• teft@piefed.social
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    9 hours ago

    This joke doesn’t work for a normal language like spanish that has regular orthography, only languages like english or french that have broken spelling.

    Klingonese is read the way it’s spoken so it also wouldn’t suffer from this problem.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      Spanish is one of the best languages for having the spelling match the pronunciation, but it’s not perfect. First of all, you can’t spell something just based on hearing it because a /k/ sound can be a ‘c’ or a ‘k’, and a /s/ can be an ‘s’ or a ‘c’. It also has silent letters like ‘h’. Going the other way, seeing the spelling of Mexico, Xalapa, Oaxaca, etc. would lead someone who didn’t know to try to pronounce them with a /ks/ sound, but they’re really pronounced as if they were spelled Mejico, Jalapa and Oajaca. Then, there are loan words like “psicologia” where the “p” is retained from the original language, but not pronounced in Spanish.

      • teft@piefed.social
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        6 hours ago

        First of all, you can’t spell something just based on hearing it because a /k/ sound can be a ‘c’ or a ‘k’, and a /s/ can be an ‘s’ or a ‘c’.

        Yes you can. K isn’t often used in spanish except for loan words. C and S aren’t interchangeable in spelling they just sound the same when pronounced in certain phonemes. There are very specific rules about which letter is used in each phoneme. If you know spanish then you’d know this since they are some of the first lessons you learn about spelling.

        Every other example you gave was a loan word.

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      a normal language like spanish that has regular orthography

      que necesitas para entender que esto es algo falso? Un Casco?

      • teft@piefed.social
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        9 hours ago

        Every letter in spanish is always pronounced with regular rules. You don’t have to guess. Things like “pingüino” and the u having the diaresis makes it obvious that you have to pronounce the u in the word vs “quitar” where you don’t pronounce the u.

        Just because you can pronounce s and c the same and c and k the same doesn’t make it bad orthography.

        • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Just because you can pronounce s and c the same and c and k the same doesn’t make it bad orthography.

          yes it does

          Source : Turkish speaker.

          EDIT : It’s not just s c and k, q also gets involved. LL and Y and some variations having J and G enter into it, the constant H letters that don’t get pronounced, etc etc.

          No romance language can say anything about being “regular” from an orthographic sense.

          • teft@piefed.social
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            9 hours ago

            No it really doesn’t. The joke is about not knowing how to pronounce a word when you read it. That isn’t a problem in spanish because the rules are exact on how the words are pronounced. You can read any word in spanish no matter how complicated or new and as long as you know the spanish pronunciation rules and it isn’t a foreign word you will know how to pronounce it. Foreign words, like foreign words in most languages, don’t usually follow spanish orthography so those are a crap shoot.

            Edit:

            It’s not just s c and k, q also gets involved. LL and Y and some variations having J and G enter into it, the constant H letters that don’t get pronounced, etc etc.

            All those things are completely regular. They vary in pronunciation by dialect but every person with the same dialect will pronounce the word the same when they read it.

            • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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              8 hours ago

              That isn’t a problem in spanish because the rules are exact on how the words are pronounced.

              and is there any data loss that happens when pronounced words are written using these rules?

              • teft@piefed.social
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                8 hours ago

                Why would there be? If you know how to read then you know how to write because again, spanish is completely regular in that aspect.

    • Cheesus@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Eh, French isn’t that bad, although there is some general fuckery.

      If you didn’t know how to pronounce something in English before the internet, you were basically shit out of luck.