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No natural language is actually 100% phonetic. Romanian is no exception. Romanian spelling and pronunciation are close to phonetic, but the same is true of German.


A writing system being phonetic would be impractical, because most languages have tons of little phonetic alterations of individual sounds depending on position in the word/syllable, regional variation, etc.

What you usually want is that the writing system be phonemic, i.e. that there is a 1:1 correspondence between phonemes (meaningfully distinctive sound units) and characters. Unfortunately, languages evolve, so even if your writing systems starts out as more or less phonemic, over time the sounds of the language will drift and inertia will usually keep the writing system not fully in sync with these changes. This is particularly bad in the case of English, where there's never been a proper spelling reform accounting for the corresponding sound changes.


English should just abandon differentiating vowels all together. All dialects of English shwa unemphasized vowels to some extent, and the different dialects largely boil down to how we pronounce various vowels.

J`st ch`nge `m t` di`cr`t'c m`rks, `nd `t's st`ll p`rf`ctl` l`g`ble


reject the alphabet and stop writing vowels unless really needed.


Hungarian gets pretty close too, but yeah, there are exceptions.


Among European languages, Serbo-Croatian is probably the closest to phonemic spelling. An interesting way to test this is to train a basic language model on a representative language, and then see how many mistakes it makes on words it doesn't know (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) - in this study, Serbo-Croatian scored over 99% for both reading and writing accuracy. Finnish and Turkish are also pretty good.




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