Quote Originally Posted by Shougun View Post
I defintely agree English has its fun for pronunciation but if your language has accents, or if it has any irregulars then at some point you will have to consider a true phonetic system and not call your language phonetic itself. At least thats what I was getting at.


"I laugh at you for trying to write phonetics" - and all I think is unless your language is 5 years or younger or has barely moved out of a small landmass then you'd also have inaccurate writing to pronunciation (time and movement lead to a lot of mutation).

(On su, from what I remember in class we literally said su for masu- although I looked into it more at appears only some people do lol google translator doesn't (while not the best source for pronunciation google has gotten a pretty good robotic voice))
First of all, didn't mean to offend, although I knew it would have been easy to read the comment as offensive. Just said it makes me giggle, because one thing that may be obvious in a language may be not that obvious in others. Studying languages you learn to never take anything for granted.
(You also learn that there's no "superior language" or anything, so I wasn't really laughing down on you)

Anyway, no, Vilhem had it right, I'm Italian, but I do study a few languages (english, spanish, japanese, planning to take on french in the future) and lots of linguistics, so I'm not entirely ignorant of the matter It is true, (most) every language has developed variations or sounds that can't be expressed with standard letters, thus needing a group of letters to work together and symbolize this sound (nesso consonantico or nesso vocalico, I'm not sure how it's called in english).

What I meant to say anyway is that in other langauges, like italian or spanish, you can VERY EASILY guess the correct pronunciation without anybody saying it loud, and every native speaker will agree. Nobody here is puzzled over how to spell "Eorzea", for example.

And another thing, there's probably an easier way to explain pronunciations to others, even in english: make examples of other words with the same sounds. At least our teachers did this in my english classes when we met difficult sounds, and worked wonders.

For example. One thing I saw in this topic is La Noscea, which is clearly italian (not spanish, as spanish rarely uses the "sc" group like that; it's much more common in italian by far). Lemme try..

La as in "lack"
No as in "north"
sce as in "Sherlock Holmes"
a as in "amazing"

(stress on sce)