Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 23:52:21 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Marco Molteni <molter@sofia.csl.sri.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSDCon East Message-ID: <20000407235221.B1610@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <20000407102159.B8417@sofia.csl.sri.com>; from molter@sofia.csl.sri.com on Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 10:21:59AM -0700 References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0004042145500.88181-100000@freefall.freebsd.org> <8cgj1a$313f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <v04220805b511f7c7e2a6@[195.238.1.121]> <8cj1cg$1gse$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <xzpya6qp2rq.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <v04220806b5137b59347a@[195.238.1.121]> <xzpn1n5q1ny.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20000407102159.B8417@sofia.csl.sri.com>
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> I would like to introduce you all to a language where there is NO > difference between spelling and pronunciation: Italian. I am wondering > if there are other languages with this feature. Most Indian languages. The Devanagari script (Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi etc) is such that all sounds in the language, vowels and consonants, are represented accurately. Moreover they're pronounced the same way, unlike say English and French. So a person literate in Hindi can pronounce Sanskrit almost perfectly without understanding it. In practice, though, spoken Hindi has some corrupted pronunciations which would sound bad in Sanskrit -- in particular, the last "a" in words ending in a short "a" is left out in Hindi but not in Sanskrit. This is true also of at least two southern languages, Kannada and Telugu, which use a different but more or less "isomorphic" script. Tamil tends to represent several sounds with the same letter (k, g and h; t and d; th and dh; ch, sh and s; etc) so it can get confusing, but then these sounds also often get fudged when spoken. I'm not sure of the other languages, but I believe none of them are as chaotic as English. However, it's easier and faster typing in English. (Fewer letters = simpler keyboards but less accurate representation of sounds.) There are several efforts to represent Indian-language sounds in the roman script using well-defined letter combinations for each corresponding Indian letter, and software translation into Indian scripts "on the fly". I haven't been following them carefully, though. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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