What language has the best orthography?
... by which I mean "what is the natural language (sorry, Esperanto) in which the written form corresponds most accurately and precisely to the spoken language?"
I have heard it asserted that Spanish, Polish and Korean are all candidates- but Spanish has the occasional silent "h" as well as one-syllable words with an accent on a vowel, where the accent doesn't affect the pronunciation but distinguishes the word from a homophone.
Edit: I should set a few more ground rules. In my completely-made-up set of criteria (I am not a linguist):
- A "good orthography" doesn't require a precise 1:1 mapping of phonemes to letters.
- This means that digraphs, trigraphs (and whatever Polish "szcz" is supposed to be, for example) are fine, as long as they're the only way of representing that particular phoneme, and are never used except when representing that phoneme. For example, if "th" is the only way of writing the ϴ sound, and the letter "t" followed by "h" in the same word is only ever used in order to write the ϴ sound, then it's all good.
- Apart from the bullet point above, a given letter should never be used to represent more than one different sound. So English language "g", for example, is a problem child.
- Silent letters are also a problem, unless the letter is simply part of a digraph/trigraph/etc.
- What I'm really getting at, I guess, is that a good orthography should allow for the following circumstances: (1) it would allow a person to be able to accurately and unambiguously transcribe in writing a given set of phonemes that don't actually have semantic content (such as nonsense words); (2) a second person who is simultaneously transcribing that same set of phonemes would necessarily write them the exact same way; and (3) a third person should be able to read that transcription out loud and thereby reproduce those phonemes.
Posted Aug 29, 2016, 11:12 PM UTC · edited
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