> pronunciation, so that spelling need not bear any resemblance at all
>> to how the word is said.
Quite on the contrary course, Slavic languages are known for their quite
strict correspondece between orthography and pronunciation. The most
effective orthographic system for Slavic languages is probably Czech,
which provides practically perfect correspondence in both directions:
without any "special" knowledge of exceptions etc., if it is written,
you always known how to pronounce it, and if it is spoken, you very
often know how to write this down. Polish is a bit less effective but
still quite good.
One interesting manifestation of this is that a high-quality
computer-sythesized voice file for English can take 150-180 MB while the
same quality Polish voice usually takes 30-40 MB because it is much more
"itemized".
A.
-- Adam Twardoch | Language Typography Unicode Fonts OpenType | twardoch.com | silesian.com | fontlab.net The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. (Henry Kissinger)
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