From: Mark Davis (mark.edward.davis@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 03 2009 - 11:17:59 CST
German is touted as being phonetic, and it is vastly more regular than, say,
English or Japanese. But in order to really pronounce it you often have to
know a fair amount of information: the syllable breaks (Wachs-tube vs
Wach-stube), the emphasis (from the spelling alone, emphasis and breaks
could vary in beeinflussen: 'be-einflussen, be-'einflussen, bee'-influssen,
...), unmarked short vs long vowel distinctions, and whether it is a loan
word ("USA" oo-ess-aa vs "CIA" "see-eye-ay").
Do any of these problems pop up in Slavic languages?
Mark
On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 04:55, Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com> wrote:
> > 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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